came to grips with what made them, their
fellow students or their parents uncomfortable by laughing at it. When women began
to attend the University, the men who ran
the humor magazines of the day began
depicting “co-eds” in one of two curiously
contradictory ways: distractingly beautiful
or uniformly homely. In more recent years,
Sliced Bread made fun of political correctness by inventing a Poor White Trash
Movement.
How freely students can attack certain
targets — the administration and the
trustees, for instance — also has shifted
greatly with the times. The notorious
Carolina Buccaneer flouted many readers’ sense
of decorum and taste (more on that later),
but in 1939, it referred somewhat carefully
to “South Building’s latest ultimatum.”
Thirty years later, cartoonist Jeff MacNelly
’ 69 — later the creator of the comic strip
“Shoe” — could openly deride trustee
decisions in a drawing called “The Super
Night Watchman.”
His composite caricature for the one-issue-wonder Betelgeuse combined the head
of Dean of Women Katherine Carmichael
with “the guts of an Alabama State Policeman” and “the girded loins of a Chicago
‘Pig’” to mock the position that curfews
for women students couldn’t be abolished
until the administration found appropriate
watchmen for the women’s dorms. Students of the time found that process mystifyingly slow but, MacNelly concluded, they
should be patient. “Remember,” he said,
“ 100 Trustees can’t be wrong.”
Holding up the powers that be for
ridicule is a time-honored satirical move,
one that more recent generations of Carolina students have adopted with alacrity.
In 1992, for instance, Sliced Bread reacted
to a prohibition on skateboards with the
headline, “Board of Trustees Bans Walking
on Campus.” “Starting Friday,” it reported,
“students are required to crawl on University sidewalks or face a heavy fine.”
Given the changes in the culture at
large, it’s not surprising that students in
more recent decades have felt freer than
their predecessors did to make fun of those
in charge. They’ve also become considerably more likely to take on such topics as
sexuality and religion. A BoUNCe article
titled “My only other gay friend would be
perfect for you!” would never have made it
into the magazines of the 1920s and 1930s.
Neither would a Sliced Bread piece titled
“Top 10 Things Inter-Varsity People Hate
to Hear,” which includes the joke “Why
can’t Jesus eat M&M’s? (Because of the
holes in his hands.)” Even though they
decided to run it, the editors must have
been uneasy about that one — nearby they
ran a warning that the content of some of
their articles might be offensive. “If you are
easily offended,” they said, “don’t read
them!!!”
Student humor magazines have regularly challenged the line between the
acceptable and the offensive, and at any
given time, an item might make some
readers laugh and others object. Still, general cultural standards about what’s acceptable have changed considerably over the
decades. In early Carolina student magazines such as Tar Baby, for instance, racist
stereotypes often were considered funny.
More recently, the ludicrousness of such
stereotypes is more likely to be mocked.
The reason those who are offended
react the way they do also can change:
What shocked readers in the 1930s considered smutty — offensive simply because it
alluded to the existence of sex — can
today seem tame on those grounds but
profoundly demeaning to women. Case in
point: the Carolina Buccaneer, which got
going in 1924 and went up in flames —
