Scott Dikkers tells the tale of his beginnings in comedy and getting The Onion started, and shares funny stories about how he struggled in the early years and then achieved great success. As a farm boy with no education, he'll paint the picture of a starry-eyed kid who loved reading Mad Magazine and dreamt of one day getting his work published to improbably founding the world's first humor website and heading up America's longest-surviving humor publication. Dikkers connects his experience to the audiences’ lives by pointing out how much more opportunity they have to start something new like The Onion today, inspiring them to think of right now as a magical time in their lives when they can make just about anything happen for themselves.

How did The Onion, a small college newspaper from Madison, Wisconsin, compete in the cutthroat world of entertainment marketing to become one of the most recognizable and successful comedy brands in the world? You may be surprised to learn it was done without spending a penny on marketing. Scott Dikkers, The Onion’s longest-serving editor-in-chief who founded theonion.com, helped found the print publication that preceded it, and led the company’s effort to build the brand in its formative decades, tells the unlikely and outrageous tale of exactly how The Onion—now a multi-million-dollar company with tens of millions of monthly views online—thrived against all odds to achieve heightened brand awareness and a fiercely loyal fan base using counter-intuitive customer service, bootstrapped marketing strategies, and a lot of what most business experts consider to be “wrong.” He leaves corporate audiences inspired to find new ways to add energy and passion into their own work.

In a hilarious and insightful lecture, Scott Dikkers will chronicle the early years and influence of The Onion. He will examine the mayhem that he and his ragtag band of college dropouts who founded The Onion nearly 30 years ago have wrought on current events, modern politics, and satirical news outlets such as Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show. He'll look at the rise of fake news online through the prism of The Onion's founding, how he helped to redefined satire in the last quarter century, leading to the “fake news” epidemic and ethical dilemmas journalists face today, when the public accepts fake news as real. With the tools of a journalist and the savvy of a comedian, Dikkers helps make sense of the nonsense.