I’m as surprised as anyone that a story about the campus humor magazine ended up on our cover.
Sure, I remember a couple of issues of the Chaparral from my undergraduate days. One made me smile. One made me wince. (Come to think of it, those may have been the same one.) And when I talk to alums who are younger than I am, I detect a decreasing gradient of Chappie awareness. I’ve worked on campus for 25 years, and I’ve seen only one stack of new issues lying around. (Yes, of course I grabbed a copy, and yes, again, one joke merited a grin.)
So when the Chappies reached out to alert me to the publication’s 125th anniversary and accompanying commemorative book, I was envisioning a medium-size story. You know, somewhere between pages 26 and 37, alongside a backstage look at big-league batting practice, an entertaining profile of a scream queen, and a student-written comic starring a delightful duck.
Then senior writer Sam Scott immersed himself in the Chaparral archives. When he emerged, the history buff had unearthed a tale that reflects the evolution of concerns and mores from the end of the 19th century through the first quarter of the 21st, both at Stanford and in society at large. The early days, when an editor got busted for referring to Encina Hall proctors as spies and skunks. The years surrounding the two world wars, when highly sexualized content was in vogue; and then wasn’t; and then, boy (and I do mean boy), was again. A serious period of news and commentary as the Vietnam War raged and students found paths to protest. A reclamation of the comic format in the second half of the 1970s—not exactly an easy decade, but Chappies understand that we need humor to process the hard things.
The Chaparral has long been a campus crucible for students who wanted to try their hand at humor.
It’s also a story of community. The Chaparral has long been a campus crucible for students who wanted to try their hand at humor. Some of them went on to animate Cinderella or produce The Simpsons. Some of them became lawyers or bankers. Either way, they got to practice their sophomoric jokes on the Farm.
And it’s a story of publication. Although this is difficult to grasp in the age of the internet, early Chappies successfully sold copies of new issues to other students, first for 10 cents and then, quickly, for 15. As any publisher can tell you, inflation is real.
To that end, Stanford is reducing its print publication schedule from five times a year to four—joining the cadence of academic quarters, worldwide accounting systems, and the tilt of the Earth relative to the sun. (For those of you who can’t get enough publication history, we published quarterly from late 1981 through 1995.) Here’s the good news: Between the magazine, Stanfordmag.org, and the Loop email newsletter, we plan to tell the same number of stories. We’re just going to reduce the number of times we send you a bound copy of them. Our aim is undiminished: to keep you connected to the university and to one another.
Starting with a deeper dive than we anticipated into the history of the campus humor magazine. See if it makes you smile.
Kathy Zonana, ’93, JD ’96, is the editor of Stanford. Email her at kathyz@stanford.edu.
