Online: “The Washington Post,” 2019

Top of fake Post front page.

Very early edition of the May 1 “Washington Post,” on stands January 16, 2019.

Parody OfThe Washington PostTitle: “The Washington Post”
Parody By: Jacques Servin, L.A. Kauffman, Onnesha Roychoudhuri.
Date: May 1, 2019 (distributed Jan. 16, 2019). Format: Eight-page broadsheet.
Contributors: L.A. Kauffman, Onnesha Roychoudhuri, Jacques Servin, etc.
Availability: Online as a PDF here at my-washingtonpost.com.

How did I miss this? Back in January, protesters marked the second anniversary of President Trump’s inauguration by handing out 25,000 copies of an eight-page fake Washington Post at the White House and D.C.’s Union Station. Dated May 1 of this year, the ersatz “Post” foresees The Donald being driven from office by a wave of women-led demonstrations to the sound of worldwide rejoicing. There are a handful of copies on eBay, but you can read and download the whole thing at this link.

The stunt was conceived last summer by Jacques Servin, half of the anti-corporate performance duo known as The Yes Men, as a way to rally support for Trump’s impeachment. Other organizers included longtime activist L.A. Kauffman and Brooklyn writer Onnesha Roychoudhuri, who helped shift the focus toward mass action with a 16-page insert called “Bye-Bye: A Guide to Bringing Him Down.” Masha Gessen of newyorker.com calls it “maybe the best primer now available on understanding protest.”

Parodies of the New York Times, New York Post and Boston Globe.

The Yes Men’s “Times” (2008) and “New York Post” (2009), the Globe’s 2016 mock front.

The Yes Men did something similar right after Barack Obama’s election in 2008, distributing 80,000 copies of a fourteen-page “New York Times” dated July 4, 2009, seven months in the future. It proclaimed “Iraq War Ends” and basked in the dawn of a New Progressive Era. (It’s online here, see also Steve Lambert’s link-filled post.) The “Times” was followed in September 2009 by a less sanguine “New York Post” that gave climate change 32 pages of classic tabloid scare treatment (“We’re Screwed: What You’re Not Being Told”). The mock WaPo isn’t quite as breathless, but it does assume the Current Predicament can be popped like a soap bubble and leave no mess behind.

"Trump Time" cover, 2016This latest “Post” is the third recent parody set in a Trumpian near-future, after the Boston Globe‘s fake front page in April 2016 headlined “Deportations to Begin” (online here) and Hachette’s supposedly post-election “Trump Time” two months later. “Trump Time” authors Tom Connor and Jim Downey, best known for “Is Martha Stuart Living?,” state right off that their fake newsmag is “not intended to be anything but funny,” but that very shallowness makes it the scariest to reread. The whole joke in “Trump Time” is that “Donald K. [sic]  Trump” in the White House would be the same rudderless dirigible as ever and laughably miscast: Imagine a President putting grifters in the Cabinet! Stoking ethnic tensions! Bashing “Loser Countries I Can Bomb the S#!t Out Of!!” Gotta be a joke, right?  —VCR

Harvard’s “New York Times,” March 7, 1968

Parthanon falls in the Lampoon's Times

Reports of (weeping over) the Parthenon’s death were greatly exaggerated.

Parody OfThe New York TimesTitle: “The New York Times”
Parody By: Harvard LampoonDate: March 7, 1968. Length: Front page only?
Contributors: Rob Hoffman, Jonathan Cerf, Peter Gable. Availability: Very rare; reprinted in the Harvard Lampoon Centennial Celebration (pp. 38-39) and 100 Years of Harvard Lampoon Parodies (pp. 30-31).

Fifty years ago today, on March 7, 1968, the Harvard Lampoon pulled off one of the great college pranks, replacing the 2,000 copies of The New York Times distributed in Cambridge with a year-old paper inside a fake front page. Among the headlines: “Khesanh Airlift Proves Mistake,” “Governor Warns of Water Surplus,” “Ancient Parthenon Topples As Quake Rocks Greece.” Only a few items hinted something might be amiss: A one-sentence notice that the Times would begin printing funnies, for instance, or the bland headline, “Walrus in Central Park Zoo Speaks.”

“Most fake newspapers err on the side of burlesque, but the 1968 Times is masterfully subtle.” Neil Steinberg wrote in If At All Possible, Involve a Cow. “The stories are alarming — with headlines such as ‘Castro Seizes U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo’ — but not implausible…. There were some ludicrous touches … but you had to stop and read the thing to catch them. In all, it made for a neat package that caused a lot of momentary puzzlement.”

The Lampoon recalled things more dramatically: “In a daring 4 a.m. maneuver, Poonies had substituted their version of the morning news for that contained in the March 7 Times, and then sat back to watch the impact,” Martin Kaplan wrote in 1973’s Centennial Celebration. “One woman wept to learn of the Parthenon’s collapse, and amazed students combed page 30, column 2, to discover what the Central Park Zoo walrus had actually said. Most disturbing of all, however, was the reaction of one faculty club member who carefully read the entire bogus front page and the year-old Times it enclosed without any distress whatsoever.” Three years later, in 100 Years of Harvard Lampoon Parodies, the weeping woman had been replaced by “Harvard’s senior classics professor [who] was so grief-stricken at the Parthenon’s collapse that he cancelled his classes.” (Steinberg, a stickler for facts, says there “no evidence” for any weeping professor stories.)

