It’s like a newsroom in that we pitch our stories, we brainstorm them, we talk about what the angles are that we want to touch on. We try to get a good balance of political, local, world, science, and whatever. It’s hard, because in the last month or so we’ve had a lot of drug and alcohol-related stories; now we have some jokes that are great, but they happen to be drug-related, so we have to wait two months or longer before we can run them. We don’t want to get too one-note about it.

But there’s the old saw about you never want to watch laws or sausages being made, and the same is actually true of comedy. Everybody’s like, “Oh, you guys probably sit in there laughing all the time!” Well, no. There are a lot of really great times when we are laughing a lot, but a lot of times we’re just sitting there going: “Oh yes. That is funny. I vote for that.” We have fun and it’s definitely not a standard office job—I mean, I’m allowed to run a deli out of my office. It’s not like Price-Waterhouse would put up with that kind of shit.

The Onion is probably the only straight-ahead humor publication in America that’s also a successful business. Why do you think that is?

We’re comfortable. Because of our format—which is  both a blessing and a curse—we’re making fun of the news, the way the media operates, and the way the media presents stories. We’re also commenting on the stories of the day and certain issues, and that’s always going to change—but at the same time, our coverage of that will always be similar. With a lot of humor sites, they move on to bigger and better things, and we haven’t. The other reason that we’ve maintained (success) is because we have an internet presence and a hard-copy presence; we’re in seven cities, soon to be eight. It’s still popular, perhaps taken for granted in some cases, but people pick it up and read it pretty thoroughly. So if we’re flagging in one area, the other one is usually there to keep it going.

Why is fake news so prevalent these days?

It certainly seems like it’s more prevalent—the popularity of The Daily Show is a great indicator of that. I would say it’s possibly because, as the country becomes more fractious and divided, that everybody is looking for something that makes fun of the viewpoint that disagrees with them. I think that both The Daily Show and The Onion make fun of both sides; sometimes it may seem like we’re for one way, sometimes the other way, but we both generally try to play an even hand and make fun of stupidity wherever we see it. It’s also a processing method, a way for people to process the news because it’s really kind of overwhelming. Maybe it’ll make you think about it in a different way, maybe it just gives you a respite so you don’t have to think about it in a really serious way, you can just laugh and be done with it. But it’s really hard—I don’t want to second-guess why people like us. I just hope they don’t stop…

Joe Garden is currently campaigning to host Late Night on NBC when Conan O'Brien leaves the position to take over The Tonight Show in 2009. Visit his online campaign headquarters at VoteJoeGarden.com.