Meet this week’s Campus Celebrity Scott Dikkers. He is a comedy writer and filmmaker, better known as the founding editor of The Onion, America’s most popular news satire organization.
This past Tuesday, Dikkers addressed Northeastern students in a sold-out event at Blackman Auditorium. He talked about how he got into comedy, which led him to co-found The Onion, his biggest achievement. He also shared many stories about his life and offered advice to an eager audience.
When he appeared on stage, he broke the ice in the best way any satirical writer can: by making fun of the audience. “What is Northeastern? I’ve never heard of this place,” he said as he stood on stage. “I don’t know jack s*** about it.” Dikkers then asked if anyone in the audience was an aspiring creative writer or journalist. A few hands went up in the audience and Dikkers then proceeded to say he “wept for the future.”
A few dark jokes aside, his tone turned more serious when he talked about his childhood. He was a small, shy kid who was raised in a boring household in the Midwest. He was bullied in school and admitted to attempting suicide at the age of eight. He had struggled to find much joy in life until he discovered a satirical magazine called Mad Magazine. Through the magazine, Dikkers started developing a passion for comedy and using humor as a way to cope.
As he got older, Dikkers became obsessed with comic strips. He would draw them in his free time and pass them along to local papers in Madison, WI. When he wasn’t drawing, he was cleaning bathrooms at McDonald’s for little pay. Eventually, Dikkers met Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson, and the three of them decided to create a satirical newspaper. They named it The Onion because they wanted the newspaper to “peel back layers to get at the facts”… satirically of course.
A year later, Dikkers bought The Onion for $3,000. He started hiring “people who were smart and bitter” and willing to work for $5 a week. He said his team consisted mostly of college dropouts, people with no life prospects, and minimum wage slaves. Despite how Dikkers described his writers, many of them later went on to work for award-winning shows, including The Daily Show with John Stewart, The Colbert Report, Modern Family, among others.
Despite The Onion’s early success in Madison, WI, it only started gaining national attention after going online. In fact, The Onion became the first newspaper to be available through the Internet. Dikkers explained that with popularity also came trouble. The newspaper has gotten in trouble with many companies and organizations, some of Dikkers’ favorites include: The Make-A-Wish Foundation, the George W. Bush administration and Taco Bell.
When he finished talking about his career, Dikkers offered five pieces of (questionable?) advice to the audience:
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Live your mission and do it- in other words follow your passion.
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Invest your passion, not your money- and by that he meant: don’t invest your money in case your passion isn’t profitable.
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Be prepared to scrap everything- because your passion might not work out.
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Trust your people- if you ever have people working for you, trust their judgment.
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Don’t work hard, work right- basically, someone else has already done what you’re doing, so just do what they did.
Dikkers is currently working on a book about Donald Trump.