The Chaparral’s first joke was its name. In Stanford’s early days, trees loomed large on local mastheads. The student newspaper was called the Daily Palo Alto, a nod to the towering redwood El Palo Alto, immediately to Stanford’s north. The name of the school literary journal, the Sequoia, was similarly inspired. And depending on how you parsed it, the Palo Alto Live Oak, just off campus, doubled down on the arboreal admiration.
The founders of Stanford’s humor magazine considered calling their creation “Eucalyptus” before dropping their sights considerably. The resulting 10-page publication debuted on October 5, 1899, with a bespectacled jester—still the magazine’s mascot—on the cover and a title that must have struck some as just as foolish. Chaparral describes the scrubs, shrubs, and thickets that carpet California’s arid hillsides—a lowly collective that’s nearly the thematic opposite of a single, soaring tree. More than a century later, the self-deprecation still fits. “Stanford is the Tree. We’re this,” says Jim Suhre, ’88, a former Chaparral head editor, aka Old Boy. “It’s almost impossible to kill, becomes a tumbleweed, and always looks scruffy.” It can also, he might have mentioned, rub people the wrong way.
But the strongest parallel between the Chaparral and its namesake may be their hardiness. For more than 900 issues, the Chappie, to use its nickname, has survived suspensions, apathy, scorn, scandal, humorlessness, and societal upheaval to endure as one of the oldest humor magazines in the world (overlooking a few earnest years starting in the late ’60s). This fall, the Chappie turns 125, an occasion for ardent alums and active students to celebrate, with an October reunion and the publication of a nearly 8-pound, 500-page retrospective that’s somewhere between large coffee table book and small coffee table. Even its indulgent bulk is part joke. “Some of the youngsters were like, ‘Print is dead, print is dead, no one wants something on paper,’” says Suhre, the driving force behind the tome. “And every time someone would say something like that, I would add more pages.”
Behind his repartee is reverence. Suhre is a devotee of the motto found in the Chappie’s first issue and in its most recent one: “’Tis better to have lived and laughed than never to have lived at all.” The commemorative book is big because he thinks what the Chaparral represents is big—and underappreciated. “Humor is very important, and it’s totally being overlooked,” he says. “We’re all too serious now.”
Not that the Chaparral isn’t still cracking jokes. The quarterly doesn’t have the profile it did in the days when new issues were critiqued on the front page of the Daily and sold for 15 cents in the center of campus. Its 1,300 copies, typically 32 pages each, are now distributed around the Farm for free. “People are usually surprised to hear that we have a humor magazine,” says Aadya Joshi, ’25, who was one of last year’s Old Boys. Recruiting took a hit during the pandemic, but self-deprecation remained in ample supply. “Washed-up college humor magazine in search of new editor and writers, because the entire previous staff both graduated last year,” reads a fake Craigslist ad in the September 2022 issue. Two years later, the Chappie attracts a committed crew of about 25 students who relish comedy with a point. “Part of the job of humor and comedy and satire is to open up conversations about things that are difficult,” Joshi says.
Jester: Craig McGill
How funny the Chaparral is, or was, is obviously in the eye of a beholder. Did this writer guffaw at the October 1947 anal-retentive grading of the Gettysburg Address, in which the pretend professor begins by striking “Fourscore and seven years ago”(“Be explicit. Say ‘eighty-seven’”)? Like one who knows persnickety editors all too well. Did he snort out loud at the September 1983 mock application for the University of Southern California, which asks “Are you a football player? If ‘yes,’ please skip to the last line of this application”? Even more so for having just written about USC’s recruiting shenanigans a century ago. And did he nod at the June 2023 “Solution to the Israel-Palestinian Conflict” that runs out of ink before its wisdoms can unfold? With an appreciation for light handling of a heavy situation that still lands a serious point.
Did he shrug at plenty of other jokes, limericks, shaggy-dog stories, one-liners, satires, etc.? True as well.
