Anyone who has ever scavenged the Net for laughs can understand the gratitude lavished on The Onion (www.theonion.com) by an adoring public: There's a lot of drivel out there. Casual comedy-surfs dig up sites stoked with Dixie-cup gags that made you yawn when you were eight; sex-and-dismemberment riffs on Princess Diana and Nicole Brown Simpson that make you wish computers came with side-mounted surf-sickness bags; and spammy lists of faux-Martha Stewart Christmas tips, DIY Dilbert yuks, and so on - not to mention the endless spew of Clinton-Lewinsky jokes so stale they couldn't make it on Leno or Letterman or even into the cartoons of the New York Post.

And then there is The Onion - "America's Finest News Source" - which induces helpless laughter by skip-ping the shtick and telling it like it is. Celebrating its 11th year on paper, its third as the Web's leading source of satire, and its first as an out-of-control pop icon, The Onion may be vulgar, insensitive, sexist, racist, ageist, antipapist, or even, on occasion, offensive, but unlike its Web rivals, it's bankably funny. That is, of course, in the opinion of the people who get it. But for those poor clods who mistake them for real news, Onion stories often have a bitter tang.

For instance, when The Onion in February 1998 ran the scoop CLINTON DENIES LEWINSKY ALLEGATIONS: 'WE DID NOT HAVE SEX, WE MADE LOVE,' SAYS PRESIDENT, Democratic action groups called the offices to protest what they mistook for a partisan dig. Following the much ballyhooed birth of the seven McCaughey babies, The Onion reported a similar case abroad: CHINESE WOMAN GIVES BIRTH TO SEPTUPLETS: HAS ONE WEEK TO CHOOSE, explaining that the surplus six infants would be flung from a mountaintop "in accordance with Chinese multiple-birth law." Email soon reached The Onion's offices, informing the staff that heartsick churchwomen were holding prayer vigils. POPE CONDEMNS THREE MORE GLANDS prompted neurotic correspondence from pious souls who feared they might be guilty of internal sin, and when The Onion ran a photo feature on NEW SMOKABLE NICOTINE STICKS that could help smokers quit, gullible doctors and nurses phoned in to find out how to obtain them for their patients. "You can get them anywhere," incredulous Onion staffers told the callers. "They're called cigarettes."

__ News you can't use - on the Web. __

The confusion is easy to understand. Despite The Onion's cocky motto Tu stultus es - "You are dumb" - people are not duped merely because they are dumb, nor simply because The Onion sets out to mislead, but also because readers cut, paste, and forward Onion stories to friends and newsgroups without saying where they came from. Through the overly literal sorting process of the Net, outrageous accounts fall into straight-laced searches, bringing satire to people who are in no way prepared for it. Well-meaning new parents, trawling for general information on infant care, have called The Onion to protest that their Net searches turned up NEW YORK TO INSTALL SPECIAL 'INFANTS ONLY' DUMPSTERS - an invention the article described as part of an "ongoing campaign to revitalize New York City's public image."

"You'd be amazed," says Onion managing editor Robert Siegel, a boyish but exhausted-looking 27-year-old. "People see things in print, especially when there's no byline, and they don't say, "'Gee, this article sounds pretty crazy.' They regard the printed word as having dropped from the heavens."

This, of course, is just what Siegel wants. "We love to be misunderstood," he smiles. Still, not all misappropriations are equal. A recent cover story, '98 HOMOSEXUAL-RECRUITMENT DRIVE NEARING GOAL was picked up by Fred Phelps, architect of the notorious God Hates Fags Web site, who listed the article as proof of a gay conspiracy. Onion Webmaster Jack Szwergold quickly doctored the link so that Phelps groupies who clicked on it would be transported to The Onion's homepage, where they would understand (he hoped) that it was a spoof of the very kind of homophobic paranoia Phelps peddles.

