by George Murphy

This month, BitRake got to speak with Mike Gillis – head writer of the nation’s most beloved source of news satire, The Onion. As The Onion has recently undergone new ownership, the comedy publication has decided to revive its print edition. In this interview, BitRake correspondent George Murphy asks Mike for his advice, insight, and opinion on where The Onion (and comedy as a whole) is headed next. 

Q: How did you get involved with The Onion? 

A: I started at The Onion a little over 12 years ago.  Similarly to you guys, I was at the college humor magazine at Dartmouth, The Jack O’ Lantern, and I found that really fun. I thought there was a lot of space to explore and develop your voice in the less stressful environment of a humor magazine. And so I thought, if I could ever do something like that for a living, that would be a dream come true. 

I started reading The Onion in middle school. I remember picking up my first copy of it from a newsstand and thinking that it was such an honest evocation of what it was to be an American in the sense that it wasn’t really profound the way a novel would make it look, and it wasn’t absolutely dire the way the front page of the news makes it seem. News can make it seem like everything is constantly on fire, but so much of American life is just the boredom of going to a fast food place, being in a Walmart parking lot with your friends, or getting high and watching The Empire Strikes Back for the 19th time. 

So I applied to an internship program that we had back them, and I didn’t get it. But, I got close enough that they felt bad and gave me the chance to submit. And that was really my first foray into The Onion. I just worked my ass off and wrote something like 1000 headlines before I even started contributing. And yeah, it wound up working out, but it was incredibly stressful and incredibly fun at the same time.

Q: How has The Onion changed since you first started? 

A:  So I think what, one of the major things has been that we were purchased by very competent, benevolent people who really care about The Onion, and that’s been a huge plus for us. I’ve experienced several ownership structures, and there’ve been a number who have been confused about what The Onion was. They had weird plans on what they were going to do with it that didn’t really jive with what we wanted to do on the editorial side. So, the good news is, The Onion is ascendant. We’re doing great stuff by starting the print subscription again. And of course, people are really responding to that. And we’re relaunching Onion News Network, which we’re all really happy about.

Onion News Network is The Onion’s parody news TV show, which has been out of production since 2011.

Q: I’ve found that your website features a couple online comedy games that you helped create, develop and write. They were hilarious. But I feel like comedy games as a whole are kind of overlooked.

I want to know, what mediums of comedy do you think are overlooked?

A: Definitely, comedy games. I think you’re right on the money. The things you can do with interactivity in a digital space are so cool, and there are so few games that do it well. There’s so many that do it really poorly, like to the point where it’s almost painful to play some games that try to do comedy. I recommend games by Tim Schafer or Crows Crows Crows –  the people that did The Stanley Parable. And I think for people who are just starting out in comedy in particular, keeping yourself open to that industry is important. You should imagine the possibility of doing comedy in really different spaces. Like, don’t pigeonhole yourself.

Q: Yeah, that’s great advice. I also see that The Onion has evolved into different mediums like Instagram Reels, TikTok, etc.

Is [social media] something The Onion is taking in stride, or is it more of a matter of engagement? 

A: Well, I think they go hand in hand. If you’re going to make satire in an effective way, you have to go where everybody is at. If a newspaper was no longer a valid reference, we would probably not want to be doing newspaper parody. But it still is, and I’m really glad it still is. 

Also, sometimes doing one form of parody year on year becomes a little suffocating, and it’s really cool to have all these other outlets, whether it’s like parody film reviews, 24/7 news, TikTok, interactive stuff – there’s room to expand into that, and our writers are excited to get that chance. 

Q: When submitting packets to satire publications like The Onion, I sometimes hear the fear of your jokes being stolen and used without proper credit, sometimes unintentionally.

Once you read a joke from a packet submission, you can’t exactly unread it. Do you have any advice regarding this challenge? How does The Onion address this challenge?

A: Well, if a joke of yours has been published, or if a TV show were to take it, you should try to get in touch with them and just say, “hey, I wrote this joke and submitted it.” Actually, one of our old Editors-in-Chief, Cole Bolton, wrote a joke and submitted it to The Onion. They happened to publish something really similar, like a week or two later, and he got the chance to contribute that way. It’s a great way of saying “I’m good enough to have written for The Onion,” after what you have written is then published on The Onion. So I would just be circumspect about it. And if it’s not the exact same joke, and it’s like, a general concept for a joke or something, you probably don’t want to burn your bridges by alleging plagiarism where it isn’t. But if it is very, very similar, I wouldn’t worry about it. I would say that’s a good sign that you have a chance of writing at that place. 

Q: Oftentimes in DePaul’s comedy programs, we hear professors talk about comedy’s higher purpose.

I’d like to know if you think there is a singular purpose to comedy.

A: I think at some point you try to figure out a kind of underlying framework for why you’re spending your life devoted to this one vocation. To me, I think the purpose of most art is to create a good form of something and put it out into the world. Non-creative pursuits are means to an end: you trade stocks in order to make money, or you build a boat so you can go over to an island. But I think with this art form, genuinely, it’s an end in itself. It’s like a good painting. Painting is a fundamental part of human life, and doing it well is worthwhile in its own right. And I think the same can be said of a joke. 

I think you can get really tied up in this idea of, like, oh, I’m fighting fascism, or I’m trying to tear down oppressors or whatever. But your jokes don’t really wind up having any major policy effects. Outside of someone like Upton Sinclair, it’s very, very rare that most pieces of art end up changing the world in a concrete, logistically concerned way. You would probably have to think of yourself as a failure if you went into comedy with the idea that you’re going to change the government. 

Q: So, I have a final question –  just a hypothetical.

We’re approaching about 25 minutes of recorded audio of you, Mike Gillis, speaking. That is, as most people know, enough to fuel Bitrake’s latest AI, Necromancer 3.0, to create deep-fake content of you saying just about anything we want. Is this the sort of blackmail strategy that would work on you or your colleagues, hypothetically?

A: No, I think my reputation is slandered enough that there’s, there’s nothing you can do to make it worse. It’s not going to work on me.