Transcript
The Onion’s Roots and Klingon Lullabies(Hour 1)
Nite Lite with Pete Schwaba and Greg Bach · Thu Nov 13, 2025
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Yeah.
We always have a good time here.
And coming up a little bit later on, we've got my wife.
She's
She's here and boss Peterson author and our guest tonight and we'll get into a whole bunch of different things her career book.
She's written and we'll talk about movies as Well, because she always seems to know more than me about movies and you know
I went to Barnes & Noble today to try to buy the book and they were sold out.
They didn't have any.
And then I was checking the Barnes & Noble on the other side of town and they also didn't have any.
So, you know, we're flying blind as far as the book goes, but that's why we'll have Scott.
He'll explain to us what's in there.
But I was listening to an audio, you know, the audible book or whatever.
What is it called?
Kindle?
I don't know.
Anyway,
Vernon Evelyn was one of the great programs here in the Madison area.
They were two mice.
What?
And there were voiceovers for the mice and they would introduce different segments of the show.
And real human beings, human beings would be in these segments.
there.
That was great
No set really, just two chairs, you know, and they would take phone calls and people would call and complain about whatever they wanted to complain about.
It was a great concept.
Yeah, it was great.
You can call us this evening as we continue to fill in on Nightlight on the Civic Media Radio Network.
The number is 855-752-4842.
All right.
Well,
question
question
You know, famous actor.
He's played a lot of different parts, but a lot of times he plays a dad in the movies that he's in, right?
So what actor is that you like out there that plays a dad in a movie or a TV show, TV or movies?
Who's your favorite dad actor?
You can call us or text us.
Again, the numbers eight five five seven five two four eight four two or text us your favorite actor who played a dad,
And if you watch the early versions of Leave It To Beaver, Hugh Beaumont is on there playing Ward Cleaver.
And I actually modeled my fatherhood on Ward Cleaver.
Oh, really?
Yes.
I really did.
I wanted to be what he was in the show.
And the thing is, you know, when the kid gets into trouble, you want to have a conversation with them.
Yeah, you still do that.
They didn't know why I was doing it.
Why are you sitting here, dad?
Well, you know, back in the early days of television, though, in the fifties, it was like these TV shows got onto this thing where they had to have a moral to the story.
They did.
So leave it to Beaver.
Beaver always got in trouble somehow.
And usually it sort of really wasn't his fault, but
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oz
Yeah.
You know what, one of the things that what I used to watch, I mean, you could catch these videos anywhere, Rick Nelson singing from those shows.
They have those video clips.
But when you watch it, it seems like he really is kind of detached from the audience because they always played in front of their friends at a small party and everybody was there.
Oh, in an eye.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
But he acted like he was, well, I'm just singing this song.
You know, I'm a pop star now.
Don't worry about it.
He decided to perform in the Klingon Shakespearean play Hamlet.
And then he interviewed a linguistic specializing coach on Klingon.
And the coach apparently told the story about him trying to teach his kid the language of Klingon.
And I have to tell you that I hated the Klingons.
I
Well, right.
Yeah.
But well, I guess so.
I mean, some of them.
But.
You know, they had all this history and they created these stupid practices and You know, it just it just was really a kind of a dumb storyline and they kind of filled a lot of time with it So, uh, yeah, well, we're gonna play that we're
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right, version of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Backstage, before the performance, I chatted to a Level 4 Klingon speaker.
Dharmand Spears is a computational linguist who took the rather unusual step of teaching his son Klingon as his first language.
We had a lot of fun.
We would play language games.
So I would say things to him like... Where's my chief?
And I would say... And he would point to his nose.
And then one day we're playing on...
the carpet in the living room, and I had his bottle that he would drink from.
And we didn't have a word for bottle, we didn't have a word for diaper, we didn't have a word for, you know, a high chair.
Lots of domestic things.
Exactly.
I had words for shuttlecraft, and phaser, and transport, ionization unit.
I
didn't have a bottle, right?
So we were using the word for bottle that is like a drinking vessel.
Give jet.
And I said to him one day, you know, we'd had this game, you know, no duck, oh, this or that.
And so I said to him, nook tak och giv jet le jet.
So I used the word for bottle.
I used it with a suffix.
I used it in a sentence.
I didn't point at it.
I didn't look at it.
I didn't do anything like that.
And this two-year-old kid, you know, baby, toddler, started crawling over towards the bottle and grabbed the bottle.
One of the other things we did was we had a lullaby that we would sing every night.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
The Klingon Imperial Anthem.
Takjajwo.
May the empire endure.
and we sang it as a lullaby.
I'm so picturing this little baby in a sort of two bear onesie, singing the Klingon empire
song.
Absolutely
right.
As he went from about two and a half to three years old, he stopped.
He stopped being interested.
