Scott Dikkers looks unassuming. With a black sweater, Midwestern charm and a very bald head, he gives off a Steve Jobs/Woody Harrelson vibe.
But Dikkers is the adoptive father of one of the biggest comedy institutions out there: The Onion. Wednesday night, he came to USC courtesy of Carolina Productions to tell the scrappy origin story of the publication.
As a Midwestern teenager without the Internet, Dikkers lacked a clear path to a comedy career, so he worked on comic strips as a way to get his name out. He cycled through idea after idea until one stuck.
“I drew comic strips like Ulysses S. Grant waged war — I didn't care how many troops I sacrificed,” Dikkers said.
His comic, “Jim’s Journal,” soon found success, and he was contacted by University of Wisconsin-Madison students Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson to draw comics for their new college humor magazine, then conceived as “The Rag.” That was soon switched to The Onion, partially because The Rag seemed crude and partially because Johnson would eat raw onion on a piece of bread for breakfast.
Keck and Johnson proved to be more entrepreneurs than humorists, and shortly after making Dikkers editor-in-chief they offered to sell him the paper. Dikkers scrounged up the $3000 asking price and started the task of shepherding The Onion to greatness, starting with hiring more writers.
“We did not search high and low. We mostly just searched low,” Dikkers said, listing “dropouts, shut-ins, disaffected liquor stores clerks, grocery store clerks who crack up customers in line, minimum wage slave service workers” as their target employees.
The gamble paid off — Dikkers’ strategy of hiring misanthropes and giving them creative freedom turned out to be the perfect recipe for sharp comedy.
“If you leave people alone, that's often when they do their most successful work,” Dikkers said.
The Onion grew as a successful humor publication, mixing their now-signature fake news with cartoons and other miscellaneous humor pieces.
What truly launched The Onion into what it is today came in two parts. First, Dikkers revamped The Onion to commit to the fake newspaper idea, as he felt that was what they were strongest at. Then, around that time, The Onion created a website during the nascent stages of the Internet, where comedy websites were few and far between.
Dikkers chose to reinvest The Onion’s newfound money back into the publication, and as owner, that meant he wasn’t getting paid.
“I could not pay my bills, and I became homeless,” Dikkers said.
He found sleep in odd places, taking up with a family that took pity on him by sleeping on a mattress in their garage until their dog peed on it.
“By any other standard, [that] would be a nadir in my life,” Dikkers said. “It wasn’t … I think back on that time and, literally, it was one of the happiest of my life. Because all this work we had done at The Onion had come to fruition.”
The Onion's story has a happy ending — with a host of successful spinoffs, it's practically a comedy empire. But Dikkers managed to vividly recreate the early days, when it was an underground success with everything to prove.