Carolina Alumni Review - November/December 2008

of the novelties
of their

respective eras.

See an

illustrated

timeline

of Carolina

humor

publications

on pages 44

and 45.

issue of The Carolina Boll Weevil shows two fig leaves hanging on a clothesline; its caption, “The First Monday,” will be clear only to those who know that Monday used to be widely observed as laundry day. And a 1969 Betelgeuse line about “the two-color cover with the circles and the arrows” rings a bell only with those who remember the Arlo Guthrie anthem of the era, Alice’s Restaurant.

Likewise, more recent terminology might be puzzling in the future. “I didn’t click on the movie because I still have dialup,” the editor of UNCommitted, a photocopied publication from the early 2000s, says in passing. A BoUNCe article from 2005 begins, “AIM usage reached a new milestone last week when UNC student Shelby Cortez responded to a friend over instant messenger using the familiar phrase ‘lol.’ But Cortez did not, in fact, ‘laugh out loud.’” In 30 years, will anyone know what these sentences mean?

But older student publications can cause head scratching for other reasons as well. Styles of humor have certainly changed and, as the student body has become more diverse and more sophisticated, campus humor has gotten a lot more sophisticated, too.

Thank heavens. Puns were the epitome of wit when the Literary Trumpet published this gem in 1846:

Why is a fellow with a big nose like a man as wise as Solomon? Because he knows (nose) a heap.

And in the 1930s, he/she jokes like this one from the Carolina Buccaneer were common:

She: Oh, look at the stars; they are so numerous! He: Yeah, and ain’t there a hell of a lot of ’em!

It’s not that the student humorists of subsequent generations never made people groan. But the current brand of humor is a lot more complex than that of old. Heavily influenced by The Daily Show and the national online publication The Onion — itself originally created by two students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — the trend has been toward satirical fake news items that mock current events and personalities. Their topicality might make them hard for later readers to understand, but they tend to demand a little more knowledge and thought from their intended audience.

The art of ridicule

Even when the subtleties of some of their jokes get lost over time, student humor magazines provide capsule sum-maries of the novelties of their respective eras and of how the students of the day reacted to those novelties. The “short” bathing suits and the low-backed evening dresses that prompted commentary in the flapper-era Boll Weevil would be considered tame, if not quaint, today. Women smoking, now simply considered unhealthy, was then profoundly shocking — and, so, an ideal subject for student humor.