He stopped enjoying doing it with me as much.
So I would say something to him in Klingon and he would say it back in English and I would try to encourage him.
And he started to resist it.
And it was fun and it was interesting.
And when it stopped being fun and interesting, I stopped doing it.
Klingon was little used to Darman's son in communicating with the outside world.
And that is the key factor in whether a language survives and flourishes or dies.
But here, the one that I remember most is Thriller with Boris Karloff.
Oh, you really should check those episodes out online Thriller.
There's one where he play.
Oh, it's the Grim Reaper.
And there was a Grim Reaper picture.
And this picture comes to life magically and kills people.
Okay, and he doesn't believe it.
He thinks it's just a myth, you know something create a created to make the picture more interesting Yeah, and he finds out the hard way it It isn't like that.
I kind of gave it away, but definitely check out.
It's very scary
Oh my god, that was a classic Twilight Zone episode.
It really was good stuff.
All right, let's see.
Oh
You know, when we come back, we're going to tell you more about the big showing that we're having in Madison of the godfather of Green Bay, the Pete Schwabba movie.
Yeah, we got a couple clips.
Yeah, we've got some of that coming up.
And Scott Dickers.
Scott Dickers will be with us in just a few minutes.
us.
Out
of sight
He's got a new book out called The Onion Story, and we're going to find out more about that.
We want to remind you that we are going to be showing The Godfather of Green Bay here in Madison at the Atwood Music Hall.
This is going to happen on Thursday, December 4th.
It's a great little movie.
Pete Schwabba is in it.
This is the 20th anniversary this year of Godfather of Green Bay and WMDX here in Madison, the Civic Media Station.
We're hosting that along with our friends at Dundren's Distilling, and it's all to benefit the Dane County Humane Society.
But that film screening, again, is going to be Thursday, December 4th, 7 p.m.
And we have information at our website, wmdxradio.com.
That's right.
It's going to be fun.
Pete put together a great little movie.
And who else is in this?
Tony Goldman.
Yes.
And Lauren
good evening, gentlemen.
see you here.
I
expect you.
don't know how long I've been in your virtual waiting room here, but I can't put up with this crap anymore.
I'm an important author and Mr. Dickers has been waiting five or ten minutes to talk to you guys.
So I'm glad to finally be with you.
And we need to keep talking about William Shatner.
about?
People often ask me, where did the name the onion come from?
Did it come from the fact that it's so funny that it makes you cry?
And I'm thinking, oh my god, imagine if we had that much hubris that we named it that because we knew how funny it was going to be to people.
But William Shatner wrote something that made me cry.
And it was just a beautiful piece of writing.
So he went up in Jeff Bezos' space rocket.
Yeah, and he came back and He wrote this little brief couple of paragraphs.
I just was weeping because they always said like and there's a line in the movie contact where they say Where Jodie Foster goes into space and they always send the scientists and stuff and she says You know, they should have sent a poet and obviously she's speaking through the voice of Carl Sagan.
That's what he always thought
you need to send a poet to outer space to adequately communicate the awesomeness of that experience.
And here's William Shatner, you know, he's kind of a, no offense, John, but he's, you know, he's kind of a joke in the world.
Yeah,
is, he is.
Yeah, all the other actors on Star Trek hated him, you know, all this other stuff.
Right,
right.
And he's seen us kind of a lightweight, you know, he's in the airplane sequel, for God's sake, so.
But he comes back and he writes this this beautiful piece of writing that just likes it's just like a shot across the bow That really sums up what it must be like to be in outer space and I highly encourage you to look that up and read it amazing piece of writing
it
I think it shows his character and I don't know why a lot of people didn't like him on the set.
Maybe it was a little rude to them or maybe it was just very, you know, much into character.
I don't know what it was.
I think he, I think he and Leonard Nimoy got along.
I think that's
Yeah,
I think he mostly, George Takei, I think was the main person who didn't like him.
And I think everybody else was jealous.
He's the leading man.
He's good looking.
Gets all the girls.
You know, why would you like a guy like that?
You know,
Yeah, I'm the captain, you know.
But he's, but he's so, yeah, affable.
He seems so nice and friendly.
And it does make you wonder like,
Was that a him problem that people didn't like him?
I don't know.
we go there.
It's backwards, guys.
Well, maybe we're seeing it okay.
We're seeing
okay.
You see it good.
That's just me.
That's wonderful.
Yeah, that's the book.
It's
as my head.
You can always tell us the book is good.
Well,
I wrote this because I wrote a similar subject matter book a long time ago, just about how the onion grows.
It's almost like a business marketing type of book, like how the onion got to be a name brand.
And
I got a couple of inquiries from a couple of different companies saying, hey, would you be interested in selling the movie rights to this book?
And I was like, the movie rights to a book about marketing, what are you talking about?
