A Visit to the Funny Farm

One of the funner, if you will, stories I've ever written was a piece for my employer, the television trade mag Broadcasting & Cable, about how writers from the satirical paper The Onion were starting to rival the longtime primary source of TV writing talent--the Harvard Lampoon.

So you've got these preppy and connected Harvard guys on one end, and these flannel-wearing state school dudes with honkin' Midwestern accents on the other, if we can speak in broad stereotypes that are probably not far from the truth.

It was a cover story in 2006. The cover said "The Funny Farm". 

The story itself was called "Wisconsin Wise Guys Plot TV Takeover."

The sources were quite funny.

Here's a taste:

While alumni of both the Onion and the Lampoon make up a small percentage of working comedy writers, they wield disproportionate influence, with high-ranking staffers producing influential shows. Onion humor drives programs that mine current events for wit, like The Daily Show and Colbert Report, while Lampoon humor—described by The Office producer and former Lampoon President Schur as “very odd, dry, abstract and mostly unreadable if you're not on the staff”—seems best-suited for sitcoms and sketch comedy.

It's not hard to see the Onion's influence on its alumni's shows. There's the tongue-way-in-cheek satirical bite of Daily Show (a Zagat-style review of Guantanamo called it a “hip Hussein loyalist hangout,” albeit one with a “limited menu”) and Colbert Report (bombastic host Stephen Colbert teased a recent episode with “So-called separation of church and state—if a father and son can be president, why not the Holy Spirit?”).

There are the “Onion-esque” newspaper headlines, as American Dad executive producer Mike Barker describes them, that start each episode of the Fox program. “The satirical bent that the Onion writers have lends itself perfectly to the satirical nature of American Dad,” says Barker. His favorite Dan Vebber headline on Dad: “Britney Spears' Baby To Enter Pre-Hab.”