The Lampoon put as much care into distributing its “Times” as it did into creating it, maybe more. The plot almost unravelled at the start, when the Poonies’ order for a thousand copies of its March 2, 1967, issue raised eyebrows at the real Times. “Inquiries were initiated, and members of The Lampoon explained that delft wall tiles had been ordered and delivered defective and that The Times was considered ideal for wrapping them to be returned,” the Newspaper of Record wrote the day after the parody appeared:

“Then Mr. [Rob] Hoffman, a sophomore, and his two key assistants, Jonathan Cerf, son of Bennett Cerf, the book publisher, and Peter Gabel, son of Martin Gabel and Arlene Francis, went more deeply underground. A few weeks ago, as deadline time neared, several of the Lampoon’s trusted spies were assigned to trailing distributors of the genuine Times, noting which newsstands were major drops.

“Wednesday night, other valiants from The Lampoon went to Times Square area and gathered up some 500 copies of the Thursday morning paper shortly after they hit the street. With these papers they flew back to Cambridge. In this the men of Lampoon were being particularly devious. They reasoned that many Harvard students who got the fake edition of The Times might turn first to the sports page and realize the hoax. Those 500 copies are this morning’s Times except for Page One.

“But no such precautions were taken for Cambridge residents who get their papers from newsstands. Those copies had the false Page One wrapped around the edition of last year’s March 2 edition.

According to Sheldon Cohen, operator of the newsstand kiosk in Harvard Square, no one has requested a refund for the parodied Times.” (“The Times Gets a Lampooning at Harvard,” NYT, March 8, 1968, p 36.)

The same day the Times‘ unsigned but obviously inside-sourced account appeared, the Lampoon’s old adversary the Crimson tried to spoil the party: “The New York Times Company announced yesterday afternoon that it will sue the Harvard Lampoon for $175,000 for ‘willful deceit, commercial libel and commercial defamation’ in its March 7 Times parody,” wrote the Crime’s James R. Beniger. “U.S. Justice Department officials are presently studying the parody to determine whether they will file criminal charges for ‘willful fraudulent claim of copyright.’ It is a federal offense to appropriate copyright for material not clearly a parody.”

The story went on to claim the Lampoon might also be sued by Time Inc. and Murray’s News Agency, the latter seeking the return of 800 stolen copies of the real Times. It ended: “Thomas S. LaFarge ’69, Lampoon president, said last night his organization would not return the 800 newspapers stolen from Harvard hallways. ‘We sold them to a waste paper dealer for $2.37,’ LaFarge said. ‘It was our biggest sale since the Playboy parody.’

Ouch.—VCR

Parodies in Mad, 1954-2017

Seven Mad parodies from 1954-2006

Wikipedia helpfully lists all of Mad’s movie and TV-show spoofs, but I believe this is the first attempt to catalog parodies of publications. Real, identifiable publications, that is: I’m not counting the fake lifestyle mags for groups like beatniks and hippies and mobsters Mad has perpetrated over the years. I’m also ignoring articles that show a bunch of different titles pulling the same gag: e.g., “Jack and Jill as Retold by Various Magazines (June 1959), “Magazines for Senior Citizens” (June 1961), etc. Everything listed here had at least one full page devoted to it.

"The Bunion," 2002.

“The Bunion,” 2002.

Unlike TV and movie spoofs, magazine parodies never became a staple of Mad’s editorial mix, and they’ve grown rarer as its target audience drifts away from boring old print. More than half the longer parodies appeared in the 1950s and ’60s, with the most recent in 2001. Many were designed by John Putnam, Mad’s art director from 1954 to 1980, whose fascination with the details of layout and typography was rivaled only by National Lampoon’s Michael Gross. Significantly, when Mad took a poke at The Onion in 2002, it targeted theonion.com, not the print edition. Since then there have been similar digs at The Huffington Post (2014) and Cracked (2016).

The list has two sections: multi-page parodies – usually consisting of a front page or cover and three or more inside pages — and cover-only parodies.  Section 1.B lists parodies done as bonuses in Mad annuals, which tended to be longer and more colorful that those in the magazine, with pages the same size and paper stock as their targets’. The biggest parody in a regular issue was a 16-page spoof of Entertainment Weekly in April 1998 that doubled as a test-run for Mad’s switch to inside color and slick paper (and the real ads that would pay for them). “Entertain-Me Weakly” generated a flurry of media coverage, but nothing as ambitious has been done since.

Pages of Mad's 1968 16 parody

“Sik-teen” in issue #121 (1968) was the only Mad parody to begin on the back cover and continue inside. Frank Frazetta’s Ringo first appeared in the “Blecch” Shampoo ad in issue #90 (1965).

Section 2 deals with cover-only parodies. Such brief spoofs usually leave me wanting more, but some of Mad’s are priceless. Basil Wolverton’s Life-like “Beautiful Girl of the Month” on the front of Mad comics #11 (May 1954) may be the most famous, but for my money the funniest is Mark Fredrickson’s version of Vanity Fair’s kiss-up to Tom Cruise and family in issue #472 (Dec. 2006). Both appeared on Mad’s front cover, but most fake covers have run on the back, where they’re subject to mutilation by Fold-In fanatics. Since the late ’90s, Mad has done most of its magazine spoofing in the annual “20 Dumbest People, Places and Things” survey.

Three pages of Mad's 1957 "TV Guise."

Making 1 + 1 (pages of Mad) = 3 (pages of parody) in issue #34 (1957).

