What's So Funny? Playing The Devil’s Advocate

In the cheesy television sitcom that is any college campus, the offensive college editorial and the corresponding campus-wide blow-up is akin to the episode where the lead character “accidentally” sets up two dates with two different women at the same time. It’s a hackneyed, clichéd premise we’ve all seen before, and a pretty fair indication that the show is about to jump the shark.

And it looks like the University of Colorado at Denver is the latest Fonz: The Advocate, the university’s student-run paper, publishes yearly a satirical, fake-news April Fools’ Day issue (dubbed The Devil’s Advocate). It’s typically pretty clumsy, but for some reason, this year people lost their shit. Students rallied and protested, demanding the resignation of the editor.

The staff can come up with esoteric, politically correct bullshit explanations for why they wrote what they did, but the truth is that they just didn’t know what they were doing. Having been on the authoring end of many offensive pieces—including a student paper that pissed off my college—I can tell you that when you first start trying to write satire, you’re just writing shit that you think is funny.

Did the dumb jokes about minorities, bulimia, and rape piss you off? Sorry. I just thought it was funny.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Not everyone comes out the gates a Jon Stewart or a South Park or The Onion. You have to hone your craft, start somewhere, and oftentimes it’s an offensive college paper that provides that first experience. Had The Advocate penned clever, obviously fake, hilarious articles, there would never have been such an outcry by UCD students. Because good humor is it’s own justification; shitty humor gets a rougher going-over. And in that rough going-over everyone seems to have missed the fact that these were merely young humor writers trying to get their joke on, not their lynch. 

To put it another way: Is the college version of yourself the best embodiment of who you are as a person, the most polished version that you want to put out into the world? Of course not. You were a drunken goddamn mess in college. And that’s okay. College is about finding yourself, figuring out who you want to be and starting to take the steps toward becoming that person.

Some want to write humor to provoke and offend, to intrigue. These are called people who don’t like making money. Others want to feel self-righteous in college, to pretend they are saving the world by gathering signatures and making sure everybody walks on politically correct eggshells. These are called people who don’t like making money—that’s why they usually end up working for aptly titled non-profits. Neither group of people is at the top of its game in college; they’re simply learning by doing.

My humor paper was shitty? Well that march you planned in response wasn’t exactly Selma. But, you know what, we’re in college, so can we both just admit that we’re still learning our respective crafts?

The students you should be fearing, UCD paper writers and protestors, are the ones with their heads down in their LSAT and MCAT books. Those are the only ones who are going to make any money in the future, and thus pull the strings to decide what humor you get to write and where you get to protest. So if I were a UCD student, I’d either pick up one of those books myself, or befriend someone reading one. Because the write-the-humor-paper/get-offended-by-the-humor-paper storyline is as old as and as tired as print. And there are plenty of other, better TV shows you could be watching.