An Exotic Drug 'Cocaine' Appears Popular
April 8, 2020 7:37 PM   Subscribe

 
Oh Christopher Cerf appears in this piece. I've been obsessed with his The World's Largest Cheese for decades, and it's basically not represented online hardly at all. It's one of the most intelligent-literary-humor-also-Lampoon piece of thing I have ever encountered.
posted by hippybear at 8:16 PM on April 8, 2020


And this article is amazing. I had never heard of this before, but it sounds like a total gas for all involved and for all who unknowingly encountered it. I love stuff like this. Thanks for posting!
posted by hippybear at 8:20 PM on April 8, 2020


Nobody was being paid and nobody was going to get credit, and there was never a better atmosphere of creativity and freedom and camaraderie. Where are you going to find those parameters again?
posted by clew at 8:35 PM on April 8, 2020 [3 favorites]


The (London) Times staff produced Not The Times during a similar late seventies strike.

Has anyone found copies of these parodies on-line?
posted by monotreme at 9:28 PM on April 8, 2020


Hmm, I know that when I was pretty young, like maybe early teens which would make it late 70s we had a parody newspaper like this, but I don't think it was the same one, and now I want to track it down, but I'm not sure I remember anything specific to help.
posted by tavella at 10:45 PM on April 8, 2020


National Lampoon did a Sunday paper for the city of Dacron Ohio.
posted by rochrobbb at 4:08 AM on April 9, 2020 [2 favorites]


I'm somewhat disappointed that they skipped over the actual production, printing, and distribution part to, Oh, everyone loved it, and what a lark it was!

It's all well and good to have a big party over at Plimpton's with everyone banging out jokes on old typewriters. But actually getting the thing printed and distributed to newsstands around New York - that doesn't just happen on its own.
posted by Naberius at 5:43 AM on April 9, 2020 [9 favorites]


This is a brutally accurate bit that continues to be super relevant about how the Times covers politics.

In one parody column, the writer, walking past a pile of skulls to interview Genghis Khan, praised his ability to “get things done.”
posted by entropone at 7:30 AM on April 9, 2020 [2 favorites]


I am mostly impressed that the joke of referring to sport as "Sprots" dates back at least to 1978.

I was derisively referring to "Sportsball" as early as 2000, but I'm sure it probably has antecedents from the Carter administration as well!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:04 PM on April 9, 2020


I also subscribed to The Onion back when it had a paper edition out of the University of Madison. It always seemed like it was an April Fool's edition of the AV Club that wasn't sure when to just take over the franchise, and sometimes you'd get the AV on the outer fold and sometimes the Onion.

But I agree with Naberius: The Onion's print production history is pretty clear. How the devil did the NYT get hundreds of thousands of copies to newsstands across a picket line?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:07 PM on April 9, 2020 [1 favorite]


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