The Onion Movie Was Not Ultimately What I Expected Or Wanted It to Be
When I first learned that my then-employers The Onion would be following in the footsteps of Mad Magazine and breaking into the motion picture business, I was overjoyed. I was a whole lot more than cautiously optimistic about The Onion’s chances up on the big screen.
I was a true believer. The Onion could do no wrong in my eyes. Why wouldn’t I be? America’s Finest News Source was the best thing that had ever happened to me. It gave an angry, confused and depressed kid from the group home an identity and a home.
Being Nathan from The Onion sure beat being Nathan from the group home. I was part of something people didn’t just like: they fucking loved it. I fucking loved it. From the time I first set eyes on a crude tabloid parody called The Onion visiting my older sister at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as a fifteen year old in 1991, working for The Onion was my dream job.
For the first ten years at least, The Onion wasn’t just a job: it was my life. It was my graduate school, where I learned how to be a writer. It was a baptism by fire, a working education of the best kind. Even though I had nothing to do with the comedy side, I took enormous pride in being part of something so good, so necessary, so important and something that made so many people happy.
I would tell people that I worked for The Onion and they would immediately become more animated and excited. I wasn’t just some schmuck. I was somebody. I was part of something. It was great.
I miss it.
When The Onion released Our Dumb Century in 1999 it was both the kind of timeless masterpiece that is reverently taught in satire courses in college and a huge best-seller that helped put the funky little satirical newspaper on the map. If a book did big, big things for The Onion, then why wouldn’t a movie produced by David Zucker, the comedy God behind movies like Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane! and The Naked Gun do wonderful things for the paper as well?
I have enormously complicated feelings about The Onion as a whole but I’ve always loved its comedy unambiguously. The same goes for Clickhole. So while I knew that sketch comedy movies were very infrequently successful, and more regularly embarrassments for all involved, I assumed that if The Onion comedy writers made a movie it would be funny and successful and good.
I held onto that conviction even as buzz on the production began to sour. I remember cornering one of the film’s directors at the wedding of one of its screenwriters and asking him how long the movie was going to be. Looking back, that’s kind of a weird question but I was very drunk and feeling very festive.
The co-director looked around uncomfortably and said that they had about an hour of footage. Even in my drunken haze, I realized that that was not enough for a motion picture. It’s about two/thirds of the runtime of the average movie and sure enough, when The Onion Movie was eventually snuck onto home video many years after its production, it only ran about 76 minutes.
Over a period of years, the big question with The Onion Movie shifted from “Is it going to be good?” to “How bad could it possibly be?” The Onion took steps to distance itself from the movie, as did its screenwriters, my friends Todd Hanson and Rob Siegel. At a certain point, Scott Aukerman was brought in but he sure isn’t putting this on his resume either.
By the time The Onion Movie hit DVD stores and Netflix in 2008, some five years after it wrapped production, it was an orphan whose ostensible creators had either taken their name off it, attempted to take their name off it, or distanced themselves publicly from the results. So I didn’t see The Onion Movie partially out of a sense of loyalty to my friends. But I also didn’t see it because it had a reputation for being quite poor. It’s the kind of widely derided film that doesn’t attract cultists so much as apologists or weary, embattled defenders.
The bar for The Onion Movie has been set so low that I was pleasantly surprised to discover that because The Onion Movie recycles some of the greatest hits of the print publication, it has something of an Onion vibe. I was not expecting that.
So I experienced a weird surge of both nostalgia and optimism when I discovered that part of The Onion Movie’s format involved recycling stories from the print publication as segments from the Onion News Network. Did I smile and chuckle at a headline like “Depression Hits Losers Hardest” because that joke works in a cinematic format or because of the enormous affection I felt for the print version of that story and the place I was in my life when I first read it? I have no idea, but watching The Onion Movie was a full-on Proustian reverie.
The deeply unsatisfying framing device of The Onion Movie intersperses fake-news segments from the film’s TV version of The Onion with sketches and behind-the-scenes drama involving a dignified veteran news anchor played by Lou Cariou who is concerned about the station’s new owners meddling with the news and compromising its ethics and integrity.
Ethics! Integrity! In journalism! Christ, were we ever that young? It’s no wonder The Onion Movie feels like an accidental period piece, a reminder of a bygone era and a world lost to history.
The Onion Movie won a whole bunch of nostalgia points by faithfully referencing articles I’ve damn near memorized and tattooed on my body. And I willingly concede that some of the sketches are genuinely funny, like an early segment involving an angry black man (identified only as “Armed Gunman”) who storms into a bank and demands a good, challenging job at gunpoint. The gag escalates as we follow him through his various personal triumphs in the banking industry but the sketch is less funny in light of the many sketches to follow that depict non-white people and non-heterosexuals as criminals, sex freaks, terrorists and thugs.
The movie is meta in its racism, bringing in a dignified Black Muslim gentleman to complain about its depiction of African-Americans in one of a number of fourth wall-breaking gags, but the unrelenting emphasis on racial humor leaves a nasty aftertaste, as does the wall-to-wall profanity.
