The Yale Record

Founded in 1872, it is the oldest humor magazine in the United States.

The Yale Record

"Old Owl", The Record's "mascot"
Editor in Chief	Dom Alberts
Online Editor in Chief	Tara Bhat
Chair	Natasha Weiss
Publisher	Andrew Cramer
Categories	Humor magazine
Founder	Edward Anthony Bradford James Heartt VanBuren Samuel J. Elder E.H. Lemis Henry Ward Beecher Howard
Founded	1872, Yale University
First issue	September 1872
Based in	New Haven, Connecticut
Language	English
Website	www.yalerecord.org

The Record is currently^[when?] published eight times during the academic year and is distributed in Yale residential college dining halls and around the nation through subscriptions. Content from the magazine is made available online and entire issues can be downloaded in .pdf form.

The Record began as a weekly newspaper, with its first issue appearing on September 11, 1872. Almost immediately, it became a home to funny writing (often in verse form), and later, when printing technology made it practical, humorous illustrations. The Record thrived immediately, and by the turn of the century had a wide circulation^{[weasel words]} outside of New Haven—at prep schools, other college towns, and even New York City.^{[citation needed]}

As Yale became one of the bellwethers of collegiate taste and fashion (especially for the younger universities looking East), so too The Record became a model—F. Scott Fitzgerald referred to the magazine as one of the harbingers of the new, looser morality of collegians of that time. But it wasn't just laughs The Record was serving up—during the 1920s, The Record ran a popular speakeasy in the basement of its building at 254 York Street (designed by Lorenzo Hamilton and completed in 1928).

Early 20th century

Along with the Princeton Tiger Magazine (1878), the Stanford Chaparral (1899), and the Harvard Lampoon (1876), among many college humor magazines, The Record created a wide-ranging, absurdist style of comedy which mixed high-culture references with material dealing with the eternal topics of schoolwork, alcohol, and sex (or lack thereof). Comedy first published in the magazine was re-printed in national humor magazines like Puck and Judge.

In 1914, J.L. Butler of The Yale Record and Richard Sanger of The Harvard Lampoon created the first annual banquet of the College Comics Association, which drew representatives from 14 college humor magazines to New Haven. The college humor style influenced—or in some cases led directly to—the Marx Brothers, The New Yorker, Playboy, Mad magazine, underground comics, National Lampoon, The Second City, and Saturday Night Live.

The character "Whit" (pronounced "wit") in the Sinclair Lewis story Go East, Young Man drew caricatures for the Yale Record.

Mid-20th century

 

From the 1920s to the 1960s, The Record placed special emphasis on cartooning, which led many of its alumni to work at Esquire magazine and especially The New Yorker. Record cartoonists during this time period included Peter Arno, Reginald Marsh, Clarence Day, Julien Dedman, Robert C. Osborn, James Stevenson, William Hamilton and Garry Trudeau.

From 1920 through the 1940s, many Record staffers and alums contributed to College Humor, a popular nationally distributed humor magazine. Additionally, comedy first published in The Record was re-printed in national humor magazines like Life and College Humor.

By the late 1940s, the magazine's ties to The New Yorker were so strong that designers from that magazine consulted on The Record's layout and design.

By the 1950s, the Record had established the "Cartoonist of the Year" award, which brought people like Walt Kelly, the creator of Pogo, to New Haven to dine and swap stories with the staff.

In the early 1960s, cartoons and comic writing from the magazine were regularly re-printed in Harvey Kurtzman's Help!, a satirical magazine that helped launch the careers of Monty Python's Terry Gilliam, R. Crumb, Woody Allen, John Cleese, Gloria Steinem and many others.

 

In the late 1960s, the magazine played an integral role in editor-in-chief Garry Trudeau's creation of his epochal strip Doonesbury. Trudeau published the pre-syndication Doonesbury collection Michael J. (1970) through The Yale Record. In addition to editing the Record, Trudeau (and Record chairman Tim Bannon, basis of Doonesbury attorney T.F. Bannon of Torts, Tarts & Torque) organized Record events such as a successful Annette Funicello film festival, a Tarzan film festival (with guest Johnny Weissmuller) and a Jefferson Airplane concert featuring Sha Na Na.

Recent years

The 1970s and 1980s are known as the "Dark Ages" amongst Record staffers. Economic conditions in New Haven were abysmal and despite its impressive pedigree, The Record sputtered along, self-destructed and was revived numerous times throughout this period. Boards were convened and issues were published intermittently in 1971-1981, 1983, and 1987.

Then in 1989, Yale students Michael Gerber and Jonathan Schwarz relaunched The Record for good. Their more informal, iconoclastic version of The Record proved popular, and a parody of the short-lived sports newspaper The National garnered national media attention. Gerber also created an ad hoc advisory board from Record alumni and friends, including Mark O'Donnell, Garry Trudeau, Robert Grossman, Harvey Kurtzman, Arnold Roth, Ian Frazier, Sam Johnson and Chris Marcil.

In the fall of 1992, Record contributor Ryan Craig founded popular Yale tabloid the Rumpus.

While The Record continues^[when?] to publish paper issues, the magazine began publishing web content on April 1, 2001.

