History of The Plague
Once upon a time, before any of us were born, a group of incompetent and incontinent college students wanted to start a comedy periodical. They called it The Plague and it wasn’t really all that funny.
But that’s okay, really, it wasn’t their fault. For you see, it was the ‘70s, 1978, and aside from Steve Martin nothing purposefully funny happened during the ‘70s. People then took things like disco and Nixon seriously, so who knows what they found funny—maybe children getting molested in hot air balloons gave them a hoot, we’re not here to judge.
So the magazine began. I think it was bimonthly or something. It was 20 pages, but those really cheap pages that they used to print the smutty comic books your Dad has in the basement on. There were a lot of hand-drawn cartoons and other such accoutrements. Most of what was drawn in The Plague, and elsewhere, was of a suggestive yet weird nature. Without the Internet, everybody, not just Gallatin students, used to get off on amateurly-inked cleavage.
The context was mostly black and white spoofs of popular and NYU culture, much like it is today. Then, however, they used lots of literary references and wrote long poems or made shockingly talented parodies of well-known oeuvres. They weren’t funny or anything, but they were very well-written and accompanied by a monochrome chick with a nice rack that maybe had something to do with whatever the hell they were writing about, Ivanhoe or Virginia Woolf or whatever crap people thought was clever.
Throughout the ‘80s the magazine slowly started to become funny. Some people think it’s because the editors started adding jokes, others cite the crack boom that allowed urban youth to flourish under Reaganomics.
Blah blah blah, and for the early ‘90s there was a lot of frat-based humor. Not the good kind where we make fun of the dozens of losers for not being able to make friends but selecting them arbitrarily and then all sleeping with the same three girls. No, the bad kind, where the frat guys were writing the jokes. On the bright side, they started to have color, and were even able to use real photographs. How they did this (moving pictures from film into magazine pages) without a USB cord escapes us now, but we can assume it… no, no I just really don’t know what they did. Sorcery?
Today, though, the reverie continues unabated at The Plague. Thanks to high-availability of the internet and cheap thrills, our editors have to work less hard than ever before! Quality-wise, we’re experiencing a boom never before seen in our long history, thanks to the elimination of the frat-humor element and a serious toning-down of the racism. (Although, if racism is your thing, go and be merry. Who are we to tell you how to live your life?)
Yes, everything’s great in the land of The Plague, except for one thing...
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