Even the Chappie’s champions wouldn’t argue that it always—or even often—hits the mark. “We publish a lot of stuff,” says Joshi. “Some of it’s funny; some of it falls flat.” But the magazine is venerated by generations as a collaborative haven where they got to be funny, or at least comfortably fail in their attempts. “I found my family at the Chaparral,” says Karen Easterbrook, ’85, a former Chappie business manager. “It breeds fearlessness in you.” The Chaparral has been a campus crucible for those who “aspired to be funny,” as former Old Boy Bruce Handy, ’80, puts it in the book’s introduction. “It’s okay to be sophomoric if you’re a sophomore,” he writes. “Or sophomore adjacent.” Handy, now an author, editor, and journalist, says he’s happy to have had a place to get some of his worst mishits out of his system. “Grapes of Roth”—a Philip Roth–John Steinbeck mash-up—comes to mind. “Better to have done that at 20 than 40,” he says. If you can look back at your Chappie contributions without a wince, he says, you were doing college humor wrong.
Funny business
The Chappie hasn’t produced the professional comedy pipeline of the Harvard Lampoon—the acknowledged heavyweight of campus comedy rags—but there’s a long legacy of Chappie alums who’ve made a living in Hollywood on talents honed at the magazine. Among the earliest known luminaries were legendary Disney animators Frank Thomas, ’33, and Ollie Johnston, ’35, as well as Doodles Weaver, ’35, a mid-century radio and television star. Modern Chappies have pursued careers in screenwriting and producing, including Jay Martel, ’81, who won an Emmy for his work on the sketch comedy show Key and Peele, Josh Weinstein, ’88, a former showrunner for The Simpsons, and Carrie Kemper, ’06, whose credits include The Office and Silicon Valley.
“Ninety percent of what I learned at Stanford is from working on the magazine,” says Weinstein. (The former Old Boy’s favorite Chappie creation: an infusion of Nietzsche, the dark lord of philosophy, into the dopey comic strip Archie. Result: “Artzsche: America’s Favorite Teenage Nihilist.”) Plus, he points out, you don’t have to ply that knowledge in the funny business; you can instead be funny in business. “There are a lot of people who were on the Chappie who I think of like, ‘that’s the world’s funniest lawyer; that’s the world’s funniest investment banker.’”
One of the Chappie’s most enduring approaches has been to parody other publications. Long before desktop publishing, its artists turned out virtuoso imitations of other periodicals’ covers, from “Sports Frustrated” to “Lie,” a knockoff of Life, to its many, many riffs on the Stanford Daily. In 1960, the magazine turned its mimicry on one of its own advertisers, L&M Cigarettes, a mainstay of its back cover that had failed to keep current with its bills. “So, we employed the only weapon at our disposal—satire,” says Ray Funkhouser, ’60, MA ’65, PhD ’68, the Old Boy at the time. The resulting “L&N” parody ad touted the benefits of a “filthier cigarette” rather than a “filter cigarette.” The ad rep was unamused. “You no doubt were pleased with your clever-ness,” he wrote. “But you may also wonder why we don’t have your book full of national advertising. There is a connection.” Cigarette companies had held the Chappie’s back cover for 271 consecutive issues from 1929 to 1960. They would never do so again. It was no big loss, Funkhouser says. The spot went to a local jeweler who paid on time.
Cardinal grins
Brushing off advertisers was one thing. Chappies couldn’t so easily turn away from angry administrators. The dustups date back to 1906, when Old Boy Morris Oppenheim, Class of 1906, was placed on probation. (His transgression: calling Encina Hall proctors “spies” and “skunks” and refusing to apologize.) On April 17, 1906, the leaders of the Chaparral met in Meyers Pub in Palo Alto to form an organization independent from the university. Thus began the Hammer & Coffin Society, originally composed only of men (a women’s auxiliary was founded in 1938; the Hammer & Coffin proper wouldn’t accept women until 1978). It is still the owner and publisher of the magazine today. Its declaration of independence didn’t provide the magazine with any protection from nature’s wrath, however. A few hours after the founding meeting ended, the 1906 earthquake struck, wreaking havoc throughout the Bay Area and destroying the offices where the April issue of the Chappie had just been printed. It is the only one of the Chaparral’s 914 (and counting) issues that can’t be found.