Each listing begins with the name of the publication being parodied, in italics; followed by the fake title or article name, in parentheses; the Mad issue date and number; the length of the parody (if more than one page); and the names of the writer(s) and artist(s), in that order, separated by a slash (/). A phrase like “9 pages (on 5)” means one page of Mad contained two or more digest-size parody pages; the phrase “no cover” flags a couple of early parodies that didn’t have one; and “(p)” indicates a photographer. The writer and artist credits are from Doug Gilford’s Mad Cover Site, to whom all thanks. — VCR

1. Multi-page parodies …
A. … in Mad regular issues, 1954-2001:

  • The DailFirst page of "Field & Scream"y News (“Newspapers!”), Oct. 1954 (#16). Front cover + 7 pages. Harvey Kurtzman/Jack Davis.
  • Confidential (“Confidential Information”), Aug.-Sept. 1955 (#25). 6 pages (no cover). Kurtzman/Will Elder.
  • Field & Stream (“Field & Scream”), Jan.-Feb. 1957 (#31). 5 pages (no cover). Kurtzman/Davis.
  • TV Guide (“TV Guise”), July-Aug. 1957 (#34). 9 pages (on 5). Paul Laikin/Bob Clarke.
  • Better Homes and Gardens (“Bitter Homes and Gardens”), Mar.-Apr. 1958 (#38). 5 pages. Tom Koch/Wallace Wood.
  • The Saturday Evening Post (“… Pest”), May-June 1958 (#39). 6 pages. Koch/Clarke.
  • Pravda, July 1958 (#40). 4 pages. Frank Jacobs/Wood.
  • National Geographic (“National Osographic”), Sept.-Oct. 1958 (#41). 5 pages. Koch/Wood.
  • Look (“Gook”), Mar. 1959 (#45). 7 pages. Koch/Wood.
  • True Confessions (“Blue Confessions”), Oct. 1959 (#50). 9 pages (on 3) Laikin/Wood.
  • Modern Screen[?] (“Movie Land”), Apr. 1960 (#54). 5 pages. Larry Siegel/Joe Orlando.
  • The Wall Street Journal (“… Jungle”), Mar. 1961 (#61). 4 pages. Phil Hahn/.
  • Playboy (“Playkid”), Mar. 1961 (#61). 7 pages. Siegel/Clarke.
  • Ladies’ Home Journal (“… Journey”), Apr. 1961 (#62). 6 pages. Koch/Orlando.
  • Reader’s Digest (“Reader’s Digress”), Dec. 1961 (#67). 9 pages (on 5). Siegel/Orlando.
  • Popular Mechanics/Popular Science (“Popular Scientific Mechanics”), Sept. 1963 (#81). 7 pages. Al Jaffee/Clarke.
  • Hair Do (“Hair Goo”), June 1965 (#95). 6 pages. Jaffee/Jack Rickard.
  • Road & Track (“Load & Crash”), Sept. 1965 (#97). 6 pages. Koch/George Woodbridge.
  • National Enquirer (“National Perspirer”), Apr. 1966 (#102). 5 pages. Siegel/Jaffee.
  • 16 (“Sik-Teen”), Sept. 1968 (#121), Back & inside-back covers  + 6 pages. Siegel/Rickard, Davis.
  • Consumer Reports (“Condemner Reports”), Jan. 1970 (#132). 6 pages. Dick DeBartolo/Clarke, Irving Schild (p).
  • Popular Photography (“Popular Photomonotony”), June 1975 (#175). 6 pages. DeBartolo/Schild (p).
  • Consumer Reports (“Consumer Reports for Government Agencies”), March 1979. 4 pages. DeBartolo/.
  • TV Guide (“Mad’s ‘TV Guide’ Textbook”), June 1980 (#215). 7 pages (on 5). Lou Silverstone/Woodbridge.
  • Mad (“The Book of Mad” [Biblical Parody]), Dec. 1983 (#243). 5 pages. Silverstone/Paul Coker, Dave Berg, Don Martin, Rickard, Davis, Clarke, Woodbridge.
  • Parade (“Charade”), Sept. 1993 (#321). 4 pages. Charlie Kadau, Joe Raiola/Sam Viviano.
  • Entertainment Weekly (“Entertain Me Weakly”), Apr. 1998 (#368). 16 pages. Scott Brooks/Drew Friedman, Joe Favarotta.
  • Generic muscle magazine (“Bulging Man”), Aug. 1999 (#384). 8 pages. Scott Maiko/Scott Bricher, Schild (p), Sean Kahlil (p)
  • Generic tattoo mag (“Maimed Flesh”), Sept. 2001 (#409). 8 pages. Maiko/Hermann Mejia.
TV Guide parodies and 1776 "Madde."

Bonus parodies in or from More Trash # 6 (1962) and Specials #8 (1972) and #19 (1976).

B. … in Mad Annuals, 1961-1976:

  • Puck: The Comic Weekly (“A Sunday Comics Section We’d Like t0 See”), in The Worst From Mad #4, 1961. 8 broadsheet pages. /Wood, Orlando, Clarke, Woodbridge.
  • TV Guide (“TV Guise”), in More Trash from Mad #6, 1963. 16 digest-size pages. Aron Mayer Larkin/Lester Kraus (p).
  • TV Guide (“TV Guise” Fall Preview Issue), in Mad Special # 8, Fall 1972. 16 digest-size pages. Koch/Schild (p).
  • Mad (“Madde”), in Mad Special #19, Fall 1976. 24 pages. All the regulars.

2. Cover-only parodies …
A. …on Mad front covers, 1954-2006:

  • Life (“Mad”), May 1954 (#11). “Beautiful Girl.” /Basil Wolverton.
  • Time (“Mad”), Sept. 1982 (#233). Pac Man: Man of the Year. /Clarke.
  • Time (“Mad”), March 1987 (#269). Alfred E. Neuman as Max Headroom. /Richard Williams.
  • People (“Mad”), Jan. 1991 (#300). Alfred as “Sexiest Schmuck Alive!” /Norman Mingo.
  • Vanity Fair (“Mad”), Dec. 2006 (#472). Alfred as Suri Cruise. /Mark Fredrickson.
Real and parody covers of SatEvePost and Vanity Fair.

