Up to the new century, Spike had never been much of a natural habitat for women, although, Swarthmore being a fairly liberal place, some did serve well on staff.  But let’s face it people: college humor has always been a man’s world. It can trade on the soft currency of reportage all it cares to, but when the shit hits the fan,[1] the fuck, scat, and dick jokes constitute its gold standard. So what do outgoing editors do when their heirs apparent are women? They accept the changing of the times,[2] and the new editors triumph.

            Jeanne Gardner ’02, Christine Smallwood ’03, and Alyssa Timin ’03 brought a new twist to the world of Swarthmore college humor, one that didn’t shun the innate crudity of the institution, but that also sought to bring something of a more thoughtful, more worldly, and more academic air to the proceedings.  The work was sometimes accompanied by intense identity crises (what is the proper shape of the magazine?), but even these produced great fruits; one was equally likely to read in this incarnation of Spike a political tract or a piece of local interest as to encounter a piece of absurdist humor or a well-conceived theme issue. Indeed, Smallwood and Timin also went out with a bang with their final issue, a thirty-two page examination of things ethereal and invisible.

The editors of this period were not above flat-out hilarity, however. It seems that their tenure was the only one to follow a firm production schedule, despite any technical fiascos that may have occurred,[3] and this was supplemented by the white bread humor of such special parody issues as the Weakling Nudes and the Poenis. One of the most legendary of the Spike-produced humor events occurred during this period as well: “Glutton Bowl 2002,” moderated by Bill “El Wingador” Simmons, several times champion of the world in competitive chicken wing-eating, pitted the boldest members of Swarthmore’s student body against each other in a contest to see whose stomachs could stomach the most greasy meat.  The rewards for the victor may have been small, but the pools of vomit in Sharples were large indeed.

>>Modernism

[1] And the shit often hits the fan.

[2] We have it from what we consider to be an incredibly unreliable source that the editors of the Renaissance period wished to kill the magazine rather than yielding it to editors of the opposite sex. So unreliable, in fact, that it’s probably irresponsible to print it here. But in all honesty, Spike has never been that responsible.