And one of my agents was like, no, you should write another book that tells like the emotional story, the personal story of what it was like to be starting up the onion in the original group of people and then seeing it through for 30, 35 years or whatever.
all the ups and downs, all the crazy characters.
And I thought, yeah, that'd be fun.
You know, because I have every issue of the onion, I have all these journals from the time.
And I talked to a lot of people who did that journey with me or part of it.
I don't know if there's anybody who was there the same like amount of time I was almost
else kind of just in and out.
But yeah, so it was really fun.
Like most of the books I write are
comedy books and then recently I've been writing books about how to write comedy I've never done anything like a memoir or a serious like nonfiction book about my own life and You're in it John.
You're in the book.
Have you found yourself yet?
we put
You were an important part of the onion's history.
You were part of the first iteration of the onion radio news.
Yeah,
kind of a hidden story of the onion that people don't realize is the whole radio story of the onion.
Yeah.
It was a very parallel track that the Onion radio show was on.
And for a time, the Onion's radio show had a far bigger audience, if you're to believe the Arbitron ratings at the time than the print publication ever had.
So yeah, it was on radio stations all over the country.
They were
stories.
They were fun.
They were so much fun.
And yeah, so there's this whole like underbelly of the onion in the world of radio that was fun to write about, you know, and I and a lot of other staffers at the onion worked at Wisconsin Public Radio.
I worked at a bunch of radio stations in Madison.
I was just thinking during the break when you had the news on, the news guy came on, I was thinking of this radio station I worked at in Madison.
back around the time the onion was getting started.
And it was at a morning shift, I would get there at 5 a.m.
and I would play like Dick Cavett's comedy hour and a bunch of other shows on a record album, we'd play for an hour.
And a guy would come in and do the news at the top of the hour for five minutes.
And he was just like the laziest news guy in the world.
And he came in.
Yeah, he would come in and
one day he was drunk he literally was hungover from the night before and he came in and he recorded the news once on a cart and he says play this every hour you didn't care you know if you know LA dropped into the sea between 10 a.m.
and noon as long as he could go back home and go to sleep.
So it's just like a lot of fun times, you know,
that I remember the call letters.
No, it was one of the AM commercial states like an AM talk station.
I don't
remember the call letters.
Yeah.
One of the one of the main ones, you know,
out
chance.
But Scott, you know, I mean, the whole thing started, I mean, with your your cartooning, Jim's Journal, you know, it became very successful.
You and the other people, I just read part of the introduction in the book.
But you know, all these other cartoonists were together and you were making money from a little bit of money, right?
You were selling t-shirts and paraphernalia.
Yes, Jim's Journal was a really big success on campus before the onion came around.
And oddly, later on when the onion was kind of really cooking a few years in, we realized that like the majority of the writing staff had all been cartoonists at the Daily Cardinal at one point.
just like this weird pipeline.
But no, I mean, it wasn't really a result.
The onion wasn't a result of Jim's Journal so much as I was kind of in that orbit.
and James Sturm who had this really popular comic strip called Down and Out Dog at the time.
James got into business with this guy Tim Keck to do a one sheet calendar that he distributed to students and they made a few hundred bucks having James draw some drawings and Tim sold some advertising on it and it was kind of like a proto onion and Tim was gonna, I had heard that he was gonna approach me about doing a Jim's Journal version of that calendar.
And then it turned out he wasn't because he had, he had moved on to bigger things, which is, hey, I'm going to do a whole weekly newspaper every week.
And
he brought in
this other business guy, Chris Johnson, and they wanted me to run Jim Cernl and the Onion.
I didn't.
I came up with a bunch of other comic strips to make for them and help them write jokes and edit and stuff.
And, you know, we were off and running.
And after a year of that, they
got tired of it and they sold it to me and to other people who were, you know, we seemed to have a lot more ambition for it and Tim and Chris just ran themselves ragged that first year and they wanted out.
But yeah, so it was just a crazy series of events and the right people in the right place, the right time.
I mean, I left many times.
times.
Yeah, sometimes I would just leave.
I remember telling Tim and Chris after six months, I told Tim and Chris, I've done enough.
I kept doing my cartoons, but I didn't show up at the office and help anymore for like six months.
And it was after that period, they came to me and said, we'd like to sell it to you.
I leave and then they pull me back in.
But then it happened again, where I left in the mid 90s to make a movie.
And then I left in the late 90s, I thought for good.
I'm like, okay, I've done what I can with the onion.
I'm leaving.
And then I sold my shares in it.
And then the new owners like invited me back to run it for a few years.
And yeah, there were things like that where it was kind of come and go.
Very strange.
