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.'](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/edc4ef0/2147483647/strip/true/crop/855x277+0+0/resize/880x285!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Flegacy%2Fsites%2Fwunc%2Ffiles%2F201509%2Fjim_edit.png)