Mad on the Post’s redesign (back cover #62) and VF’s Suri Cruise hoopla (front cover #472).

B. …on back covers, 1958-2000:

  • Reader’s Digest (“Reader’s Disgust”). Jan.-Feb. 1958 (#37). /Orlando.
  • Saturday Evening Post. March 1962 (#69). /Mingo.
  • Newsweek (“Newsweak”), Dec. 1963 (#83). /Kraus (p).
  • The New Yorker. March 1977 (#189). Bill Johnson Jr./Clarke.
  • WWF Magazine (“WWWF: Witless Windbag Wrestlers Federation Magazine”), July 1987 (#272). /Schild (p).
  • Sports Illustrated (“Sports Titillated”), April 1988 (#278). /Schild (p).
  • Metal Edge (“Metal Sludge”), July 1989 (#288). Kadau, Raiola/Schild (p).
  • Typical teen mag (“StupidTeen”), Sept. 1991 (#305). Kadau, Raiola/.
  • GQ (“Geek’s Quarterly”), March 1992 (#309). William T. Rachendorfer, Andrew J. Schwartzberg/.
  • Sassy (“Sasssy”), Jan. 1993 (#316). Kadau, Raiola/Jacques Chenet (p)
  • Martha Stewart Living (“…Dying”), May 1997. Meredith Anthony, Larry Light, Alison Power/Schild (p).
  • Maxim (“Maximum”), July 2000. Jeff Kruse/AP, Wide World (p).

C. …in the annual “20 Dumbest” list, 2000-2017:

  • 1999's "20 Worst" People cover.People, Jan. 2000 (#389). “JFK Jr. crash coverage.” David Shayne, Raiola/.
  • Playboy, Jan. 2001 (#401). “Darva Conger.” Dave Croatto/.
  • Time, Jan. 2002 (#413). “Anne Heche.” Greg Leitman/.
  • Martha Stewart Living (“Martha Stewart Lying”), Jan. 2003 (#425). “Martha Stewart.” /Scott Bricher.
  • Teen People (“Dumb Teen People”), Jan. 2004 (#437). “Jessica Simpson.” Frank Santopadre/Schild (p).
  • Modern Bride (“Drunken Bride”), Jan. 2005 (#449). “Britney Spears.” Raiola, Kadau/Schild (p).
  • Modern Bride (“Runaway Bride”), Jan. 2006 (#461). “Jennifer Willibanks.” Kadau, Raiola/Bricher.
  • Sports Illustrated (“Sports Inebriated”), Jan. 2007 (#473). “Bode Miller.” Kadau, Raiola/Bricher.
  • Sporting News (“Snorting News”), Jan. 2008 (#485). “Keith Richards.” Jacob Lambert/Fredrickson.
  • Parenting (“Bad Parenting”), Jan. 2009 (#497). “Celebrity parents.” /Schild (p).
  • High Times, Jan. 2010 (#502). “Michael Phelps.” Uncredited.
  • Women’s Wear Daily (“…Deli”), Jan. 2011 (#507). “Lady Gaga.” Barry Liebman/Bricher.
  • Scientific American (“Unscientific American”), Jan. 2013 (#519). “Todd Akin.” Scott Nichol/.
  • Money (“Fake Money”), Feb. 2014 (#525).”The Winklevoss twins” /Mike Lowe.
  • Better Homes and Gardens (“Better Homes unGuarded”), Feb. 2015 (#531). “White House security.” Uncredited.
  • Sports Illustrated (“Sports Segregated”), Feb. 2015 (#531). “Donald Sterling.” /Friedman.
  • People (“Deplorable People”), Feb. 2017 (#543). “Donald Trump.” Uncredited.

The Bawl Street Journal, 1919-2009

1947 Bawl Street Journal

“The Bawl Street Journal,” June 6, 1947.

Parody Of: The Wall Street Journal. Title: “The Bawl Street Journal.”
By: The Bond Club of New York. Dates: June 1919 – June 2009.
Availability: Findable on eBay, ABEbooks, etc.; 1930s-’80s issues most common.

This was going to be a salute to “The Bawl Street Journal” on the hundredth birthday of its sponsor, the Bond Club of New York, but instead it’s a eulogy. On June 17, 2017, a message appeared on www.thebondclub.com saying the group’s centennial celebration three days earlier may have been its “Last Hurrah.” According to “Bailing Out the Bond Club,” the group was still $14,000 in debt from its previous big bash in 2015, despite several fundraising efforts. Worse, it had “no current members to help generate revenue.”

Generating revenue was once the Club’s strong suit. It was started in June 1917 by a group of young Wall Streeters who had been asked to help the Treasury Department sell Liberty Bonds in World War I. Sell they did: The four Liberty Loan drives of 1917-18 netted over $17 billion ($6.3 trillion today), or roughly two-thirds of U.S. war spending. Finding they enjoyed each other’s company, the salesmen kept the club going after the Armistice as an outlet for shop-talk and story-swapping. In 1919, a member named Robert Bould had the bright idea to preserve some of this camaraderie in a parody of The Wall Street Journal.

Bawl Street Journals from 1957 and 1997

“BSJs” from 1957 and 1997.

Bould’s mix of political satire and inside jokes proved a hit, and “The Bawl Street Journal” became a profitable annual tradition. Brokerage houses and other pillars of finance ran ads mocking themselves and their customers. In 1921, the Club spent profits from the third issue on a day of fun and frivolity at the Sleepy Hollow Country Club in Tarrytown, N.Y. That caught on, too, and in 1934 the parody and party were written up in Time:

Only tip-top Manhattan bondmen enjoy the Sleepy Hollow jamboree, but the Bond Club’s annual publication – the “Bawl Street Journal” – is sold in every important financial city in the land and is even ordered from Europe, China, Brazil. Written largely by bankers, brokers and their employees and printed on the presses of its famed prototype, the Wall Street Journal, the “Bawl Street Journal” is regarded as the most expert parody in the publishing field.

