What is black, blue and boring? The Black and Blue Jay (BNBJ) comic literary magazine this season is bruised beyond recognition. We can barely remember the genuinely funny publication of years past.
In its place is a crass, vulgar and grating husk of its former self. With $2,703 in funding from the Student Activities Commission (SAC) for its last issue, we expect the magazine to aspire to a higher standard. Instead we get 32 pages of inane, childish banter that uses bad taste to offend minorities, women and intellectuals.
Granted, the BNBJ makes a point of its own bad taste. Unfortunately, it also violates the cardinal rule of humor magazines: it's not funny.
Even in its least subtle aspects, humor is a delicate construction. Throwing out vulgar words and blatant political incorrectness doesn't automatically comprise humor. Neither do crude sex fantasies about what chemistry professors do the night before lecture: "As the night goes on, he gradually loses all his clothes and ends up slathering baby oil all over his body and sliding into the wall repeatedly. He wakes up the next morning lying on a bed he's fashioned out of the carcasses of dead lab rats."
The best humor pulls from a bit of reality. However, the BNBJ seems to think that readers prefer a contrived, sordid sort of humor. They create ludicrous situations which nevertheless fail at being funny: situations in which Mayor Michael Bloomberg files down his teeth, keeps President Brody on a bejeweled leash under the table, and bans smoking in New York City because he resents "seeing people with things in their mouths other than my d--k."
Yes, the Jaytorade advertisement on the back cover was funny. It does indeed take a great mind to make a joke about urine.
In his opening note, the self-proclaimed Editor-in-and-out-of-Chief-sometimes-Chef David Estrakh writes that "It's useless to have a philosophy for comedy. You should just be funny." Well, the magazine's over-the-top vulgarity is a philosophy in itself, and it clearly doesn't work. The product of this philosophy? "7) Poop. 8) Haha." We aren't laughing.
Unlike the BNJB, which has unceremoniously fallen from grace, we at the News-Letter have been proudly upholding our tradition of un-funniness since 1896.
