It may seem odd, at first blush, that the funniest publication in the United States should be a college-town throwaway published in the Corn Belt and supported by ads for places like Big Mike's Super Subs, University Optical, and the Pizza Pit.
Indeed, despite a battery of high-profile fans among the cultural elite at The New Yorker (which has called The Onion "the funniest publication in the United States") and Miramax Films, which signed the group to a first-look movie-rights deal in February, The Onion's staff has managed to sneak onto the New York scene with hardly a peep.
The Onion and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, as funny as that publication and those television programs sometimes are, attract audiences that know exactly what they're getting.
But publication is funny – in the sense of being not remotely amusing and not really very much to do with you.
As ever ahead of his time, Crisp had realised that most publishing was about personality, not words on pages (though his words were funny and profound), so the publication gave him access to audiences, starting with a Late Night Line-Up show.
The publication was also funny; the article titled "Spiro Agnew is an Anagram for Grow A Penis" is a good example of this.
But something funny happened on the way to publication, perhaps because it was first serialised in a magazine.
The publication of this dazzling, funny and deadly serious novel will bring nourishment to readers hungry for the best new European fiction, and to those wondering where the new generation of post-Yugoslav novelists are.
Through that, I also wrote for some publications, coming up with funny headlines.
We have lived through a decade in which we have followed the publication of the liveliest, funniest, scariest and most moving children's stories ever written".