Nor did autonomy shield the publication from detractors. In 1917, Old Boy Lansing Warren, Class of 1917, was removed by the men’s student council for what the Daily described as “incompetent judgment, which has on several occasions tended to injure the university and the Student Body.” One of Warren’s sins, apparently, was ridiculing Stanford president Ray Lyman Wilbur, Class of 1896, MA ’97, MD ’99; another was running a cartoon so offensive it was removed by razor blade from every copy of the March 1917 issue. By 1923, the pendulum had swung the other way. Old Boy Northcutt Ely, Class of 1924, JD ’26, crowed about personally using a stamp to blot out a naughty joke discovered after publication. “Such entertaining specks of smut,” he wrote, “are verboten in the columns of Chappy.”
His kind of restraint wouldn’t last. Sex was a subject often on Chappie minds. Sometimes, the topic was treated with subtle genius. Take the 1946 cartoon showing a Stanford student plucking pricklies from her sweater as she alternates between “he loves me” and “he loves me not,” a sly allusion to the campus cactus garden’s role as a lovers’ lane. Many times, subtext was in short supply. In 1951, a series of parody comic strips laden with double entendres—think “Little Organ Annie”—resulted in the suspension of the magazine and its editor for two months. “In my opinion, there is no reason why we can’t have a humor magazine that meets acceptable standards of good taste,” dean of students Donald Winbigler said. A decade later, the magazine was again in Winbigler’s sights, this time for its 1961 “Layboy” parody of Playboy. Its latest offense wasn’t sexual content—the administration had apparently given up that fight—but blasphemy. The issue included a satire of the Immaculate Conception that drew the ire of area Catholics, including the archbishop of San Francisco, John Joseph Mitty. Magazine and editor were again suspended. “If every time someone’s judgment is labeled faulty by the administration a first-rate campus institution is liquidated, we shall only be left with the second rate,” Old Boy Brad Efron, MS ’62, PhD ’64, protested. He who laughs last laughs best, however. Efron would go on to become a Stanford professor of statistics, a MacArthur fellow, and chair of the Faculty Senate.
By the end of the ’60s, the bigger threat to the Chaparral proved not to be sanction from above but societal change all around. In 1965, “Layboy Revisited,” featuring a San Francisco burlesque dancer—on the cover, with a jester lipsticked on her midriff; inside, topless—was reportedly the Chappie’s best-selling issue with some 6,500 copies sold. But two years later, an issue entitled “Legalize Spiritual Discovery and Pornography” received a cold reception. “If you feel a college humor magazine should contain a few mature and sophisticated stories that are not pervaded by a junior high school snickering about sex, then save your 50 cents, because the Chaparral doesn’t and maybe never will,” a Daily reviewer wrote. Then a sexed-up send-up of men’s adventure magazines fell flat, leaving the Chappie offices crowded with unsold copies. In a world of sexual revolution, civil rights battles, and war in Vietnam, the jokes had grown stale almost overnight.
A similar reckoning was occurring across the country, says V. Cullum Rogers, who runs MagazineParody.com and is writing a book on parody magazines. Beginning with the surge in university enrollment after World War I, college humor magazines had proliferated across the country, their numbers swelling into the hundreds. (The Hammer & Coffin Society would expand to a dozen chapters at campuses across the West before shrinking back to one.) This led to clashes with administrators, particularly when ex-GIs returned from World War II. “The mags’ typical attitude toward women was ‘the male gaze’ at its most bug-eyed,” Rogers says. Many were caught out by a change in attitudes. “Suddenly college humor just seemed like one of those things, like freshman beanies and curfews in women’s dorms and just old-fashioned stuff, that we moderns don’t have to put up with,” Rogers says. “It just became corny.”
But seriously
In the 1968–69 school year, the Chappie produced but a single issue. Desperate, the Hammer & Coffin Society gave the keys to senior Mike Sweeney, who recast the magazine as a radical newspaper. Humor was beside the point; the articles pushed for urgent change. Sweeney’s time in charge ended with the February 1970 ROTC issue, a polemic complete with gruesome photos of dead Vietnamese citizens, aimed at ending the military’s presence at Stanford. “We want to live the revolution,” he told the Daily. He was arrested the same month for spray painting “Vietnam” on a sign in front of the ROTC building. Then, in 1971, the Chappie transformed once more, into something akin to the alt-weekly Village Voice, where straight journalism rode shoulder to shoulder with politics, humor, and attitude. “We felt that we were keeping the Chaparral name alive and also that we were providing a different kind of journalism for the student body,” says Tina Swent Byrd, ’72, the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief. (“Old Boy” wasn’t used in this phase of the Chappie, but it has retroactively been applied to her; some female successors have referred to themselves as Old Girl, Old Bag, or Old Hag. “I liked the irony of a woman being an Old Boy,” Swent Byrd writes in the book. “Irony is, after all, part of the Chaparral tradition.”)
