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The Onion's Scott Dikkers And The Formula To Fake News

Nicki Fietzer

The Onion is known for it's satirical news with headlines like "Study Reveals: Babies Are Stupid" and "CIA Realizes It's Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years."

But for ScottDikkers, making fake news is often serious work. Dikkers is a founding editor of The Onion and served as it's longest serving editor-in-chief. 

At the satirical news source, he instilled a formula for how to write good comedy. The strategies that made The Onion famous are featured in Dikkers' latest book "How To Write Funny" (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform/2014).

Dikkers now runs a writing workshop with Chicago comedy theater The Second City in partnership with The Onion.

Scott Dikkers will speak in Duke University's Page Auditorium at 4:30 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 21.

Host Frank Stasio talks with Dikkers about the late nights putting together The Onion in its early days and the guaranteed way to write a good laugh.

A sample of Scott Dikkers' comic strip 'Jim's Journal.'
Credit Scott Dikkers

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Charlie Shelton-Ormond is a podcast producer for WUNC.
Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.
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