I was the executive producer of the web series that led to the show that got
us the deal
for the show.
yeah
yeah and the the show was was it was unfortunate because I watch it now and there's definitely some funny parts in it but it we I don't think we're ready to do a tv show I think you're trying to get our legs with the web series and we're doing really well and we had agents just like begging us to do a tv show and I kept telling them we're not ready we need a little more time and then as soon as I left the writers that were there just jumped at a tv show and
Yeah, you know Yeah, that's how
You're
listening to civic media find the latest news information and archives of all your favorite shows on the civic media website civic media dot us
This is Nightlight with Pete Trauma, John and Gordy filling in tonight on Civic Media, the radio network.
We have as our guest today, Scott Dickers, who has the Onion Story, a new book, and it is taking off.
And I've got to say that at the end of that chapter, the audio, the audible version of it is fun to listen to.
It
is.
Of course,
Oh, thank you.
I appreciate it.
We did that through Brilliant's Audio, the Amazon.
Audio book production people so yeah, I learned I learned a lot But
yeah, I
appreciate the words you guys it's an editor's pick on Amazon never had a book be an editor's pick before so that's yeah
Yeah,
terrific a lot of visibility and it was a number one new release in a couple of categories
So normally I would poo poo somebody says really take it off as a marketing speak the marketing people told you to say that but in this case I think it's actually
You have the receipts.
the
he
It's also fired from the onion.
Oh, is that
Back in the day, yeah.
He's a friend of the onion, but, you know, sometimes you have to fight with your friends.
the early headlines that we presented to them in order to, you know, find out what they thought about those important stories that the onion covered.
Let's listen to it.
All right.
Let's try that.
Stunned many, many people.
This is...
A warning to the new students, the university administrators, plot the execution style murders of thousands of freshmen.
Now this is a story I didn't happen to read in the Wisconsin State Journal or
the catch
break the news
Did you stop the execution of these fresh?
Well, you know once the university process gets going pretty hard to stop those apparently there was a clerical error and many students names were misspelled and so they were executed for their Rather
than fix the error.
I want to set the record straight
I don't want to make you feel uncomfortable at all, but I really don't think it's fair to compare us to, like, Madison newspapers, or even, even, like, USA Today can net newspapers, because, I mean, I don't want to question their journalistic integrity.
But you've worked too hard.
We've worked too hard to be scooped by those jokers, and we're, I mean, we're a cut above, clearly.
I mean, any person with any news sense would see that that's a story.
They pass it up.
They had a little brief on it.
I mean, but they just mentioned it offhandedly.
And this is
probably one of them.
Graham Graham was on voice there.
Let's just know what became of Rich John.
no.
He went off to Hollywood to pursue a career as a writer and he ended up being the executive producer and showrunner of the Colbert report.
Yeah.
lot of
I'm sure Rich had no small part in that.
I thought you guys were going to drag out the clip where you had me on your show, which I have on a VHS tape somewhere.
But that's great.
Yeah, those guys are great.
We used to do that all the time.
I talked about this in the book where I would put different people out in the media to represent the onion.
so that the world wouldn't identify one guy like me as the lone genius behind the onion, like the leader.
I always wanted people to be confused as to who was running it, who was in charge.
And it worked because
the
point was to have the brand, the onion be the star, not any individual writer or person behind it.
And that really did help the onion survive.
A few times when we had to make a move and we lost a lot of employees any other comedy publication You know would have suffered because readers would say oh so-and-so left it's not funny anymore But it was always just the onion and it looked like the onion sounded like the onion They didn't know who was coming or going and that that was very much by design
I love it.
I think it's great when they stopped doing it in 2012.
I was there and I was very unhappy about it.
And the new owners are great.
Yeah, they had a bunch of really sketchy owners.
Didn't know what the hell they were doing.
The
new
owners, they're really supporting the writers and the writing staff has always been pretty much in a cocoon.
But it was tough for a few years there where the bean counters would come in and try to affect the content.
But now they're left alone to flourish.
If they have an idea, it gets a budget.
So I'm really happy for them.
And I'm delighted by the new owners.
Global Tetrahedron is the name of the company that.
Well, it's a company name that we invented for our book, Ardham Century.
We mentioned it.
in the very last page of the book, there's a, you know, the book is a bunch of front pages from the onion from the year 1900 to the year 2000.
And it came out in April of 1999, but we printed the front page from like January 1, 2000, just because the onion can predict the future.
So why not just publish a book with a future newspaper front page.
And one of the stories was, richest 1% escapes earth in
You know, and the company that all other companies have merged into is called global tetrahedron.
So
you hear a company that's put together by a journalist and a billionaire or whatever, and they're called that.
I'm like, OK, these are fans.
They
I mean, if there was some kind of tool in the modern world where you could enter the name, where you could put the name of a book or a person, you know, just tell it the name and get information back, I would say go there, but we don't have anything to
The world of tetrahedron will invent something like
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