Still, the downward spiral continued. In July 1974, the ASSU froze the Chappie’s account and rekeyed its office after a $2,194 printing bill went unpaid. That October, the ASSU publications board declared that the magazine had ceased publishing. In response, staffer Mike Dornheim, ’75—a champion of the comic format—led a group of accomplices to San Francisco to print a barebones issue of the Chappie (nearby print shops had been warned against accepting such orders). The result, he acknowledged, was “cruddy,” but it made a point. How could it have ceased publishing if he had a new copy in his hand? In November 1974, the publications board acquiesced. The jester was back. Dornheim, who died in an auto accident in 2006, is revered in Chappie circles not only for resurrecting the magazine but for ending its detour into politics, journalism, and black-and-white newsprint, an era some old Chappies recall with disdain. Paul Cheney, ’86, one of the authors of the commemorative book, thinks a more informed attitude would be gratitude that people like Swent Byrd saved the magazine. “It was exactly what the readership wanted for that time,” he says. “Silliness itself was no longer sufficient.”
Play on nerds
In that debut issue, Dornheim and his co-conspirators narrowly averted tastelessness occasioned by an eerie coincidence. As they arrived at the San Francisco printer’s office, they heard a news flash that a body had been found in Memorial Church, a murder that would take four decades to solve. The going-to-press issue contained a piece about someone laughing themselves to death outside the church, which they hastily replaced. A few years later, the timing wasn’t so fortunate. On the morning of March 30, 1981, the Chappie started selling an issue with a story called “Who Shot R.R.?” It was a play on “Who Shot J.R.?,” a question then omnipresent in pop culture because the nighttime soap opera Dallas had ended a recent season with a cliffhanger depicting the shooting of its most famous character, J.R. Ewing. The R.R. in the Chaparral’s parody was President Ronald Reagan. An hour and a half after the issue went on sale, Reagan was wounded by gunfire from would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr. The Chappie story’s author, Jay Martel, spent the day on the phone answering questions from the Secret Service and journalists. “I was trying to explain to an AP reporter that it was a parody, and she just kept on going, ‘You mocked the assassination of a president,’ over and over again,” he says. He was most terrified of losing a new internship at Newsweek working for a bureau chief who was so close to Reagan he’d almost been press secretary. The journalist, however, got the joke—or ignored it.
Image: The Stanford Daily
Having served as Old Boy the previous year, Martel was familiar with the uncomfortable spotlight. By tradition, Chaparral newbies then strove to play a prank that would make the front page of the Daily. In 1980, seven Chappies gave the paper no choice. One of the pranksters followed a Daily staffer to the printer and swapped out a real front-page story with a photo about the tragic demise of the Stanford bowling team in an airplane crash: “Tragedy Strikes Bowling Team,” read the caption below a picture of seven “bowlers”—the Chappies themselves—grinning like Cheshire cats. The jokers left out a second phrase, “None Spared,” as too obvious a pun. They would have cause to regret their subtlety. They only belatedly found out Stanford had a club bowling team, whose members they were soon calling to apologize. Some readers were in tears. Some parents were in agony. The Daily was apoplectic. The students were given sealed punishments. And the Chaparral leaders, who had no foreknowledge of the prank, were pushed into penning a public contrition. “It may be the most difficult piece of writing I’ve ever been a part of, and that includes five rewrites of a terrible Mr. Mom sequel,” Martel wrote in the commemoration book. A less controversial prank followed three years later, when seven Chappies convened in darkness to turn the clock tower at the southeast corner of the Quad into a giant Mickey Mouse watch on the eve of its unveiling. School officials let the rodent remain for a few weeks. “We spent a lot of time looking up at our work, feeling very pleased with ourselves,” Trey Ellis, ’84, the Old Boy at the time, later recalled.