There was a time not all that long ago when hardly anyone misunderstood The Onion, because not that many people read it. Between 1988, when it was founded in Madison, Wisconsin, and 1996, when the Web site was launched, the paper was distributed only in the Midwest, and its volatile charms remained the eccentric passion of students and anarcho-syndicalist academics in Madison (home of the University of Wisconsin) and a handful of humor buffs in New York and Los Angeles. After a few years, some of the writers ditched their $10-a-week gigs at the paper to try their luck out on the coasts, and now, a few alums write for places like the Late Show with David Letterman and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But otherwise, word of The Onion rarely spread beyond the coot-rich waters of Lake Monona or the nearby shores of Lake Michigan.

* We made The Onion editors write this headline. Here are some others they suggested:

AREA NEWSPAPER HATES WORLD, LIFE, YOU

GLORIFIED COLLEGE RAG SOMEHOW SNAGS BOOK DEAL

HEADLINE-MAKERS MAKE HEADLINES

And a few they missed:

ONION EDITORS DISCOVER PROZAC, RENOUNCE HUMOR, SATAN, REVENGE

SECRET SOURCE OF ONION JOKES REVEALED: TIPPER GORE

ONION TO WORLD: GO TO HELL

The paper was founded by Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson, who now publish, respectively, The Stranger in Seattle and Albuquerque's Weekly Alibi. They named it The Onion for no reason but whimsy, though some say onion is old-time slang for a juicy, multilayered news story. In '89, The Onion's second year, Keck and Johnson sold the paper, then just a black-and-white sheet sprinkled with jokes, to some of their colleagues, including Scott Dikkers, a 24-year-old cartoonist and editor, and 21-year-old Peter Haise. Dikkers became editor in chief and his friend Haise the business manager. Ten years later they're still at it.

In time they built what Andrew Welyczko, The Onion's design director since 1996, calls "a successful college-humor rag." Profits increased year by year, until, in the summer of 1995, Dikkers decided it was folly not to attempt the jump from campus to the real world. His plan was to cut the heavy-handed humor and attempt a more subtle goal; to lampoon USA Today with a color-enhanced version that used deadpan journalese to assault the banality of everyday life and to spoof major news events. Welyczko perfected the design, and Siegel, who had joined the staff as a writer earlier in the year, introduced the new no-nonsense, Associated Press style. "Robert's writing style was perfect," Dikkers says. "It felt like a new guard." It's this new-guard Onion that's hit the big time.

In person, the writers - not counting Siegel, Dikkers, and graphics editor Mike Loew, who are lean and presentable, more or less - are a grumbling, beflanneled herd of irascible couch potatoes. There are five full-time humor writers. Todd Hanson, the famously glum head writer, looks like Jesus, if Jesus had eaten a lot more fries. Carol Kolb, his girlfriend, recently incensed passersby in her busy neighborhood by installing a poignant shrine to a dead baby - complete with a framed photograph and artificial flowers - in a ditch in front of her house. She specializes in bleak, squalid tales, such as IT'S NOT A CRACK HOUSE, IT'S A CRACK HOME and the much reprinted essay by Thunder the Ferret, I CAN'T STAND MY FILTHY HIPPIE OWNER. Then there is Maria Schneider, small, plump, smiling, reminiscent of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and the only writer whose desk décor is not overtly terrifying. She has a pink flapper's feather taped to the computer, where she writes her popular column "by" Herbert Kornfeld, a drab middle manager who speaks a foul-mouthed jive, and her weekly "message" from T. Herman Zweibel, The Onion's demented, libidinous "publisher emeritus." John Krewson, who looks like Travis Bickle and once did drive a cab in New York City, writes the horoscopes; a December offering to birthday-week Sagittarians: "Though it's certainly true that you're not as young as you used to be, the stars say you're just about as old as you'll ever be." Finally, there's Tim Harrod, the most recent hire: a pale, flaxen-haired, muttering presence who writes the "News In Brief." In 1996 Harrod relentlessly bombarded the editors with viable headlines until Dikkers gave up and let him join.

