"Old Owl", The Record's "mascot"
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Categories | Humor magazine |
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Founder | Edward Anthony Bradford James Heartt VanBuren Samuel J. Elder E.H. Lemis Henry Ward Beecher Howard |
Year founded | 1872, Yale University |
First issue | September 1872 |
Based in | New Haven, Connecticut |
Language | English |
Website | www |
The Yale Record is the campus humor magazine of Yale University. Founded in 1872, it became the oldest humor magazine in the world when Punch folded in 2002.
The Record is currently 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 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—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).
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.