What’s funny now
Such pranks have mostly fallen out of the Chappie’s bag of tricks. In a world of ubiquitous video cameras, among other developments, calculations are different. “There’s no longer an atmosphere for campus pranks to happen,” Joshi says. “It’s much easier to get caught doing stuff.” Times change, in other words. And so does the Chaparral. The magazine’s first cover, in 1899, had an inset image of a student in distress in a bath. The caption, “There was a roomer afloat in Encina last night,” is a punny reference to “tubbing,” a terrifying practice in Stanford’s early days of hazing freshmen by half-drowning them. It’s a joke about as unlikely to appear in a modern Chaparral as the 1986 cover that showed a cloud-bound Zeus contemplating a distant space shuttle with a lightning bolt in his hand. Six weeks earlier, the space shuttle Challenger had exploded 73 seconds into flight, killing all seven aboard. The piece in which the ink runs out before the writer can establish a roadmap to peace in the Middle East ran several months before the Israel-Hamas war began. It probably wouldn’t have run afterward, Joshi says. “There’s a line between making fun of a situation in a way that draws attention to the problem and then there’s being crass and being rude about a sensitive topic, and that’s the line we’re trying to toe.”
The Chappie can still throw elbows. “Horton Hears a Hoover,” from 2022, satirizes the Hoover Institution in perfect Seussian rhythm, and a fake PSA calls out the Bitcoin set in merciless textspeak. “If you or a loved one think crypto is a good idea, seek help,” it says. “Ur dumb.” But in keeping with today’s sensibilities, there’s clearly more careful consideration of identity-based jokes. In 2022, when the Chaparral reran the fake USC application from four decades earlier, the form still showed an undue interest in whether the applicant was a football player (or had a house in Palm Springs), but it eliminated, for example, a question that characterized the applicant as an enslaver.
‘There’s a line between making fun of a situation in a way that draws attention to the problem, and then there’s being crass and being rude about a sensitive topic, and that’s the line we’re trying to toe.’
One of the challenges Suhre faced in creating the book was how to treat such material. The book is a mix of celebration and history, including some history presented without celebration. It’s a line-drawing exercise in which, Suhre acknowledges, not all readers (including the various Chappies he consulted) would draw the same lines. For example, he left out jokes that were made at the expense of Black people, deeming them not only offensive but also peripheral to the Chappie’s story. But he printed images of every Chaparral cover, including those that featured drawings of the Stanford Indian (the university’s mascot from 1930 to 1972), on the grounds that they were more central to both the magazine’s and the university’s past and could not be ignored. Sexism required an additional calculation. There’s a leering vibe in a lot of old Chappies that leaves many readers cold. “I can’t read more than a paragraph without getting sort of growly about how things used to be,” says Easterbrook, the business manager from the mid-’80s. And yet, Suhre writes, to have cut it all from the book would have been nearly impossible. “[T]he honest truth is that if you left out sexist material that objectified the female body, and/or items that were just a whole lot of horny male angst, there would be no Chaparral history.”
Jester: Craig McGill
Loving the Chaparral, as a result, doesn’t necessarily mean loving all the Chaparrals. Easterbrook’s allegiance to the Chappie begins with the Dornheim era, when she believes more modern values started to take root. Joshi, too, says she and other female staffers sometimes cringe at older issues, but that the Chaparral has increasingly become home to women as well as students of color. “I think for the first time in Chappie history, it’s not majority white,” she says. She also points out that it’s hardly the only institution that has changed with the times. “You could say the same thing about the Chaparral as you could say about the university,” she says. “Stanford has done some pretty messed-up things, but we still choose to go to school here because, as an institution, it continues to evolve and grow and be self-aware.” So, too, the campus humor magazine: “What makes this space so incredible and so endearing also is that the writing has grown with the times.” No joke.
Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford. Email him at sscott3@stanford.edu.
The reproductions accompanying this article are the property of, and appear by permission of, The Hammer & Coffin Corporation, publisher of the Stanford Chaparral since 1906, Nothin Shall Soften, Inc., and T’is Better To Have Lived and Laughed Than Never To Have Lived At All, LLC. All rights reserved.
