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

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