Founder Robert A. Bould began having fun with the sedate Wall Street Journal and its advertisers in 1919, but after he was drowned in Long Island Sound in 1926 publication lapsed for five years. In 1931 the “Bawl Street Journal” was resurrected by John A. Straley, lean, sardonic promotion manager for Corporate Equities, Inc. A writer of fiction on the side, Editor Straley started offering prizes which brought in contributions from all over the U.S. This year more than 10,000 copies were sold at 50¢ each…. (Time, June 4, 1934)

Straley stayed with the “BSJ” through 1962, except for a four-year gap during World War II, putting in two months unpaid work on every eight- to twelve-page issue. Circulation reached 44,000 in 1957 and topped 60,000 in 1964, selling for $1 a copy when the real Journal cost only a dime. A switch to online publication in 2005 wiped out that source of income, though printed copies were still distributed at the annual field day.

Like its prototype, the “BSJ” favored old-fashioned layout and robber-baron politics. Deficit spenders and government regulators were constant targets, especially when Democrats held the White House. The 1936 edition reported that Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau planned to balance the federal budget by having the government pay 50 percent income tax on its own income. “True, … an unscrupulous government might find ways to avoid paying taxes to itself,” the Secretary was quoted as saying, “but I expect to watch myself very closely.” A similar story in 2009 had former Illinois Governor (and convicted bribe-taker) Rod Blagojevich offering to hold funds from the Obama administration’s Troubled Asset Relief Program in either “carefully selected financial institutions or in the trunk of …. [his] 1992 Chevrolet Impala.”

Cartoons from the 1997 parody

A page of cartoons from the 1997 “BSJ.”

Contributors took a kinder view of their own foibles: “Without resorting to an overactive use of ribaldry, we have attempted to humorize the Street, its characters and its conditions,” the Publications Committee wrote in the 1947 edition. Much of that humor involved groan-worthy puns on members’ names and cracks about their golf games, hairlines and other personal matters. The “BSJ” also catered to its mostly male audience with gag cartoons of the wolfish-boss-and-sexy-secretary variety, which remained a staple long after they vanished from other upscale publications. Many were commissioned by brokerage firms and run as paid ads, sometimes with the names of real Wall Streeters attached to the characters.

2009 BSJ front page

Online in ’09.

Most victims took the “Journal’s” ribbing in good humor — or pretended to — but jibes at real people and businesses led to trouble in the 21st Century. The fatal blow came when the feds stiffened so-called “compliance” rules after the 9/11 attacks and 2008 Recession. Mainly intended to stop money laundering and insider trading, the new rules also cracked down on traders who spread rumors that might affect stock and bond prices. According to “Bailing Out the Bond Club,” many firms decided to play it safe by canceling ads and warning staffers not to submit “disparaging remarks about other firms and employees” — which was the whole point of this annual roast-in-print.

Does “The Bawl Street Journal” still exist? The only edition posted on the Bond Club’s website is Vol. LXXVIII, No. 1,* from 2009, and a recent Google search turned up nothing more recent. Still, 90 years is a long time to spend parodying a single publication; the only comparable run I can think of is the Harvard Lampoon’s war on The Crimson, which began in 1901 and is still in progress. “B.S.J.,” R.I.P. – VCR
________________________________
* To my knowledge, no Vol. ever had a No. 2.

Online: Spy’s “New York Times,” 1992.

Spy's fake Times front page

Parody OfThe New York Times. Title: “The New York Times.” Parody By: Spy.
Date: July 15, 1992. Length: 4 pages. Contributors: Uncredited.
Availability: Occasionally seen on eBay and abebooks; online right here.

Real Times front page for July 15, 1992

Real NYT, 7/15/92

Amid the current worry over “fake news,” it might be soothing to revisit a political hoax that only wanted to raise a few laughs. On the night before Bill Clinton’s nomination at the 1992 Democratic Convention, Spy magazine smuggled a thousand copies of a facelifted New York Times into Madison Square Garden for delegates and journalists to find the next morning. “The front sections of copies of the real Times were wrapped with Spy’s new pages one, two, op-ed, and back page,” George Kalogerakis wrote in the 2006 history, Spy: The Funny Years. “Ross Perot was running as a strong third-party candidate, so the lead front-page story was: PEROT SET TO PICK TV’S OPRAH WINFREY AS RUNNING MATE. For a few seconds, democracy teetered. Then everyone laughed. … [T]he parody was discussed on the The Tonight Show by Tom Brokaw, reporting live from the convention floor, and by [Nightline‘s] Ted Koppel as well, who fooled his wife with a copy.”

A second Ross Perot story said the eccentric billionaire had kept his mother’s body in an attic for seven years after her death, “apparently believing she was still alive.” Spy later said this was one of the alleged “dirty tricks” that prompted Perot to suspend his presidential campaign on July 16, the day after the parody appeared. True or not, it’s no crazier than Perot’s own claim that George H.W. Bush and the CIA were planning to disrupt his daughter’s wedding.

Spy's 1992 Times parody page 2

Spy was obsessed with the New York media world generally and the Times in particular, and both are skewered here. British tycoon Robert Maxwell, who had conveniently drowned off the coast of Spain as his media empire was collapsing, reemerges on page two as “Roberto Maxbueno,” secretive publisher of the Canary Islands’ trashiest tabloid. Vanity Fair’s Tina Brown promises Condé Nast a “New New Yorker” in the back-page “Chronicle,” and, on the Op-Ed page, former Times editor Abe Rosenthal says nothing for 400 words in a column aptly headlined “I Don’t Know.”

