We are not amused
Confessions of a student journalist part 1
“Prepare for rhyme—I’ll publish right or wrong:
Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.”
—George Gordon Lord Byron
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
“Glen, we have a problem,” said the copy editor. In his hand was the latest instalment of my satirical horoscope. It was covered in red ink.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Lots,” he replied. He pointed to the first line:
Life in love’s doghouse isn’t really so bad; at least the dog never rejects you.
“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.
“The implication of bestiality.”
“Oh, come on. It’s harmless.”
He shrugged. “I agree,” he said. “But some of the other editors object to it, so it can’t run unless you lose the bestiality.” I reluctantly changed the line to a less bestial “at least the dog still loves you,” and we moved on to the next offending item:
Aries had better be ready to do some “spelunking” tonight, or he may run the risk of having his stalactite snapped off.
“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.
“Again, I don’t personally have a problem with it, but—”
“Glen, can I speak with you please?” came a voice from behind us. Oh no. It was Andrea, ringleader of the humourless clique of leftist vegetarians who controlled the paper’s editorial content. She was one of my least favourite people on the planet, and not because she was leftist or vegetarian. I couldn’t stand her because—well, you’ll see.
“You must have led a sheltered life if you think this is funny,” she snapped, angrily brandishing my column.
“So what’s wrong with the spelunking joke?” I asked.
She looked at me peevishly. “It’s a joke about castration.”
“So?”
“Glen,” she sternly lectured, “I know that castration humour is popular right now in the cultural mainstream, but that doesn’t make it acceptable, especially for a progressive, alternative publication. It’s disgusting, and the piece isn’t running unless you take it out.”
There was nothing I could do. Sighing, I changed the line to this:
Aries had better be ready to do some ‘spelunking’ tonight, or there will be... consequences.
My castration joke now castrated, we considered my next affront against common decency:
Try to keep track of family affairs—incest can be a real juggling act sometimes.
“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.
“It’s disgusting,” Andrea said. “I can’t believe you’re making a joke about—about the rape and abuse of children.”
“Um, I’m not talking about abusing children, I’m talking about incest.”
She gasped in surprise, as if I were being deliberately obtuse.
I stared at her. If I weren’t a shy newcomer with only three weeks’ writing experience, I would have shouted, “Has it occurred to you that consenting adults can engage in incest? You’re reading a lot into the joke that isn’t there—it’s just a dumb pun, for crying out loud! Piss off!”
But alas, I was a shy newcomer with only three weeks’ writing experience, so I stayed silent. The line was cut, and we continued:
Unique proposition from paperboy has you investigating certain legal concerns.
“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.
“It’s disgusting. Another joke about the sexual abuse of children.”
“No it isn’t,” I replied. “Just think logically. The paperboy can’t be proposing something obviously illegal, like underage sex, because then a review of the law wouldn’t be necessary. The paperboy is making an unusual proposal that may or may not be legal.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Horoscopes are supposed to be vague.”
Well, that defence didn’t pass muster. With a heavy heart, I changed “paperboy” to a less provocative “vacuum cleaner salesman” and we moved on. Thankfully, Andrea and her cohorts did not object to my favourite line:
Shift in attention from Venus to Uranus signals change in sexual orientation.
But this wasn’t a big surprise, since most of the editors were queer and it played to their sensibilities. But this bit was not so fortunate:
You won’t receive any applause for your pathetic performance in bed tonight, but you will get a good dose of clap.
“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.
“Venereal disease isn’t funny,” she spat. “Thousands of people die every day from venereal diseases, and it’s—it’s problematic and regressive for us to make jokes about it.”
“I’m not making fun of people dying of venereal diseases. I’m talking specifically about gonorrhea, which is easily curable. It’s really just a pun on the word ‘clap’.”
“It’s offensive,” she said with finality. Then we moved on to the most heinous joke of all:
Oh dear. It seems your vow of celibacy has left you alone, frustrated and sexually deprived this Valentine’s Day. Thank God your church has a daycare!
“This—” Andrea visibly shook, barely keeping her voice down. “This is the most disgusting thing I have ever—”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“What’s—? What’s—? You’re explicitly advocating the molestation of infant children!”
“No I’m not, it’s irony! I’m attacking the church’s history of child abuse!”
Almost shouting now, Andrea laid into me once again about my ignorance, corrupt morals and sick sense of humour. I just sat there, quietly shocked. Now my feelings were genuinely hurt. Few things disturbed me more than the endless revelations of child abuse in the Catholic church, and I thought the bit communicated my contempt perfectly. But as far as Andrea could see with her infallivision, I was encouraging the abuse of defenceless children, and the joke was at their expense.
In the end, all arguments were useless. I was forced to declaw and defang the joke:
Oh dear. It seems your vow of celibacy has left you alone, frustrated and sexually deprived this Valentine’s Day. Investigate major appliances.
