Christine Wenc: The Onion's Straight Face Made It Funnier
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Christine Wenc joins to discuss Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire, recalling its Wisconsin roots, AP-style discipline, and newsroom battles over absurd details. She traces the paper's arc from gas-station rent money to online cult influence, and the tension between preachiness and bite. Plus, the Ambazonian separatist movement run from Minneapolis, and a court ruling upholding E. Jean Carroll's $83 million judgment against Donald Trump.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm doing a debate on Wednesday night at the comedy seller, and the proposal is masculinity is a prison. |
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| 0:40.2 | Mike Pesca. |
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| 0:57.2 | Masculinity is a prison this Wednesday, 6 p.m. |
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| 1:05.0 | It's Monday, September 8th, 2025 from Peachfish Productions. |
| 1:08.8 | It's the gist. |
| 1:09.6 | I'm Mike Peska. |
| 1:12.7 | And the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has decided that Donald Trump will indeed have to pay E. Jean Carroll. She is |
| 1:18.8 | entitled to $83 million, $18 compensatory damages. And the Trump looked at the punitive |
| 1:25.2 | damages of about $65 million. And they said, yeah, that's fair. So I have no inside information. No one's leaking to me. But I predict that Donald Trump's just going to pay it. Who do I make the check out to? He says with a smile, fair's fair. You got me on this one. E. Gene, there is no way he will do it. I do not know how long. He could drag |
| 1:45.6 | his feet. I do not know what mechanisms he will use, but I just cannot see Donald Trump |
| 1:51.3 | actually paying E. Jean Carroll. I don't know. Maybe he'll say, look, this is what I had to get |
... |
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