Spy's 1992 Times parody page 3

The other Op-Eds parody a trio of familiar Times types: the Highly-Credentialed Has-Been (played here by Michael Dukakis), the Concerned Empathizer (Anna Quindlen), and the Gadfly Intellectual (Camille Paglia). All three are aped precisely and, in the Paglia take on Bill Clinton’s sex appeal, exuberantly: “In a way, we citizens are like millions of sperm ejaculated toward the great womb of the commonweal, driven to swim in order that one may be selected to fulfill the general imperatives of the organism as a whole,” runs a typical sentence in “A Hot-Button Candidate.”

Spy's 1992 Times parody page 4

The real Camille Paglia appreciated the attention: “Just a note to express my admiration of your New York Times parody, with its deft, skilful and hilarious send-up of my heavy-breathing, multi-adjectived op-ed pieces,” she wrote in Spy’s October issue. The July 15, 1992 “Times” succeeds as both a prank and a parody, and is still funny 24 years later. I’ve posted it here so you can see for yourself. — VCR

William Hone’s “A Slap at Slop,” 1821.

Front page of A Slap at Slop.

Parody Of: The New Times (London). Title: “A Slap at Slop.”
Parody By: William Hone. Date: 1821. Pages: 4.
Contributors: William Hone (writer), George Cruikshank (art).
Availability: PDF of pamphlet version online here.

Portrait of William Hone

William Hone, 1780-1842.

William Hone may have been the original pop-culture fanatic. Born in London in 1780, he was drawn to the printing trade and radical politics while still in his teens. In the 1790s he was a disciple of free-thinker William Godwin and briefly belonged the London Corresponding Society, one of the pro-French groups targeted in The Times’s 1794 self-parody, “The New Times.” In 1810, he began writing and publishing attacks on the authorities that were scathing, witty and abundant — 175 separate titles between 1815 and 1821.

Hone collected printed ephemera most of his life, from old-master prints to election handbills, and he was fascinated by parodies. He loved to present his radical satires as if they were children’s stories, advertising circulars and — most notoriously — books of religious instruction. Around 1817, he issued three political satires modeled on three core documents of the Church of England: the Catechism, the Liturgy and the Creed. In one, “The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism,” he even parodied the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Lord who art in the Treasury, whatsoever be thy name, thy power be prolonged, thy will be done throughout the empire, as it is in each session. … Turn us not out of our places; but keep us in the House of Commons, the land of Pensions and Plenty; and deliver us from the People. Amen.”

Seeing an opening, the Tory government charged Hone with three separate counts of blasphemy, claiming it was prosecuting him not for his politics but for mocking religion. The trials were held on consecutive days in December 1817, all before the same judge but with different juries. Acting as his own lawyer, Hone won three acquittals and national fame as a champion of free speech. His most effective tactic was showing jurors dozens of religious parodies similar to his own that had not been prosecuted. Collecting these whetted his interest in the subject, and he spent the next 20 years gathering material for a book. Unfortunately, the book never materialized, and his collection disappeared after his death in 1842.

Hone's Buonaparte-phobia

“Buonaparte-phobia.”

Hone never copied a specific publication in detail, but a few times he came close. One such was “Buonaparte-phobia, or Cursing made Easy” (1815), a half-sheet poster mocking The Times’s nonstop abuse of Napoleon. Hone made The Times look ridiculous simply by knitting the more spittle-flecked passages of its anti-Boney editorials into one 3,000-word rant. He attributed these attacks to a “Dr. Slop,” after the incompetent obstetrician in Tristram Shandy, but their real author was a quarrelsome and widely disliked reactionary named John Stoddard. Originally a lawyer, Stoddard began contributing to The Times in 1810 and was named editor in 1814. His duties included writing the “leading article” (i.e., lead editorial), but his “style was as violent as it was personal,” the paper’s official history said: “In 1814 The Times was ridiculed as a magazine of curses.” Essayist William Hazlitt, who despised Stoddard’s politics despite (or because of) being his brother-in-law, wrote in 1823 that Stoddard’s Times “might be imagined to be composed as well as printed with a steam engine.”

The Times axed Stoddard at the end of 1816, suspecting him of disloyalty. Two months later, he reappeared as editor of a rival paper, The Day, which he soon renamed The New Times (no kin to the 1794 parody); the real Times sniffily dismissed it as “the New, or Mock, Times.” In 1820, Hone renewed his attacks on Stoddard with a reprint of “Buonoparte-phobia,” followed by a four-page, broadsheet parody of The New Times titled “A Slap at Slop and the Bridge-Street Gang.” (The latter was a pro-government propaganda group whose real name was the Constitutional Association for Opposing the Progress of Disloyal and Seditious Principles.)

Slap at Slop pages 2 through 4

“A Slap at Slop,” first edition, pages 2-4.

Like the 1976 film Network, “A Slap at Slop” anticipated media trends that seemed outlandish but later became standard. Its front page consisted entirely of ads, as was the custom, but Hone gave them the bold headlines and large illustrations previously seen only in posters and handbills. “My first intention was to parody Slop’s paper, ‘The Slop Pail,’ or ‘Muck Times,’ throughout,” Hone wrote. “But … what could I do with thoughts as unquotable, as confused, as ill-conceived, as ill expressed as that puissant Lord’s — without depth or originality — as plentiful and superficial as duckweeds…. Under the stringent necessity of varying my original plan, … I have parodied some of the features common to the Slop Pail, and supplied … a Sketch of HIS LIFE — filling the remainder of the sheet in my own way.” In that sketch, Hone described Stoddard as a man who “mistook passionate heat for the enthusiasm of genius, a habit of loud talking for talent, a ranting way of writing for reasoning, and pertinacity of manner for firmness of character.”