__ Through the overly literal sorting process of the Net, outrageous accounts fall into straight-laced searches. __

The writers and editors work together all week, with only Mondays off, and Siegel and the writers hang out together after hours. Dikkers and Loew tend to keep more of a distance. Dikkers, who looks like a monk moonlighting as a Navy SEAL, and Loew, who is 25, 6'4", and so silencingly cool that he seems like an anime cartoon of an anime cartoonist, are both loners. But the whole team comes together to make humor. Loew's family photo will appear in The Onion's forthcoming book Our Dumb Century, illustrating a story called IOWA FAMILY BLASTED FOR LACK OF DIVERSITY. Dikkers, who has only once dropped in on the staff's annual Christmas bash (attended by the full 50 members of the supporting cast, including distributors and ad salespeople), spends most of his time overseeing The Onion's new high-profile projects and looming over his staff as a do-not-disappoint-me figure. Still, he weighs in from time to time with columns, such as "Smoove B." A recent Smoove invitation to an unnamed ladyfriend titled I GOT WHAT YOU NEED begins, "You are looking very fine. I am serious. But I am not here to tease you with words," and takes the lady through an imaginary evening out with His Smooveness, during which she will be treated to dinner at a restaurant where "there will also be cloth napkins" and then whisked to a bedroom where, he vows, "I will sex you wild" on sheets that will be "sparkling clean, as they will have been washed with only the finest laundry detergents." A jilted boyfriend later emailed Smoove's honeyed words to his ex at the University of Arizona. She promptly called the police.

Onion HQ is a stuffy, low-ceilinged, gray-carpeted suite of offices near Madison's capitol building. To pinpoint the office more precisely would be unkind; the staff lives in terror of being hunted down by talentless gag writers. The Onion does not publish its street address, there is no plaque in the lobby, and, indeed, from the street no sign hints that any activity occurs in the building other than lawyering, accounting, or UW Badger boosting.

The Onion's weekly war on complacency is waged in a bedraggled den known as the "writers' room," where Schneider, Kolb, Hanson, and Krewson have their desks. With its Satanic-nursery kitsch clutter, its squishy brown modular sofa chunks, and its Chex mix of free-floating crud on the floor, the room recalls an East Village cybercafé. On Tuesdays, everyone piles in with their fast food and diet sodas, and what unfolds is a revival meeting set in newsroom hell. Their inspiration is fueled not by malevolent glee, Siegel says, but by "serious personal problems, evil politicians, and the sad state the world is in." On a dry-erase board late in November, a story idea from a previous Tuesday lingered: VIOLENCE: THE ANSWER\?

The currency of every Tuesday meeting is headlines. Every article, whether a cover story, a news brief, a feature, or just a one-line teaser or poll question, starts as a headline. For each news-based story one person suggests a headline, another may write the article, and still others edit that, and whether one or six pencils produce the effort, in the end there will be no byline. This anonymity means that every Onion writer is invested in every Onion story; as in the old Hollywood studio system that produced Casablanca, everyone feels pressure to excel, nobody gets sole credit for anything, and the work ends by being a true collaboration. This kind of teamwork doesn't happen easily in cutthroat comic environments like Saturday Night Live, where writers compete or get sacked; it is only possible here because the writers are not only rivals, they are a handpicked group of friends selected over the course of a decade, and they're not afraid to scream at each other when they disagree. "We're like a family," Siegel says. "There are stretches of time where we just hate each other." Still, he allows, cringing as he says it, they do have a "synergy" that other comedy klatches lack. Whatever it is they have, it's something a growing number of people want in on.

Late last summer, Crown shelled out $450,000 for two Onion books, one of them a best-of collection, the other Our Dumb Century: 100 Years of Headlines from America's Finest News Source - a year-by-year romp through imaginary front pages of ye olde Onion, which is due in stores next month and slated to be promoted with an hour-long network-TV special written by Dikkers and staff. The pages of Our Dumb Century resemble Wendy's restaurant tabletops but the headlines breathe new life into yesterday's news. A front page dated July 21, 1969, reads HOLY SHIT: MAN WALKS ON FUCKING MOON; a related editorial asks WE CAN PUT A MAN ON THE MOON, BUT WE CAN'T BOMB A TINY ASIAN NATION INTO THE STONE AGE\? Hyperion Press, which had originally bought the book, ditched the project late in the game when the "right lawyer," as Siegel put it, finally saw the manuscript and proclaimed it too controversial. Siegel shakes his head: "I don't know what they were thinking."

The flattering rush of attention from book publishers, TV networks, and even Hollywood does not come from The Onion's humor alone; if that were true, the staff would have long since relocated to palm-dotted Sunset Boulevard digs. The sudden vogue is the result of the fact that in May of 1996 The Onion finally put the paper online, a move that Dikkers, a Web skeptic, had staunchly resisted. Jack Szwergold convinced Dikkers that a move online was necessary to increase readership. He was right: Now that people can read The Onion without flying to Madison, 1.2 million a month do. The paper version has 363,400 subscribers, but 300,000 readers cackle over online postings each week, most of them from their desks, in their offices, where they are supposed to be working. "In a way, all our readership is white-collar crime," Szwergold muses. Indeed, some companies have caught on to the scam, and lately Szwergold and Siegel have received calls and email from distressed employees at Andersen Consulting and Salomon Smith Barney complaining that they can only log on to The Onion at home.

It was a pre-Web story by Siegel, published in December 1995, that convinced Dikkers to make the leap to cyberspace. In the story, CLINTON DEPLOYS VOWELS TO BOSNIA: CITIES OF SJLBVDNZV, GRZNY TO BE FIRST RECIPIENTS, Siegel described "Operation Vowel Storm," which would "provide the region with the critically needed letters A, E, I, O, and U, and is hoped to render countless Bosnian names more pronounceable." The article also quoted a desperate Bosnian, Trszg Grzdnjlkn, 44, who wailed, "My God, I do not think we can last another day. I have six children and none of them has a name that is understandable to me or anyone else. Mr. Clinton, please send my poor, wretched family just one 'E.' Please."

Before long, the story was circulating wildly on the Web. The following February, not knowing where it came from, the hosts of the NPR radio show Car Talk stumblingly read the entire piece on the air, laughing so hard they could barely speak. Art Bell recited the story on his radio show, and Pat Buchanan's presidential campaigners ran it on the Go Pat Go Web site. Nobody credited The Onion, because nobody knew The Onion was the original source. Going online, Szwergold told Dikkers, would mean that when a story got filched and began to crop up across the country in newspapers, Web sites, and TV programs, The Onion could prove that the copycats had stolen someone else's punch lines. Credit could go where credit was due. Dikkers agreed to go online, and what Szwergold predicted came true. In 1996, Chevy Chase, an avowed Onion fan, plucked "Vowel Storm" off the site for yet another public airing; he read it out loud to President Clinton and other Democratic bigs at a DNC fundraiser in New York - and he made sure to credit The Onion. The president, Chase says, laughed heartily, calling it the funniest thing he'd ever heard, and thanked "Chvy Chs" - leaving out the vowels - for the humor break.

During the summer and fall of 1996, the staff sat back and watched, stunned, as the anonymous, miserably paid years of work they had spent financing their Onion habit by temping, washing dishes, and cashiering in liquor stores part-time at last started paying off. They started getting salaries and benefits - and, in another unexpected perk, e-correspondence with great and wise men. Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, emailed his credit card number so they could debit him $40 for the pleasure of his (free) subscription, and when The Onion ran a story about how the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking had thrown away his wheelchair and welded his head to a Robocop-like exoskeleton, Hawking emailed, "You have blown my cover as a wheelchair-bound mad professor. But little do you guess I'm really a Time Lord from Andromeda."

