Nicki Fietzer
Author Scott Dikkers now teaches comedy writing at Second City in Chicago.
Elon Musk is the latest target for Scott Dikkers, former Madisonian and a founding editor of The Onion. Welcome to the Future Which Is Mine, published Oct. 2, purports to present the technocrat’s philosophy and future projects.
“Elon Musk is a funny character, a modern-day robber baron,” says Dikkers. “He’s a ripe target for satire.”
Supposedly written by the creator of Tesla, chapters include “Do You Have What It Takes to Die on Mars?” “Electric Cars Should Have the Right to Vote” and “Inside My Plan to Colonize the Sun and Then Replace It with a Cheaper Renewable Heat Ball.”
In other words, the book focuses on the man, his movement and his followers, similar in style to “America’s Finest News Source.”
“Yes, this is very much like the Onion days,” says Dikkers, who teaches comedy writing at Chicago’s Second City in a program he created in partnership with The Onion. He has not worked at The Onion since 2014.
“I reached out to many [of my students] and invited them to be a part of this small writing team and then did a blind selection process based on the quality of the submissions.”
Truly a group project, there are three listed editors and 12 contributors, ages 18 through 40-something. “I set the overall tone and structure and then serve as an editor and put everything together and select the final jokes,” says Dikkers.
Sprinkled throughout Welcome to the Future are inspirational quotes from the ersatz Musk, such as:
“Love is the most powerful emotion, which is why you must never feel it.”
“The problem with workers who unionize is that they slow down production of the machines that will one day replace them.”
“When there was only one set of footprints in the sand, that was my thirty-foot-tall killer robot carrying me.”
The foreword, supposedly written by Mark Zuckerberg, includes Terms of Service. “By physically holding this book and flipping to this particular page, you consent to ‘opt in’ to this agreement and relinquish all your personal data without restriction.”
While timely, Welcome to the Future is not Dikkers’ most recent work. On Nov. 6, he published an ebook titled Outrageous Marketing: The Story of The Onion and How To Build a Powerful Brand with No Marketing Budget. Instead of looking ahead, he looks to his own past.
“For a book about marketing, ostensibly, it’s quite a personal story of my life and how I got into comedy and how I succeeded at it,” says Dikkers, who lived in Madison from 1988 to 2001.