And so, the rising tide of institutionalized sexual abuse in the Catholic church was momentarily halted, thanks to Andrea’s heroic intervention in the joke astrology column of an obscure student newspaper. And unfortunately for me, she was just getting started. By the end of the day, Andrea and the editorial clique handed me standing content guidelines that would chill any novice gag writer to the bone:
NO bestiality.
NO incest.
NO castration.
NO cannibalism.
NO necrophilia.
Is nothing sacred?
Such was a typical early-1990s afternoon at The Peak, the student rag at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University. It was a dark time. A virulent plague of politically-correct zealotry was sweeping North America, and most of our editors were acute sufferers.
They displayed all the classic symptoms: severe irony deficiency, intense suspicion of all things white, male, or heterosexual (heaven help you if you were all three), and an irresistible compulsion to suppress all thought that didn’t conform to their radical notions of social progress.
Every week, the Peak clique sat in a sanctimonious circle and vetted my horoscope with extreme prejudice, scouring it for jokes that could conceivably offend anyone, especially themselves.
And I wasn’t the only target of their righteous wrath. In her finest moment, Andrea unsuccessfully lobbied to prevent our October 31st issue from having any Hallowe’en imagery—no skulls, no jack-o’-lanterns, no witches on broomsticks—because one of her friends had allegedly suffered Satanic ritual abuse and such images would upset her.
The unbelievable intolerance of these fanatics tore at the underpinnings of my sanity. It seemed perfectly obvious to me that the jokes in my humble horoscope could not possibly be as harmful to society as the mentality that was censoring them.
What the hell was going on at The Peak? Weren’t campus newspapers supposed to be entertaining and iconoclastic—to think the unthinkable, to print the unprintable, to skewer respectability and good taste just as vigorously as the politics and prejudices of the day?
Verily, things looked bleak for this budding young troublemaker. But then, one blackest night, as I lay awake lamenting this gruesome predicament, something amazing happened.
God spoke to me.
(And since God doesn’t exist, this happens very rarely indeed.)
“For the record, I liked the daycare joke,” God said. “Those Catholics are royally screwing up. I’m glad somebody’s saying something.”
“Thanks, God.”
“You’ve got real potential, son. It pains me to see those nitwits smothering you like that.”
“I’m doing my best, God, but they’ve got me on a pretty short leash.”
“Let me give you a piece of advice, my chosen one. Screw those miserable imbeciles. Don’t let them get in the way of your development as a writer. Just write whatever the frick you want, and do whatever it takes to get it in print.”
“Yes, God. I shall.”
“Good boy. I’ll see you in Hell.”
At that moment, I knew what my role at The Peak had to be. What that torpid, pretentious rag needed was a dedicated heretic—someone who would heroically fight to vanquish the dark forces of stupidity, hypocrisy and good taste, both inside and outside The Peak’s gates.
Someone who would vex the left and right with equal enthusiasm, and give the center a good thrashing in the process. Someone who was prepared to afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted, comfort the comfortable, afflict the afflicted, and run close-up photographs of his/her penis in the paper as often as possible.
And that someone, dear reader, was me.
And so, I quietly went to war against the foul cabal of tight-assed tyrants who held the paper in their thrall. In the beginning, victories were few and far between. For example, when the editors cut another favourite line—
A sudden outbreak of cannibalism disrupts otherwise amicable business meeting.
—I managed to sneak it into print a few weeks later. In their honour, I considered changing it to—
A sudden outbreak of cannibalism disrupts otherwise amicable vegetarian pot luck.
—but in the interests of personal safety I stifled the urge.
I soon learned the virtue of outlasting my rivals. Within a few months, the leftist vegetarians moved on, editorial policy relaxed, and bestiality, incest, castration, cannibalism, and necrophilia were welcomed back into my column like old friends.
Freed from its shackles, The Imfallible Horoscope became the most-read feature in the paper—not because it was brilliant (although, to be fair, it usually was), but because most everything else in The Peak was unreadable, preachy crud.
A few years later I launched a new column, Wasting My Youth, a shameless autobiographical wankfest that only saw my fame and madness grow.
In retrospect, I may have been a bit too good at outlasting my rivals. By the time I finally graduated from SFU and left The Peak, I’d been at the paper for almost a decade—from the politically-correct heyday of the early 1990s to the post-9/11 chill of the early 2000s.
I’d survived countless repressive cliques and risen to the paper’s top editorial position. I’d authored hundreds of columns and articles, earning myself a reputation as one of the most controversial students at the university.
And I’d become, undeniably, one of the greatest student journalists in the history of forever.
Dear reader, you hold in your hand the distilled debris of one man’s ridiculously long career in student journalism—a selection of favourite bits from my two columns, augmented with incriminating photographs, letters from readers, and epic tales of office politics that will make you recoil in fear and loathing.
It’s a compendium that has something for everyone, and something else for everyone else—and I’m so certain you’ll enjoy it, I’m not offering a money-back guarantee. No one will want a refund, so why bother?
Enough introductory blither! Sit back, loosen any constrictive clothing, and enjoy the euphonic cacophony that is Wasting My Youth. •
Completed in 2004 as the introductory chapter of the Wasting My Youth book.
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