Hone’s “own way” ranged from pure nonsense to blackest humor: One fake ad pictured the Duke of Wellington, hero of Waterloo and current Tory leader in the House of Lords, as a turbaned “Indian juggler” forcing Britannia to swallow his sword. “Wanted To Go Abroad,” said another ad, “a stout, active, stone-hearted young man, of a serious turn, as an apprentice in the military business, and to assist as a missionary. Apply at the Bishop and Bayonet, Westminster.” Directly below that was a picture of “A Nondescript” — a creature made up of mitres, crowns, boots and other symbols of authority — accompanied by several hundred words of pure gibberish.

Real and fake Warren's Blacking ads

A real Warren’s Blacking ad (left) and the “Slap’s” parody, both drawn by George Cruikshank.

The “Slap” also contains the earliest known parody of a national ad campaign. Robert Warren’s Shoe Blacking had made itself famous with a drawing of a cat startled by its own reflection in a freshly polished boot. In Hone’s version, a rat sees himself wearing a judge’s wig — a hit at politician Charles Warren (no kin to Robert), a former radical who had cynically turned Tory in exchange for a Welsh judgeship worth 1,000 Pounds a year. The fact that one of the Tory leaders had given his name to the Wellington boot must have been an irresistible set-up for Hone and his illustrator, cartoonist George Cruikshank. It didn’t hurt that Cruikshank had also drawn the original ad.

Cruikshank cartoon of Southey and Prince of Wales

Poet Laureate Robert Southey and King George IV, as seen by George Cruikshank.

On inside pages, Hone parodied Robert Southey’s overblown ode to the late King George III, “A Vision of Judgement,” as “A Vision of Want of Judgement.” Southey was a fire-breathing radical who moved right relatively young; by 1813 he had ingratiated himself with enough Top People to be named Poet Laureate, much to his old comrades’ disgust. Cruikshank’s illustration shows the poet serenading his new muse: an overweight, underdressed  George IV strumming a lyre. Hone also mocked Southey’s naked careerism in an ad for “Golden Ointment for the Eyes,” which the poet testifies is “astonishing! I immediately looked two ways at once, and saw my way clear to the Laureateship. I have seen in the dark ever since!”

Topical humor seldom outlives the issues that inspired it, and many of the jokes in “A Slap at Slop” have become the stuff of footnotes. What comes through undiminished is the force of Hone’s personality. He hated unearned privilege, militarism and servility, and he loved working people, old paper, liberty and forceful writing. And he really, really, really didn’t like John Stoddard. — VCR (edited 4/11/18 to correct info on Charles Warren)

 

Online: The Lampoon’s “Transcript,” 1919.

Lampoon's "Transcript" cover.

Unlike later Lampoon newspapers, the “Transcript” looked like (and was) a 9″-by-11″ magazine.

Parody Of: Boston Evening TranscriptTitle: “Boston Evening Transcript.”
Parody In: Harvard Lampoon.  Date: May 9, 1919. Pages: 16 + cover.
Contributors: None credited. Availability: Online here at Hathi Trust.

Fifth printing, new cover.

The fifth printing’s new cover.

“The old Boston Evening Transcript, conservative, delicate, dignified, and ever ‘responsible,’ served from the mid-nineteenth century until its quiet demise in 1941 as the ‘Bible of Proper Bostonians.’ In 1919 it was the unhappy subject of the one of the Lampoon’s most popular and successful parodies, which went through five printings and sold eight thousand copies, a circulation record not broken until the Literary Digest issue of 1925.” — 100 Years of Harvard Lampoon Parodies (1976), p 36.

“The Lampoon’s effort is a brilliant piece of parody. Sometimes it is a little obvious, and the number of themes upon which it lays unholy hands could have been varied with advantage. But the headlines and memorial notices are alone worth the price of admission; and the editorial is so like what the Transcript actually preaches — it is perhaps rather better written — as to suggest that it was contributed in all seriousness from the Transcript office. … But the main thing, at the moment, is to send a copy of the Lampoon to every Transcript subscriber.” — Harold J. Lasky in the Crimson, May 12, 1919.

The “Transcript” deserved its success. It was filled with the kind of collegiate whimsy the Lampoon usually disdained, and the newspaper format kept the jokes brief and frequent. The 1919-20 Lampoon staff couldn’t boast a Robert Benchley (class of 1911) or Robert Sherwood (’17), but it cemented a tradition: After the “Transcript,” the Lampoon produced a parody issue, usually in the spring, every year for the next quarter century.

The ‘Poonies weren’t the first Harvard men to mock the Transcript. Two years earlier, in Prufrock and Other Observations, T. S. Eliot (’09) had watched the approaching evening:

Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript.

In his nine-line poem named for the newspaper, Eliot sketched Transcript readers as life-avoiding shut-ins. It’s simultaneously harsher and more subtle than the Lampoon’s parody, but both exploit the paper’s reputation for enervated propriety, and both succeed at what they set out to do. Prufrock and Other Observations changed the course of modern literature; the Lampoon’s “Transcript” made a lot of people laugh. — VCR

1919-Transcript-206-sm

The dead in column 3 include “Harry Josephus Liski” and other thinly disguised Harvard notables. The Lampoon repaid British socialist Harold J. Laski’s kind words in the Crimson next January, when it spent a whole issue trashing him for supporting the 1919 Boston Police Strike. The Lampoon’s own history called the Laski issue “Red-baiting,” “blatantly anti-Semitic” and “Lampy’s Blackest Hour.”

Harvey Kurtzman’s “Daily Poop,” 1954

Front page of Mad's Daily Poop.

