During their first year as roommates at UCLA, Cory Fischer and Joel Abramovitz had a dream: to get students stressed by politics and the anxieties of academic competition to stop taking themselves so seriously.
Out from the haze of their early undergraduate dream emerged The Flying Squirrel, a twisted comedy paper satirizing campus and international culture that is putting its fifth issue out this week.
“We saw a need on campus to get people laughing at themselves more,” said Fischer, a fifth-year electrical engineering student.
Political correctness and prestigious front-page bylines are the lowest priorities for the approximately 12-member crew that collaboratively writes the paper’s articles, said Abramovitz, a fifth-year anthropology and Jewish studies student.
The group of creative writers meets almost every Wednesday night in Haines Hall to develop and write story ideas together, Abramovitz said.
Fischer jokingly said laughing is discouraged at the meetings because it increases the chances that writers will spill brandy and cigar ashes on their evening clothes.
The paper’s satirical articles, which are also online, have ranged from covering UCPD testing alternative medieval-age weaponry against students to Iraq’s enthusiastic attempt to celebrate President’s Day.
Though there are no official archives set aside for student publications made independent of Associated Students UCLA, Fischer said the writers found themselves combating a long tradition of short-lived comedy papers at UCLA that goes back further than the days when UCLA alumnus Harry Shearer wrote for The Penis Mightier than the Sword in the 1960s.
Through discussions with professors and other students, Fischer said he found that about every five years there is an independent group of students who try starting up a new comedy newspaper, but then they disappear.
Several other campus magazines followed, published both independently and dependently of UCLA.
But Christopher Bates, the Management Information Systems manager for ASUCLA Student Media who has studied and worked on the UCLA campus for 14 years, said Student Media has not had a humor magazine since he has been here.
This is in stark contrast to campuses such as UC Berkeley, where a student election starting today includes a fee referendum aimed at sustaining the funding for its comedy paper The Heuristic Squelch which was created in 1991, according to its Web site.
The Flying Squirrel has successfully published about 3,000 copies of each issue to be distributed on Bruin Walk, but funding issues leave the permanence of the paper, as with so many of the past, in question.
One effort to make The Flying Squirrel an ASUCLA-funded publication has failed, but they have not given up hope on it happening in the future, Abramovitz said.
“What’s difficult about (becoming an ASUCLA publication) is that most of those publications have well-formed identity-based groups behind them,” Abramovitz said. “It’s a challenge for us because we don’t do events that allow us to gather support ““ we just write.”
Sarah Carter, a third-year psychology and anthropology student who joined in September 2006, said the publication offered her a writing opportunity she could not find anywhere else on campus.
Carter said she had been looking for an outlet to write and found it in the close, creative and comfortable setting of The Flying Squirrel’s writing staff.
“Cory and Joel are very organized and dedicated. They had a plan for it,” Carter said.
After Fischer and Abramovitz graduate, however, Carter knows the responsibility of sustaining the paper for next year will partly fall to her, the remaining members, and students they can manage to recruit.