Ampersand

Editorial

When we started this two years ago, we had a lot of neat and good ideas about the Ampersand. We were excited and full of youngful ambition. We wanted to create something shockingly different. Something alarmingly different. Our motto in those early days was "Imitation Never, Innovation Now, Comedy Now!" We would have long talks about how we wanted to take the ‘Me’ out of Comedy and put the ‘We’ back in Wesleyan Comedy! 

Now that all is said and done, we are more or less satisfied with what we have accomplished. As we put the finishing touches on our final issue, we thought that we might take a moment to look at where we started, where we ended up, and how we got from one to the other one where we ended up. 

Initially, we were a little unsure of ourselves. We were scared that if we changed things too drastically we would alienate the page’s built-in audience. Unlike freedom in that famous Janis Joplin song, we actually had something left to lose. The first big change that we made was to redesign the look of the page in order to make it stand out from the rest of the Argus. This is not because we were embarrassed to be connected with the paper, but only because we wanted to separate ourselves from it in every way so that people didn’t associate us with mediocrity. 

The next challenge we faced was to rethink the kind of comedy that appeared on the page. The previous editor had written mostly fake news stories. Often he took current events and hilariously recast them in a Wesleyan context. We tried to follow suit, but our initial stories on "Science Tower Bombing Leaves Campus Shell-Shocked" and "Wesleyan Students Celebrate the Opening of Welseyan Holocaust Museum" were met with tepid response. So we decided to scrap that and to write to our strengths: how-to guides and time-lines! 

Our predecessor had also used big headlines and photographs to cut down on the amount of writing required. We, on the other hand, believed that we should always write as much as possible. We feared that readers might be intimidated by huge pages full of text, though, so we designed a system whereby we could break articles up into bite-size "laugh nuggets," each of which would have a sub heading and could be "joke eaten individually." We got the idea from some friends of ours who were saying that they’d always prefer lots and lots of really small pizzas  over one really big one that wasn’t cut into slices or anything. Three out of four of them would also rather be able to fly than to become invisible. 

The problem was that we didn’t know if people liked our writing. We were not getting very much direct feedback. For a while we included a series of race, weight, and cancer themed jokes in an attempt to get people mad at us. We figured that if people were pissed off, at least we knew they were reading the page. We saw the flaw in that theory, however, when we realized that we didn’t really didn’t care whether or not we were read by the black, sick, and chronically obese (I mean, whoa there fatty!) We also took to tapping phones and reading e-mails, desperately searching for any Amper-related comments. And by the way, Sarah Lessinger has been screwing some Middletown guy. And she takes it from behind. And her T.A. session has been moved to Thursday. 

Once we felt secure that people were reading the page, we set out to establish a consistent identity. We wanted there to be "Amper jokes" that we could always fall back on and that people would always associate with us. We eventually settled on awkward metaphors, Hitler jokes, and grammatically incorrect sentences that repeated themselves. The consistency that these jokes provided helped us to build a solid fan base. It was like we were both Hitler, gradually winning over a skeptical
German public with our comedic themes that kept coming back and specific jokes that kept coming back. 

Recently, though, we began to feel that we had gotten a little formulaic. Sitting down and writing an Amper had become as easy as 1-2-pie! So we started setting up little challenges for ourselves. Challenges like having to write in a voice other than our own, or having to come up with a lot of nicknames. These were challenges, we must say, that we met like two Hitlers, meeting the challenge of whether or not we could kill lots of Jews and lots of Jews.