PEOPLE UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT: Eugene Volokh offers libel advice to a student newspaper that runs satirical copy, unlabeled as satire, on its back page. Boy does that sound familiar! (Click here for the YFP‘s most recent back page ad–it’s great.)

Volokh’s points are all quite reasonable, so I won’t talk about them. I just want to relate some fun/scary anecdotes about the phenomenon of the back-page ad. In two cases that I can think of, somebody Didn’t Get The Joke…

1) A mid-90s back-page ad slamming “pedophilophobia,” using the typical language of the campus gay movement (“love is not a crime!”), garnered the editor a friendly phone call from the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Whoops.

2) The year before I was editor, we ran an ad playing off the tobacco lawsuits. We ran “Wanted”-style pictures of Joe Camel, Toucan Sam, Ronald McDonald, and some other sugary logo-beast (Tony the Tiger??). Basically the point was that if you want to ban Joe Camel because he appeals too much to kids (which was one of the proposals being tossed around), you should ban all these other fun characters who push sugar-loaded cereals and fatty foods. Only a few months later, Yale’s own Professor Kelly Brownell, fat-tax guru, stated (paraphrased from memory), “There is no essential difference between Joe Camel and Ronald McDonald”–so we should have a “sin tax” on fatty foods. Real World 1, Satire 0.