Parody Of: The New York Daily NewsTitle: “Daily Poop.”
Parody In: Mad comics #16. Date: October 1954. Pages: 6.
Contributors: Harvey Kurtzman (writer), Jack Davis (art).
Availability: Findable. Reprinted in The Mad Reader (Ballantine, 1954), Mad, Vol. 3, No. 13-17 (Russ Cochran, 1987), Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad #6 (E.C. Publication, Spring 1999), The Mad Archives, Vol. 3 (Mad, 2012) and maybe elsewhere.

1954-mad-cov-smHarvey Kurtzman’s “Newspapers!” in Mad #16 is basically a six-page takeoff of the New York Daily News, but it’s preceded by a warning to comic book readers that tabloid journalism’s focus on sex and violence is corrupting American adults. Though clearly a satire of the 1950s anti-comics crusade, Kurtzman’s loathing of the prurience and vulgarity of the tabs is obvious, and his parody is cold-eyed, precise and damning. (So damning, in fact, that it subverts the story’s moral: If comic books are no worse than tabloids like this, maybe they should both be banned.) Even the name “Daily Poop” evokes a not-so-subtle Swiftian revulsion.

Angry letters to the Daily Poop

Proto-trolls commenting in the “Poop.”

The “Daily Poop’s” typeset text and four-column layout reflect Kurtzman’s growing desire to escape the comic-book format and put out a “real” humor magazine. He got his wish the next year, after the same anti-comics crusaders mocked in “Newspapers!” ran E.C.’s other titles off the newsstands, leaving Bill Gaines practically no choice but to convert Mad into a 25-cent magazine beyond the reach of the Comics Code Authority. It’s funny how these things work out, sometimes.

Parts of the “Daily Poop” are silly in the usual Mad way, such as an ad for “Nu-Mal-Trition,” the new weight-loss miracle that “merely knocks you unconscious for days on end.” Elsewhere, Kurtzman and Davis use Mad’s anarchic clutter to portray a society rapidly devolving toward mindlessness: Celebrity gossip crowds out news; movie ads shrink to pictures of lips and one-word titles (“Dames,” “Love,” “Kill”); letters to the editor grow shorter and angrier until all they convey is threats of violence. The world of the “Daily Poop” is a lot like Idiocracy’s. Or ours. — VCR

1954-mad16-poo4-sm

1954-mad16-poo-ad1-sm

 

“The New Times,” 1794

The Times' self-parody 1974

The Times parodies itself, 1794

Parody Of: The Times (London). Title: “The New Times.”
Parody By: The Times — and the Tories.  Date: Sept. 6, 1794. Pages: 1.
Availability: Reprinted much reduced but still legible in The History of the Times, Volume I: The Thunderer in the Making (London: Times Publishing Co., 1935).

The earliest known parody of a specific publication was a full-page self-parody in The Times of London on Sept. 6, 1794.  Like the Boston Globe’s April 2016 vision of Donald Trump as president, “The New Times” was set in a future dominated by the worst imaginable leadership — in this case, French revolutionaries and their English sympathisers. Reformers across Europe had hailed the French Revolution in 1789, but after five years of guillotines and chaos most Britons considered it a Bad Thing. So did The Times, which was only nine years old in 1794 but had already adopted an omniscient tone and an unswerving conservatism.

“The New Times” filled all of page 3 of the four-page Times, displacing the usual news and commentary. Like The Times‘s real front page, it consisted mostly of government announcements, theatrical notices and ads. Instead of the customary lion and unicorn in the real Timess nameplate, “The New Times” displayed a guillotine surrounded by crossed pikes hoisting the cap of liberty and a blood-dripping severed head. The paper’s date was given as the “First Year of the Republic, one and indivisible, Saturday, June 10, 1800.”

In the 1800 of “The New Times,” pubs serve wine instead of beer, Parliament has been destroyed, and St. Paul’s Cathedral has been converted into a “Temple of Reason.” A brief notice celebrates the discovery of a method for “making bread of decayed bones,” and the shipping news blandly records the arrival of “a French brig, laden with guillotines for use of the fleet.”

An exchange-rate table from "The New Times"

In the 1800 of “The New Times,” zero interest in the pound.

The humor of “The New Times” is pitch-black and savage, and much is still funny in an Onion-like way. The dozen or so English radicals mocked by name in its columns were probably less amused, since many of them were awaiting trial for High Treason. These included the well-known polemicist John Horne Tooke and the left-leaning Unitarian minister Jeremiah Joyce, who was depicted in “The New Times” celebrating the destruction of Parliament. (Fortunately, all were eventually acquitted.)

Real Times front page from 1794.

The real Times in 1794.

The inclusion of Tooke, Joyce and other defendants was no accident, for “The New Times” was created by the same government that prosecuted them. The parody’s author is unknown, but the official History of The Times says it was sponsored by Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville, who was Home and War Secretary under William Pitt and head of the Tory Party’s dirty tricks division. According to scholar Marcus Wood, Pitt and Dundas “built up a propaganda machine which attempted to discredit radical thought and to magnify the dangers of radical activity.” It seems to have worked: The Tories came to power in 1783 and held it for the rest of the century.

Much of Dundas’s propaganda was slipped to friendly newspapers, who published it unaltered; in return, the papers received inside scoops, government contracts and other goodies. Times founder and publisher John Walter, for example, was appointed Printer to His Majesty’s Customs and given 300 pounds a year. “The tradition of journalists selling their consciences to politicians was old when Walter established his daily newspaper, and its age had deprived it of infamy,” the anonymous author of the History noted dryly. Infamous or not, one fruit of that tradition was the first high-profile newspaper parody. —VCR