The Onion was killing the fake-news game long before The Colbert Report, Andy Borowitz or Russian operatives got into it. The satirical news publisher, which turns 30 this month, hasn’t spent its entire life in Chicago. It launched as a print publication in 1988 by University of Wisconsin students in Madison and, like Facebook (another pillar in the fake news industry), spread first to other college campuses; it was 1996 before The Onion started reaching a wider audience by publishing online.
The company eventually established its corporate headquarters—and its sister site, the pop culture-focused A.V. Club—in Chicago, even as its editorial operations spent over a decade in New York City. But we always felt The Onion was spiritually Midwestern, and in 2012 the paper consolidated operations in Chicago—and in 2014, with Just for Laughs Chicago having gone on permanent hiatus, The Onion stepped up to give the city a live comedy festival. That first event was jokily dubbed the 26th Annual Comedy Festival, as The Onion was itself 26 that year.
But when it recurred as the second, third and fourth annual 26th Annual Comedy Festival… well, you never want to have to explain a joke, right? So the fifth edition, coming at the end of May, will be known as the Onion Comedy and Arts Festival, and it brings the comedy-nerd cred with names like Bob Odenkirk, Chris Gethard, John Hodgman and Jo Firestone. Of course, in a comedy town like Chicago, that’s par for the course. Read on for this and more of this month’s comedy best bets.
