The Yale Record
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Yale Record is the campus humor magazine of Yale University. Established in 1872, it is America's oldest college humor magazine. Its mascot is "Old Owl," a congenial, possibly sozzled bird who tries to steer the staff towards a light-hearted appreciation of life and the finer things in it.
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 outside of New Haven — at prep schools, other college towns, and even New York City. 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 — even being mentioned in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels as one of the harbingers of the new, looser morality of collegians of that time.
Along with the Princeton Tiger Magazine, the Stanford Chaparral, and the Harvard Lampoon, 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 sex (or lack of it), schoolwork, and alcohol. This college humor style influenced — or in some cases led directly to — The New Yorker, Mad magazine, underground comics, The Second City, and Saturday Night Live.
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 The New Yorker. 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. Given this context, it is no wonder that The Record played an integral role in then-Editor-in-Chief Garry Trudeau's creation of his epochal strip Doonesbury.
Although the exceedingly poor economic conditions of New Haven in the 1970s and 1980s made things difficult for The Record, the rise of desktop publishing gave the magazine new life. This process was repeated on many campuses in the late 1980s, as a generation of people who grew up reading Mad magazine, National Lampoon and Spy magazine used Macintosh computers to revive sputtering college humor magazines. Now, with alumni money flowing and its 135th birthday looming, The Record is once again one of the preeminent college humor magazines being published today.
Famous Yale Record alumni include Garry Trudeau, Brandon Tartikoff, Philip Proctor and Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theatre, Yale President A. Whitney Griswold, Vincent Price, Robert Grossman, Peter Arno, Stephen Vincent Benet, Reginald Marsh, John Templeton, and Michael Gerber.
