We’re not laughing with you.

SUCKAZ, WE SOOOO GOTCHYA!!!

So, you should actually pick the DP today, because it’s the best issue of the year: the joke issue! We Spinsters decided to succumb to delicious temptation of peer pressure and write a bunch of funny/hokey/smartass articles as ourselves–you know–to blend in.

I know what you’re thinking: funny/hokey/smartass writing, why is this day different than any other day (sorry, the Matzah’s getting to my head)? Well, you see our dear readers, today, our posts don’t actually have to be true.

Here’s a little bit of history about the DP joke issue. For more, see the page 6 of the print edition.

The Daily Pennsylvanian’s annual gag issue has a long history, of which another chapter has been written today. Every year at about this time, tradition dictates that DP editors turn their usually proper paper into a playful parody.

Although the DP used to publish a gag issue on or about April Fool’s Day, the issue was moved to Washington’s birthday in 1962. Through a series of haphazard and random events, the DP has settled on a time loosely referred to as “sometime in March or April, or whenever we remember to commemorate the crusading DP editors of days gone by.”

So how did this strange tradition begin? The DP was then led by the now celebrated Melvin Goldstein. “Magnificent Melvin,” as the flamboyant editor-in-chief was called, decided to liberate the traditional all-male newspaper by adding a few women to the staff. Not to be outdone, the rival Pennsylvania News–a weekly published by female undergraduates–decided that it, too, would go co-ed and invited men to join the paper.

The women got more than they bargained for. The very next day, Feb. 22, Magnificent Melvin and his staff produced their own Pennsylvania News, mocking the News’s frivolous style.

Ever since the Melvin, DP editors male and female have produced a DP gag issue each year. The results have often been memorable.

One year, an associate dean in the College called up the provost to ask why he had not been told that the University had been kicked out of the Ivy League.

Another February, an article disclosing that the University was really a “mafia shield” caused a Philadelphia Evening Bulletin editor to “damn near run to the telephone to give somebody hell for missing a story like that.”

Thus, the current editors, recalling Magnificent Melvin and his clashes with the forces of evil, present Gag Issue 2007, partly in fun, partly in jest — and partly to remind everyone who really runs things around here.

Just to be clear, it’s The Spin.

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