The Onion turned 20 this year, and Steve Hannah, its CEO, turned 60, but nobody is looking back. There is no time for that.

As one of Hannah's talented young colleagues said, "Everybody celebrates 20 years. We'll celebrate at 22."

There is no time for cake and candles, not with the Onion News Network (ONN) -- an online video series -- exploding in popularity and Decider, a heavily localized online guide to restaurants, entertainment and nightlife, recently rolling out in Chicago and Madison.

ONN has been such a hit that part of Hannah's time is spent fielding calls from television executives who now know an Onion joke can be translated to video, and think their network should be home to an Onion TV show. According to Hannah, it could happen within a year.

Hannah takes those calls in between reading correspondence, like the letter that came in not long ago from the daughter of a Very Famous American.

When Barbaro, the race horse, was injured and doctors were trying to save it, the Onion covered the story along with seemingly every other media outlet in the world. It is possible the Onion's coverage was somewhat less reverent than most. It's even possible the Onion was satirizing all the attention being paid to a horse.

When Barbaro died, the Onion ran a photo of hundreds of mourners passing a casket, with a horse super-imposed into the casket.

It was sometime later that Hannah heard from the daughter of the Very Famous American.

"I can't believe," she wrote, "that you put that horse in my mother's casket."

Sure enough, although no one else could probably tell, the photo the Onion doctored was from a prominent funeral.

"Your mother was a saint," Hannah wrote back. "But we bought the image."

Since the Onion is never going to be accused of saintliness, maybe it's fitting that it is now being run by a former newspaperman who loved to write about earthly pleasures, whether it was the guy who introduced bratwurst to County Stadium in Milwaukee or the Sauk County man who fled Wisconsin one cold winter and started the California wine industry.

Steve Hannah is a born storyteller, and right now one of the more interesting stories out there is how an ink-stained daily newspaper wretch wound up as CEO of the world's hippest humor weekly. But Hannah is reluctant -- OK, at least a little reluctant -- to tell it.

"This shouldn't be about me," he was saying Friday, sipping tea at a West Side bakery.

Hannah would rather talk about the coterie of brilliant and zany writers who helped grow the Onion from a small weekly paper sustained by pizza coupons to an international Web sensation drawing millions of viewers.

Since the Onion started in Madison in 1988, many of the group are from Wisconsin. Carol Kolb, now head writer for the Onion News Network, is from Spencer. Her dad worked at the Land O' Lakes cheese factory there and Kolb once described the Onion's point of view by saying "it's the view from the break room between shifts at the Land O' Lakes cheese factory."

It's a Midwestern sensibility, even if the majority of the creative team moved to New York in 2001. The corporate offices are now in Chicago, and Hannah lives there, in the River North neighborhood. He can walk to work, except when he travels, which he does often.

Hannah, who also has a cottage in Prairie du Sac, grew up on the East Coast, received financial aid to play tennis at Colgate, then went to grad school in Ireland. One of his first jobs was with CBS News in New York, where the great Charles Kuralt gave him some advice: "Go work for a newspaper."

Hannah wound up at the Milwaukee Journal, where he started as a farm reporter and ended up as managing editor.

He left around the time of the paper's merger with the Milwaukee Sentinel. Hannah began writing a terrific column on all things Wisconsin, which he syndicated to 17 papers, and he started consulting with a state mutual fund company on, among other things, dealing with the media.

Along the way Hannah met a New York financial titan named Dick Schafer, who would help rescue the Onion when it developed that the creative minds who put out the hilarious paper were less adept at the bottom line.

Madison attorney Brady Williamson had called Hannah seeking an investor, and Hannah had contacted Shafer, who looked at the books and said, "The Onion is one banana peel away from Chapter 11."

Shafer bought a majority interest in 2003, hired Hannah as CEO, and they and the other executives have since run the business while staying out of the way of the writers, who continue to shine.

Now everybody seems to want some kind of affiliation with the Onion, and it's up to Hannah to weigh the various offers, serious business he conducts even as he laughs at the latest Onion News Network scoop, like this week's revelation that the first openly gay horse was set to run in the Breeders' Cup.

"At the Onion," Hannah said, "the boy never leaves the man."