YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Collins

lines on the record: 68
first: 2026-02-02
most recent: 2026-02-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, of course. He famously tried to buy the onion once. But I don't know, some 10 years ago now or something, he tried to buy the onion. The deal didn't go through. A lot of people didn't want to work for him. So then he started picking off onion staff writers one by one. And he put them in like a weird hangar in the space X facility in California and then just forgot about them. And those people wound up coming up with something called Thud, which is probably aptly named. And then a lot of this stuff, a lot of the origin stories of these people are, they weren't accepted as funny. They never really understood jokes. They never understood punching up. And they became hell-bent on power instead.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are actually in a much worse position speech-wise than we've ever been. And one of the safe havens of that in the world right now is satire.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And say, like, hey guys, there are actual Nazis and they're coming back. Those people are being targeted by this administration. And those people are doing truthful things. So under the guise of stopping censorship and under the guise of free speech, they are actually censoring people for speech that is true.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, Carrie, you know this. A lot of the best reporters that we know at the big places are making a lot of concessions and are being quieter just to keep their job so they can pop up with their big story once every few months. Or they'd quit. That's really what they are not in a position to tell the truth accurately and correctly consistently because of the incentive structures of what these big places are. They want to have good intentions at the top of these places, which is like we got to maintain somebody on Air Force One or whatever so we can't piss them off too much. That's still a deal with the devil that you actually don't want to make. And also with the misinformation stuff, people who covered that have been effectively criminalized. People who covered disinformation, people who stood up advocacy groups to try to steal away Nazis from these platforms.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was doing drugs and firing every person. And he thought that there was some sort of like wokeness switch that once he bought Twitter, he could just turn it off. But it turns out those people who actually believe stuff. Right. So, yeah, it was difficult to go on the news and just allude to the fact that he had lost his mind. It's much easier to just sit here and watch the world's best comedy writers go ham.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh yeah, definitely. It's definitely a more powerful weapon right now. As you know, throughout all of history, fascists hate being made fun of more than anything. They can lie their way through factual stories in the press. They can easily go through that. But once they feel like they're being taunted to the point where they're unpopular widely, which is really all they care about is being loathed and liked and thought to be funny. That's where they get really upset. So there is a ton more power here in terms of taking down power structures and how people feel about what's going on. Because we were, you know, I was reporting on Elon in a very straightforward way for a while. And it was, I think part of it was he was so extraordinarily nuts that it made it, you know this, it made it seem like I was like I had a grudge against him.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The true evil are the people shooting people in the street. And you can be mad that the people passed with standing up to that aren't doing it.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right. You have more, like they may not have power, but they have more power than us. They can at least yell at the person down the hallway and everybody else has to go to work and go to the gas station and do all those other things bring their kid to soccer practice. And they don't see anybody fighting this thing This is a little severe, but I read a, and I hate to bring up a meme because we try to stay away from memes, but I read this thing about how Republicans are the Uvalde shooter and Democrats or the Uvaldi cops. You can be mad at both things here. There is enough to be mad at both things.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People who are just kind of standing there and saying, stop hitting me, but have a little bit of power. We had some headline that was like, somebody has to do something to stop this as Democratic fundraising email from sitting U.S. Congress first.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, there's several parts of that. They think they're omnipotent and they look incredibly They look soft. In the chasm between that, there lies a lot of comedy. So going in for power. Think you have to do it in a way that isn't exclusively filled with rage. You have to take us again, just contextualize everything and take a step back and take them for who they are, psychoanalyst. That's really what we do. I also think we do something that the news just simply can't or won't do, which is we say the unsaid sentence in American life, the people that when you're talking to people on the street about what's going on, they say it, but the news will never say it”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Come up with the feeling that they're thinking put into words. And right when people are at their breaking point of where they are emotionally, we do tend to provide exactly the right sentence. And that's our role.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I'm from the news. So I went in here hot and under the collar and I was like, guys, like we got to hurry up. We got to do things quick. And they're like, no, we take a breath. Like we take a breath before things happen to really contextualize stuff and see how things feel in the moment. And that's become a really big part of what this company is, is sort of providing like the one sentence that is able to distill American life right now. And they take it very seriously in the room. Like they are ruthless about word choice and where people go with each word in the sentence. So I am proud of them for just telling me to shut the fuck up and just be like, guys, like we need to take a step back here. And by the time we have that like perfect take on the moment, it gives people a lot of catharsis, I think. People struggle for nine or ten hours to come up with the thing that.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The one from this morning is ICE agent stuff sock under mask to give himself chin, which is precisely how we're thinking about it.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we're doing the basics. Exactly. And I think there are satirical places on the internet, like the hard times, that do really good stuff. There's also like, there's little onions throughout the world. There's the Beaverton in Canada. There's one in Australia. There's ones that are literally called the onion that we don't care to send ceases into CIS to throughout Asia. We don't care about that. I think, but the difference is in quality is that we just have the best comedy writers.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's in the great late night tradition of, I would say, having 15 people in a room and coming to the best sentence about what happened that day. It's closer to like Colbert or Letterman, like a great Letterman monologue than anything else. And I don't think there's another thing specifically like it.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somebody with that fever to come in and try to lay everybody off and install people with whatever weird disease those people have in their brain. So we stuck with it. And, you know, when I took over the onion, we kept the staff. We gave everybody raises. And we said, what's the ultimate form of this process that you guys run where you throw away 99% of jokes and keep the one good one? And we stayed true to that. And now it's really paying off. I think like where other places, the Austin comedy scene dying, other places starting to realize they may have had something to do with the installation of a fascist regime, we never wavered. We've just always been exactly who we are.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, look, we just stuck to the process throughout that whole weird fever that was going on throughout the comedy world. It's very clear that that fever is now breaking and that people were like, maybe we got a little bit too hot in the collar about the racism. Maybe we went a little bit too hard on that one. We stuck to our process. And that's a big reason why I want to take it over is because I didn't want.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We tend to try to make fun of how people get their information. And right now, people get their information in the most base and stupid ways possible. Like we're all competing with people who seem to drink paid for a living.”
2026-02-02 · On with Kara Swisher · The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT