From Small Town to Big City

From Small Town to Big City: Humor Entrepreneur Found What Made Him Happy

Dikkers shares insight on The Onion, creative leadership

[endif]--Scott Dikkers, founding editor of The Onion, has faced many obstacles in his life. He was bullied as a child, his parents divorced and he even spent a brief stretch without a home when he was building his business. His only escape came to be comedy.

“Humor became an outlet for me,” he said. “It is a wonderful coping mechanism for anything that life throws at you.”

Dikkers spoke at Elon University on Tuesday about the evolution of The Onion and shared insights on creative leadership.

Dikkers’ third-grade discovery of Mad magazine, the top satirical humor publication of the time, inspired his decades-long career in comedy. He began to write and illustrate comic strips, an easy and cheap way to express his humor. But getting published was the hard part.

“When I started in comedy, I didn’t know how to tell a joke,” he recalled. “I would send in a comic strip and get a rejection slip back. Finally, a small college newspaper ran my strip.”

To his surprise, the comic strip, “Jim’s Journal,” did well. He began syndicating his comic strip to other college newspapers, earning a little bit of money and becoming known around Madison for his humor. Two enterprising students at the University of Wisconsin approached him about contributing to a new comedy newspaper-magazine that they were thinking of starting.

Not long afterward The Onion was born. It gets its name from how you “peel away” the layers of a newspaper to get inside to read more. “You can never go wrong naming a consumer product after a food item,” Dikkers said with a smile.

Dikkers took the job as editor of the publication in 1988, before eventually buying the company the following year. It was a labor of love that consumed him. “I worked on it from the moment I got up till the moment I went to bed,” Dikkers said. He knew he had to recruit new writers to consistently create new content. Dikkers began hiring new writers for the publication – “misfits,” he called them.

“We did not search high and low – we just searched low actually,” he explained. “They were smart, bitter, and had no prospects in life. The funny thing is, the more freedom I gave my writers, the more work they did and the better they got.”

At this point in the company’s history, Dikkers was not taking any salary, contributing any profits that were made back into the company’s operation. He became homeless.

“I was happiest when I was living on a pee-stained mattress because I was doing what I loved,” he said reflecting back on his time being homeless. “A homeless person in America still lives in luxury compared to other places in the world.”

From his 40 years of experiences and hardships, Dikkers shared his list of his top-five principles for leadership and success:

Live your mission – “Do what you love,” Dikkers urged, “and give it 100 percent. That’s the foundation for any career.”

Invest your passion, not your money – “A lot can go wrong if you bet the farm. You can’t go wrong when you invest your passion,” he said. “It’s a win-win.”

Be prepared to scrap everything – “You should be prepared to fail. Plan to fail. Those lessons only help you.”

Trust your people – “Tell them what you want done and leave them alone,” Dikkers said. “This is how you build incredible people.”

Work right – “You don’t want to work hard,” he said encouragingly. “You don’t want to work smart. You want to work right.”

Dikkers has since left “The Onion,” but not without first leaving a lasting impression on the world of news. The popular website he launched in 1995, TheOnion.com, was the world’s first comedy website. His books have become Amazon bestsellers. His web shorts for “The Onion News Network” have won him a Peabody Award.

Only one question remains – What will he do next with his comedy?

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