The youngest staff writer at The Onion tells you how he did it.
By Ezra Klein, UCLA
Peter Koechley likes his job, and why wouldn’t he? Al Gore doesn’t stop by any of your friends’ workplaces and to tell them what a big fan he is and what a great job they’re doing. And what vital service is Al Gore so grateful to Peter for providing? The funny.
Peter is the youngest staff writer at The Onion, the net’s most famous and best-read satirical publication (they also put out a dead tree edition). His days, long though they may be, are spent sifting through mountains of jokes, sarcastic headlines, political satire and mock news articles. “It’s work,” he says, “you deal with such a large volume of comedy that after a point, it doesn’t look like comedy anymore. You sort through it like any other group of widgets. But every few hours it sort of hits you that your intense arguments are all about what’s funnier.”
That strikes me as quite a step up considering Peter’s arguments, just a few years ago, were likelier to focus on the effectiveness of Rawls’s difference principle as a retort to classical utilitarian thought with a side dispute over the comparative merits of various narrative structures. That’s because Peter’s 24. He was hired right out college, where he whiled away his years double-majoring in philosophy and creative writing.
But college was spent on more than ethics and plot devices, Peter had entered higher education with a certain amount of publishing experience under his belt. He’d spent much of his high school career writing, editing, and distributing a monthly humor magazine on campus, not to mention sending each and every edition to The Onion’s offices, based as they were in his town of Madison, Wisconsin. After a year and a half of clockwork-regular deliveries, The Onion finally deigned to write back, sending a short note saying, “Hey, we think you’re funny.” And, they published his first headline when he was 17: “Hotcake Sales Brisk.”
Finally receiving a response to his pestering, the next logical step was more pestering. So Peter began showing up at the office, offering to do for free what others optimistically expected to get paid for. Having spent a year and some change crouched over his own humor magazine, he’d picked up some Photoshop skills, some publishing know-how, and a variety of other trade tricks and magazine skills that rendered him useful to The Onion’s overworked staff.
Soon enough, a coveted Onion internship was his, and he was able to work for them without pay in a more official capacity. Then came college at Columbia, where Peter split his time between school and freelancing for The Onion, sending in floods of headlines in order to get the odd one of twenty-five published (for which he’d receive the grand sum of $20, the first pay scale I’ve heard of that make Campus Progress look loose in the checkbook).
But that’s what college was for – honing his comedy skills. “All through college I spent my time working on comedy, I was extremely interested in it. I created a prank video website for film comedy, worked on the annual comedy musical, worked on sketch comedy, freelanced for the onion—just trying to get better and better at it. A lot of schools have terrible comedy publications, so it’s good to go in there and kick some ass and make things happen.” Always seems to be.
So after four years spent honing his funny bone to a shiv and deluging Onion editors in headline submissions, Peter was hired on a staff writer upon graduation. A happy ending. And as for others interested in the same storybook trajectory? It’s going to take some creative thinking. If following Peter’s path isn’t impossible, it’s nevertheless decidedly non-linear. The Onion consists of six staff writers, two editors, two graphics guys, and a smattering of freelancers. Some of the freelancers are graduated talent, some do it as a hobby, and some are aspiring youngsters who hope to one day see their name on an Onion business card. The problem, however, is that The Onion doesn’t solicit submissions, the process by which freelancers are given the secret password can only be described as karmic.
“If you get a list of headlines in front of us, we’ll look at it. The problem is we don’t allow you to submit them,” says Peter. “It’s kind of a Catch-22, and whoever solves it is on their way to getting hired.” So think outside the box, drop by REI, and rappel down their building while throwing headline-containing fortune cookies into open windows. (Campus Progress is not responsible for any job-search related injuries that may be incurred.)
In the meantime, demonstrate that you’re serious about comedy writing, not just looking for a fun-sounding job. Start a humor magazine, and stick with it. Invade a dying one, and resuscitate it. Write a website that folks find funny, or become the leading collegiate sketch-comedy writer in the nation. Whatever you do, work on your skills so you’re ready for that glorious day when kismat calls and you smash into an Onion writer’s bumper and can regale him with headlines while the police write their accident report.
And while you wait, don’t give up on school. You wouldn’t expect a professional humor writer to have many regrets, but he does have one: “I wish I knew another language, would’ve worked harder on it. People who know other languages seem really smart. But it has to be a cool language, like Arabic. I already speak Spanish okay, but that kinda misses the point.”
So work on your comedy, show your persistence, break through The Onion’s Catch-22, and become a specialist in Near-Eastern languages. Got it? Good. Now go get a job.