Get Serious

The Rake goes inside the criminally overshadowed AV Club.

If The Onion is the nation’s class clown, the AV Club—the newspaper’s unheralded entertainment section—is its thoughtful little wallflower of a brother. Originally a wacky complement to the newspaper’s celebrated satire, the section grew into its current format under editor Stephen Thompson, who fought for a more serious critical focus when he took over in 1993. The specialty of the house quickly became long, free-flowing Q&As with notable celebrities, both up-and-coming and down-and-going. There are legions whose presence in an irreverent Gen-X publication like The Onion is nearly mandated by law—Penn & Teller, Henry Rollins, the creators of Mr. Show. But the AV Club is distinct for its focus on completely forgotten B-listers. Long before Behind the Music and Fear Factor, they let the Vanilla Ices of the world steal a little overtime in their 15 minutes of fame.

The AV Club’s new book The Tenacity of the Cockroach collects 68 interviews with such diverse figures as Joan Jett, animator Chuck Jones, film director Russ Meyer, and novelty-music king Dr. Demento. These folks have little in common, other than their scars from years of showbiz struggle, and their hard-won place in popular culture—even if that place is far out on its fringes. Tenacity explores that theme through the widest possible cast of characters, moving from embittered cranks and recluses to focused pros to those grateful just to be here. The Rake recently turned the glare of the Q&A spotlight back on AV Club editor Thompson.

The Rake: What valuable life lessons can we learn from celebrities?

THOMPSON: Obviously I don’t think Rachael Leigh Cook has a lot to teach us, or Ashton Kutcher, God bless him. But if you select wisely, and talk to celebrities that have an interesting perspective on their work and how it fits into the culture, there is potential. We probably share a certain skepticism about the tendency to make a celebrity’s story universal, like we can all learn about what it’s like to have a baby because Celine Dion had a baby. If you remember when Celine Dion had her baby, it was like this triumph of the human spirit because Celine Dion had managed to breed, and her baby was of course a kind of miracle baby. (Laughs) How ridiculous is that? I mean, obviously, Celine Dion had difficulty conceiving and I’m glad she was able to have a baby. But it was this ridiculously overblown thing where we were supposed to take this great uplifting life lesson because a pop singer went through this.

The comedy section of The Onion gets far more attention than the AV Club. Do you sometimes feel like you’re the redheaded stepchild?

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me a little bit, over the years, but I’d never in a million years expect to be acclaimed the way the comedy section has been. That’s perfectly understandable. We’re not doing groundbreaking comedy. I think we’re doing a very good entertainment section, but there are so many entertainment sections. At the same time, it bothers me when long articles appear about The Onion and don’t mention that there is an entertainment section.

How did the AV Club evolve, relative to the rest of The Onion?

We launched the entertainment section in 1993. In 1995 we renamed it the AV Club. Originally everything was written by me and the comedy writers, and eventually I brought in my own entertainment staff as I found people. It was trial and error. And there were certainly conflicts. It was originally going to be just a wacky entertainment section. And that idea I didn’t think had ever been particularly well executed. Over time the idea became, why don’t we just do a really smart, interesting entertainment section that has The Onion’s directness and economy of phrasing, has the spirit of The Onion, but is a real entertainment section that would be taken seriously and would enhance the value and the voice of the paper. It took years to figure that out and a ton of fights. My feeling was, why bother having an entertainment section if the jokes you’re putting in aren’t particularly on target? We can be cutting and clever and still provide people with some sort of service. A consistent set of opinions and a clitoral — I mean critical — perspective.

You’d probably get a lot more press with the other one.

(Laughs.) Yes, we’d be faring better today.

There’s a school of thought that a clever interviewer can draw out something universal in just about anybody.

Everyone has a story to tell and everybody’s unique, but finding people who can articulate what makes themselves interesting is a little bit trickier. We try to make sure that our interviews don’t dwell on just a current project, but to do general career overviews because that’s what we’re more interested in to begin with. It helps that our favorite sort of interviewees tend to be a little older, to have a large body of work. And in a lot of cases, they’re people whose work we grew up admiring. We have jokes about interviewing bitter, jilted cranks and geriatric comedy legends. We all have our niches. So the fact that everybody has the tenacity of the cockroach, that they have survived in entertainment, that’s the product of the mentality we’ve always taken into the interviews. We seek out people whose work we’ve enjoyed for a long time.

How does your style differ from journalists doing similar long-form interviews, like Charlie Rose or Terry Gross?

I think they do fine work. Because we’re in print, it’s definitely a different art. Terry Gross and Charlie Rose have to talk much more articulately than we do. You can edit an audio interview, but in print you can really polish it up into almost essay-like clarity.

How did you come to the long-form Q&A interview as the AV Club ideal?

That’s the standard block of space between ads in our Madison, Wisconsin, edition, which is a silly thing to base interview lengths on, but we just found it was right. Too much longer, your eyes would glaze over. A lot shorter, the interview barely registers. So we like to do a nice long big meaty feature length interview, but for that to work it has to be interesting. You can’t disguise a boring interview if you’re doing Q&A. Not that we’ve never done boring interviews.

I personally find Q&A more readable. When we started doing interviews, they were essays, which can read kind of flat. The subject gets de-emphasized, and the writer does all this paraphrasing. When I read an interview, I want to read what the subject has to say.