Each issue of the current magazine features a particular theme. Aspects of the magazine include:

• Snews - One-liners in the form of headlines.
• Mailbags - Humorous letters to the editor, historical figures, or inanimate objects.
• The Editorial - Written by the editor in chief of the magazine each issue, giving a brief overview of the contents and making of the issue.
• Cartoons - Captioned, "New Yorker style" cartoons that hail back to the magazine's early beginnings.
• Lists and Features - Staff generated content pertinent to the magazine's theme.

Parodies

From time to time, The Record publishes parodies. These include (but are not limited to):

Throughout the year, the Record invites notable figures from the world of comedy to "Master's Teas", informal interviews hosted by the Record in conjunction with residential colleges, at which tea is, in fact, not even served upon request. While residential colleges frequently organize Master's Teas, The Yale Record is known for its humorous ones. Guests have included:

• 1902: The Yale Record pranked temperance activist Carrie Nation. Pretending to be a Yale temperance group, they brought her to Yale. During her visit, they took a picture with her. At the time, nighttime indoors photography required turning off all artificial lights before exposing a photographic plate and illuminating the scene with a single flashbulb. However, in the darkness, the students from The Record pulled out a beer stein and other props to create the impression of what the Yale Daily News would characterize as a "Bacchanalian orgy."
• 2015: The Yale Record hosted a mock protest on Broadway. The students called for Yale administrators to bring a second Kiko Milano store. “When we heard that Yale had decided to replace the affordable food store up on Broadway with Kiko Milano and Emporium DNA, we were really excited to have the chance to buy more luxury products at Yale because that was really hard before,” Gertler said.

 

For over a century, the mascot of the Record has been "Old Owl", a congenial, largely nocturnal, 360-degree-head-turning, cigar-smoking bird who tries to steer the staff towards a light-hearted appreciation of life and the finer things in it.

"Old Owl" is a Cutty Sark connoisseur of some repute and enthusiasm. In artists' sketches, he is often portrayed as anthropomorphic.

The Yale Record of the late nineteenth century chronicled much of the birth of American football:

 

• The Yale Record and the Nassau Literary Magazine of Princeton printed the only accounts of the first Yale-Princeton game (1873), the first game played using the Football Association Rules of 1873. These were the first consolidated rules in American football; before this, each of the handful of colleges that had football teams played by its own set of rules.
• The Yale Record documented the organization and playing of the first Harvard-Yale game (1875). Yale proposed the game. Harvard, which had just rejected an offer to join the association of soccer-playing colleges, accepted the challenge, on condition that the game be played with what were essentially rugby rules. These were the rules used by Harvard, different to the rules of the other colleges. Yale agreed to this condition and was soundly defeated. In reflecting on this crushing defeat, one Record editor blamed the loss on Yale's willingness to adopt the "concessionary rules", complaining that Yale "should not have given so much to Harvard."
• The Yale Record documented the creation of the Intercollegiate Football Association in 1876. The Harvard-Yale game of 1875 ushered in a national shift from the soccer form to the rugby form of football. Within a year, Princeton had adopted the rugby rules, and in the fall of 1876, Columbia joined Princeton and Harvard to form the Intercollegiate Football Association, which officially adopted English rugby rules. Although Yale agreed to adopt English rugby rules and played Harvard, Princeton and Columbia, they did not join the association as they favored a game with eleven rather than fifteen players, as well as points allowed only for kicked goals.
• The Yale Record documented the creation of the first American football championship. The Intercollegiate Football Association created the first championship game, which was played between Princeton and Yale on Thanksgiving Day in 1877. The teams tied to share the first national championship.
• The Yale Record documented Walter Camp's innovations in rules and scoring, notably the reduction of fifteen players to eleven, the establishment of the line of scrimmage and the snap, as well as the creation of downs.

According to David Wilton, author of Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends (2009), The Yale Record is responsible for coining the term "hot dog":

There are many stories about the origin of the term hot dog, most of them are false. Let us start with what we know. The first known use of the term is in the Yale Record of October 19, 1895...The reason why they are called hot is obvious, but why dog? It is a reference to the alleged contents of the sausage. The association of sausages and dog meat goes back quite a bit further. The term dog has been used as a synonym for sausage since at least 1884...

The magazine published its own history of The Yale Record/"hot dog" connection in its April 1998 issue.

 

Bladderball was a game traditionally played by students at Yale, between 1954 and 1982, after which it was banned by the administration.

It was created by Philip Zeidman as a competition between The Yale Record, the Yale Daily News, The Yale Banner and campus radio station WYBC. It was eventually opened to all students, with teams divided by residential college.

Notable Yale Record alumni include (but are not limited to):

Guest contributors

Guest contributors to The Record have included:

• Caricature
• Cartoon
• College humor magazines
• Humor magazines
• Parody
• Political satire
• Satire
• Sick comedy

• The Yale Record
• Yale Fun: A Book of College Humor in Poetry, Pictures and Prose, Chosen with Loving Care from the Yale Record of the Past Eight Years; Conceived in the Sanctum, Founded on Foam, and Dedicated to the Humorous Faculty, R. S. Peck, 1902