The print version of The Onion (print! I’m still using print in the present tense, like this was fucking 2003 or something!) uses profanity strategically and methodically. They only use it when it’s absolutely necessary and serves the joke. The profanity in a headline like “Holy Shit, Man Walks on Fucking Moon” is profanity based, but it’s also very elegant and precise. A headline like, “Holy Shit, Man Walks on Fucking Moon, What the Fuck? That’s Fucking Nuts” wouldn’t be anywhere near as funny, but The Onion Movie doesn’t have sufficient faith in its audience, so it invariably errs on the side of the excessively profane and scatological.
In The Onion Movie, profanity no longer has to serve the joke. In The Onion Movie profanity is the joke. For example, early in the film we see a mock commercial for a fictional roast where the joke is that instead of ribald one-liners and double entendres the old people just say things like, “I fucked his wife in the ass.” There’s nothing more to the joke, just the cheap shock of old people with potty mouths saying nasty shit.
In print form The Onion could certainly be ribald. It could be profane. It trafficked unabashedly in blue or “low” humor. But it was not filthy for the sake of being filthy the way The Onion Movie is. It’s nasty and sour and nihilistic in a way the newspaper seldom has been. There’s edgy and then there’s “the rapist shattered your pelvis with a baseball bat” as dialogue in a broad comedy. Unfortunately, The Onion Movie is the second kind of movie.
It’s a testament to both the film’s admirable commitment to going some very dark, extreme places, as well as its perpetually wavering execution that this movie, ostensibly from a company I worked for nearly all of my adult life, genuinely offended me throughout. The Onion Movie goes too far. It’s too vulgar. It’s too purposefully offensive. There’s too much profanity and too much vulgarity.
The Onion Movie was produced by David Zucker, who made us laugh with Airplane, Police Squad, Top Secret! and The Naked Gun, then made us all cringe with right wing with An American Carol. I was led to believe that Zucker didn’t have much to do with The Onion Movie but the movie feels reactionary in a way that bears Zucker’s smudgy fingerprints instead of those of The Onion, which, like all media, is fundamentally left-wing.
There’s a pervasive sense of punching, or cock-punching down to The Onion Movie. The movie makes takes aim at Dungeons & Dragons geeks and old people and non-white criminals and seems to find homosexuality inherently funny, as evidenced by a running gag for a gay cruise line that really highlights the fact that in addition to brunches and shows and travel, gay tourism prominently involves gay dudes sticking their gay dude parts inside each other, homosexual-style.
The Onion Movie is best understood as juvenilia. It was created in the lingering shadow of There’s Something About Mary’s success and seems intent on one-upping even the likes of Freddy Got Fingered in brazen transgression, but the stuff that’s funny isn’t brutal and shocking and the stuff that’s brutal and shocking generally isn’t funny.
That said, on a purely comic level, The Onion Movie is funnier than most comedies. On a laugh-by-laugh basis, it’s a winner, and if you’re curious, I would recommend seeing it. I’m glad I finally did, and in the years ahead I suspect elements of the movie are going to stick with me. Hell, it ends with a cameo from Rodney Dangerfield, for fuck’s sake, shouting, “Hey everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!” Like so much of The Onion Movie, that’s kind of awesome, and kind of sad as well as kind of inspired and kind of off.
I laughed a fair amount during The Onion Movie, and only some of the time did that laughter fill me with shame. I will admit, for example, that I laughed longer than I care to admit at a fake Steven Seagal action blockbuster called Cock Puncher because it involves dudes getting punched in the dick, and also the phrase “cock puncher” being said over and over again and the nine year old who apparently determines what I find amusing get never gets enough genitalia-injury-based-slapstick.
The Onion Movie had me feeling intense emotions people who didn’t work for Onion Inc. for nearly two decades probably won’t experience. They probably won’t find themselves thinking, for example, “Oh look! There’s my friend Mike! Wow, he sure is a great guy. I miss him. Glad he’s doing well. Oh, and now he’s sticking his dick in the return slot of a public library.”
You’re probably not going to experience a rush of bittersweet emotions as you think, “Hey, there’s Todd! Wow, what an interesting, intense dude. Wonder what he’s up to. Oh, and now he’s screaming “Move the car you old fucking bitch!” Lastly, you’re not going to have such low expectations for a production of your former employer that you find yourself marveling, “Wow, there’s a fucking monster in this silly comedy movie! Sure, it looks like Sega CD-level computer animation but it’s an actual monster! In The Onion Movie! And now he’s swearing unnecessarily and uncreatively.”
If you’re me, this movie will make you laugh more than you expected, and win you over with its weird, muddled, time-warp personality, sour and dyspeptic as it might be, even if it really feels less like a film than an assemblage of footage, some of it inspired, some of it shockingly bad, most of it somewhere in between. But it will also make you cringe throughout. And it will offend you. But ultimately you’ll come away with a more nuanced understanding of your time at The Onion, one that certainly had its dark and painful and even traumatic elements, but also brought you a lot of joy, and is something you’ll probably spend the rest of your life trying to figure out.
Alternately, it might make you laugh but leave kind of a nasty aftertaste. One of the two. You kind of get out of it what you put into it, and I came to it with possibly more psychological baggage than literally any movie I’ve ever seen.
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