Satirical Savery: Campus Crisis, Humor to the Rescue

Hunter Savery ’20
Opinion Editor 
Trinity College is in a moment of unparalleled crisis. Like the death throws of the Roman Republic, there is chaos and the potential for dictatorship. The sky is gray, Goldberg’s is shuttered, and Trump is in the White House; the word of the day is malaise. There seems to be no moral leadership on campus, or leadership in general. All four of the Class of 2020’s SGA Senate seats are vacant this semester. The student body finds itself adrift, unmotivated, and crippled by seasonal affective disorder. Adding insult to injury there is nothing to read, this article notwithstanding of course. Sure, the Tripod has its moments, but the student body deserves something more interesting, more intelligent, something pithy and worthy of conversation. Is a lack of reading material behind Trinity’s fall in the national rankings?
There may be no concrete or scientifically proven evidence for that idea, but the correlation seems to be readily apparent. Wesleyan University, an objectively terrible institution of higher learning, has many times more student publications than our dear old Trin. If we are to survive as an institution something needs to change. Where is the solution? Which handsome saviors will rescue us from these dire straits? To alleviate this most unfortunate situation I offer but a modest proposal; a humor magazine.
That is right, what Trinity, and perhaps the world at large, needs right now is a good old fashioned laugh, “a futile and stupid gesture” that will lift us from our collective funk. In 2019, we could all use a distraction and the familiar avenues of humor are failing us. It is harder than ever to find humor in the news. Trump and his supporters are ridiculous, sure, but at the end of the day bumbling fascism is no fun at all. The Bush administration and the Obama years were funny because the balance of absurdity and existential danger was balanced. Today the news seems to spiral out of control and the widening gyre only compounds the anxiety of the present day.
A humor magazine à la The National Lampoon is what we need, a publication that will properly address the foibles of our campus and our world with wit and irreverence. There are many such institutions across higher education: The Harvard Lampoon, The Yale Record, The Dartmouth Jack-o-Lantern, etc. Trinity College, just as elitist and learned as any other northeastern liberal arts school, has no humor publications, and no: Trinity Barstool does not count, sorry. The soultion to our problems has never been so clear. A new day and a new publication must come to Trinity, stay tuned for the birth of The Trinity Travesty.