Jason Joyce
Photo of Baratunde Thurston on stage at Madison's Monona Terrace
Baratunde Thurston in Madison Friday: "I saw a group of mostly white dudes wrestle with race and say like, ‘Hey is this joke just making fun of someone for being different, or is it making fun of us for not understanding difference?’"
Working for The Onion was comedian and television host Baratunde Thurston’s “dream job, the best job I’ve ever had,” and his experience working for the satirical newspaper founded in Madison also taught him lessons about collaboration and storytelling that he continues to lean on a decade after leaving the company.
In Madison Friday to address the Public Relations Society of America’s Travel and Tourism Conference at Monona Terrace convention center, Thurston spoke about his personal history growing up in Washington, D.C., and traveling extensively around the country with his mother. He also urged the audience to think of the term “citizen” as a verb that compels Americans to act collectively. He ended his one-hour-plus talk by answering an audience question about his experience at The Onion, where he was digital director and politics editor from 2007 to 2012.
“The Onion gave me another beautiful experience in telling stories that are full of non-facts, but tell a deeper truth,” Thurston said Friday. “Stories that are collectively written, like the story of me and you, that we can turn into a story of we instead, a story of us.”
Thurston started down the path of becoming an Onion staffer before he even knew the company existed when he created a satirical email newsletter while a student at Harvard in the 1990s.
“I was obsessed with news and information and I was ashamed of my classmates at this hoity-toity college called Harvard University and they didn't know shit about what was happening in the world,” Thurston said. “And I was like, ‘But you go to Harvard! You're going to be a senator!” Literally, Tom Cotton, who didn’t know shit, was in my class at Harvard.”
He was hired at The Onion after moving to New York in 2007 and led its coverage of the 2008 presidential election.
“I proceeded to work at this place that took information more seriously than places that are constitutionally assigned to do so,” Thurston said. “I saw a group of mostly white dudes wrestle with race and say like, ‘Hey is this joke just making fun of someone for being different, or is it making fun of us for not understanding difference?’ Debates about punchlines. I mean just deliberations and the creative process.”
Thurston said The Onion succeeded where other comedy publications failed because the writers work anonymously, communicating under fictional bylines or via fictional characters associated with it since it launched in 1988 in Madison.
“Who works at The Onion? You don't know,” he said. “People write for a character that they jointly believe in. And that allows that institution to collaborate in ways and maintain a consistency that you don't see with a lot of other well-known comedy outlets.”
Thurston hosts the PBS series America Outdoors and the podcast How to Citizen with Baratunde, named one of Apple’s favorite podcasts of 2020. Parts of the speech he gave in Madison Friday can be heard in his 2019 TED Talk, titled “How to deconstruct racism, one headline at a time.”