__ The paper version has 363,400 subscribers, but 300,000 readers cackle over online postings each week, most of them from their desks. __

People still do rip off The Onion, but in a surprising twist that Dikkers, in his pre-Web gloom, did not anticipate, the bon mot thieves who try to pass off Onion gems as their own soon find themselves assailed by rabid legions of cultlike fans. When loyal readers come across a newspaper or Web site that pirates The Onion, they routinely email the "borrowers," suggesting that the source be credited; and sometimes they don't stop there.

Last fall, when talk-show host Tom Snyder read out the story CONGRESS PASSES AMERICANS WITH NO ABILITIES ACT on his show (which prompted email from dozens of citizens who wanted to know if they qualified), Dikkers randomly called up LA subscribers for help. Within 10 minutes he found someone who happily agreed to drop everything and drive a copy of the relevant issue to Snyder's set so the TV personality could show The Onion on air if he felt like it - which he did. Onion lawyer Ken Artis says fondly of the publication's online following, "If they were bounty hunters, they couldn't be better," and even Dikkers is impressed by their loyalty. "It's great," he says gruffly. "We're going to have them all kill themselves one day. We'll pass out Kool-Aid." He laughs, adding, "We were all raised Christian here."

This spiritual impulse may explain two recent religious offerings in The Onion's news sections: the feature GOD ANSWERS PRAYERS OF PARALYZED LITTLE BOY: 'NO,' SAYS GOD and the memorable November 1998 front-page story CHRIST KILLS 2, INJURES 7 IN ABORTION CLINIC ATTACK.

In the photo collage by Mike Loew that accompanied the clinic article, a guilty-looking, bearded Christ wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and a crown of thorns is led away by cops. Dikkers loves this one - indignant right-to-lifers be damned. "I get USA Today and read it and I think, 'This is somebody's idea of what's going on in the world today - but it's really not all that relevant to me, it doesn't touch me,'" he says. "But I look at The Onion, and it's filled with humor and sadness."

"For us, comedy equals tragedy," Dikkers elaborates. "Mel Brooks said comedy equals tragedy plus time. It's funny: One of the reasons why people conceive of us as edgy, or groundbreaking, is because we're telling jokes about tragic events much more close to the tragic event than you're supposed to." Sometimes this immediacy offends. For example, the story 5,000 BROWN PEOPLE DEAD SOMEWHERE, a send-up of disaster coverage and First World indifference to the Third World, ran a bit too soon after Hurricane Mitch devastated Central America to strike some readers as funny. Dikkers wasn't bothered. "I think we're very much speaking for a new type of sensibility that's very prevalent in our generation here," Dikkers says. "There is nothing sacred, there is nothing offensive, there's nothing too horrible to say."

"We would have been much more famous much sooner if we'd been in San Francisco or New York," Dikkers likes to grouse. It is the office mantra; improbable as it may seem, the bawdy, brutal, high-spirited Onion is, in the end, the product of a handful of overworked, depressed, caffeine-raddled malcontents who live in fear that the floor will collapse under them. "You'd be surprised how close the margin is between a funny, hilarious, that's-the-funniest-thing-I've-ever-seen publication and a totally mediocre, OK publication," Dikkers says. "We ride that line every week." Siegel, who is responsible for holding that line, wrestles mightily with his own personal demons. "If one person says we're not funny, I'll believe that person instead of the 10,000 who say we are," he says. "My confidence would be shattered."

Sure, sure, and he believes it too. But that doesn't mean he and Dikkers and the whole sad-sack staff aren't gunning for Our Dumb Century to turn them into obnoxious, unrepentant millionaires overnight. Until then, they're contenting themselves with smaller but no less transforming fantasies. This month, for the first time, the newly famous Onioners will attend the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, and one of them, at least, may get his slice of heaven. John Krewson, running a hand over his freshly shaven scalp, says dreamily, "I'm going to go up to Janeane Garofalo and say 'You're pretttttty.'" His fervent hope is that she will slap him.