Submission Guidelines

Submit either feature articles (2/3 page-1 page) or newsflashes (up to 1/3 page) to submit@squelched.com. Please put the submission in the body of e-mail, not as an attachment. Submit different articles/newsflashes each in separate e-mails, with the title in the subject line and the body of the e-mail. If you need to use italics or bold type, use html-style markers like [i]italic text here[/i] to designate how we should mark it.

Submit whatever you like. If you're not familiar with the magazine and the types of features we run, our archive should refresh your memory. Features are generally 2/3 a page to a full page. Newsflashes are also a good way to start--these are usually written "newspaper-article" style and run no more than 1/3 a page at most (preferably a bit less). Again, see the site for examples. You can also suggest top tens, though these are usually compiled at meetings (Wednesday, 7:00 pm, 122 Wheeler). Stop on by.

Some tips:

We get a lot of pieces about genitals. "Here's a piece about about penises." "Here's a piece about my vagina." Yes, we're the Squelch, and yes, dick is funny, but it's not funny all by itself. If we're going to read yet another genital piece, make it worth our while--some kind of unique treatment of the subject.
We also get a lot of submissions which are basically angry rants about stupid people/stupid something-or-other. Again, angry is a great place to start from, but if you're taking this route, find a way to be unique. Remember, angry's not enough, you have to be funny as well.
We get a lot of pieces that are basically rip-offs of Onion-style premises. Admittedly, the newsflash and Viewpoints formats lend themselves to this, but the Squelch was doing Newsflashes and Viewpoints before any of us ever heard of the Onion. That said, we're not really looking for "Ask a Very Specific Type of Person/Thing" advice column parodies, wherein typical advice column questions are answered by a person who ignores the question and rambles on instead in a manner befitting whatever Specific Type of Person/Thing they are. That's specifically the Onion's shtick, and while some college humor mags are fine with devoting all their space to being second-rate Onion wannabes, we at the Squelch like to think we have just a little more dignity than that. But just a little.
Advice columns in general are a pretty hackneyed premise, and they're so easy to write that they're literally not funny. "Ooh, bad advice from a columnist, how novel!" "A Conversation/Interview with an Idiot" is also a very weak premise that you should avoid. It's too easy to contrive simple questions and put dumb answers in a character's mouth. If you don't have a more specific character in mind than "Idiot," don't bother.
In Newsflashes, we usually like to avoid purposely silly names like Barry O'Larry or names with obvious, Mad-magazine style puns. In a newsflash, they're not very funny, and they break you out of the illusion that you're reading a realistic news story. It's the realistic news story style that makes the funny part of a newsflash stand out as funny.
Don't feel confined to the topics mentioned here. In fact, branch out and avoid them. Be creative, be original. We're always looking for something different. Write about something you've never seen acknowledged in the Squelch before.

Submission is no guarantee of publication, but we look forward to seeing what you have to offer.

The editors of the Squelch reserve the right to request rewrites and/or rewrite material ourselves, at our discretion. And do stop by meeting sometime. We've got donuts.

Comedic Theory: The Importance of a Premise

by Kenny Byerly, Editor Emeritus

Comedy needs a premise. One central funny idea that holds the piece together. In a short form humor article like the kind you find in the Squelch, almost all of the jokes in a given article, whether it's a newsflash or a feature, tie in somehow with the main premise. This doesn't mean you tell the same joke over and over, but it means you're investigating your comic idea in different ways. So if your premise is that "I had a bad time going clubbing one night" (Holohan, "What it Was, Was Clubbing") you'll tell a series of jokes or anecdotes about funny things that happened to you which resulted in your bad time. If your premise is about being trapped on the moon (Fornaca, "Memoirs of a Do-It-Yourself Astronaut/Ambassador to the Moon"), your jokes will be about awkward situations or bitter feelings that stem from being trapped on the moon. If your premise is that many "embarrassing stories" in teen girl magazines center around having your period (Byerly, "Humiliating Happenstances"), your jokes will be a series of embarrassing incidents (presumably of increasing absurdity) that always end up tying back to having your period.

A piece like "Ask Optimus" (Holohan) may seem scattershot, but it is still bound by a premise: "Optimus Prime writes a surprisingly vulgar advice column for other transforming robots." What if Optimus Prime really wrote a column like this? He probably wouldn't like Go-Bots very much. Thus Prime's vulgar sexual taunts toward Leader One, while uncalled for, grow naturally out of the premise of the piece, which still feels like a coherent whole.

Here is an example of a near-miss, a newsflash which contains funny elements but fails to conform to its premise:

Nice Guy Finishes Second to Last
Thousands of years of scientific research were invalidated Tuesday when renowned nice guy Sammy Bunting placed ninth at the Miniature International Marathon, a race famous for its 10-participant limit. Fans watched in awe as he crossed the finish line just seconds ahead of French competitor Henri Pierre. When asked to comment on the incident, Bunting meekly replied, "I didn't mean to beat the lovely French fellow. It just happened. I'm terribly sorry." After the race, Bunting was seen escorting a blind man across a busy intersection while carrying a single mother's groceries and providing cunnilingus to an elderly woman with no legs.

"It was spectacular," uttered Bunting's friend Barry O'Larry. "His performance brought me to tears. He was a cordial blur shooting around those streets! This breakthrough comes at such a special time for the American people, too, what with the recent anniversary of September 11th and all. I think we can all take solace in knowing that Sammy is out there protecting us from terrorists."

California Governor Gray Davis has issued a statement mandating that all scientists responsible for previous theories on nice guys be given eight slaps on the wrist. In response, expert niceguyologist Wayne Hamper was seen disposing of halogenated waste into a bin clearly marked for non-halogenated waste. According to the Laboratory Rules Book, Hamper's punishment shall be twelve slaps on the wrist.

In comedy, having a central premise to focus your jokes is just as important as having a thesis when you write a paper for class. If your paper is about why Virginia Woolf is a moron (for example), and you spend several paragraphs talking about Mark Twain without ever tying it back to your idea about Woolf, you're going to get a bad grade (never mind that this thesis wouldn't fly; it's just an example) because those paragraphs don't support your thesis. They're irrelevant.

Similarly, the aggressive wackiness of the last two paragraphs does little to advance the premise of this piece: That a "nice guy" not literally finishing last is somehow breaking all the rules. Let's look closer: What's the point of the second paragraph? Something about September 11th? What does that have to do with the premise?

Same with the last paragraph. Suddenly it's Gray Davis? He's responding to the "nice guy" science law thing, but all the jokes are about the slaps on the wrist and the halogenated waste.

A good newsflash is sort of like a movie. We're willing to suspend our disbelief for the sake of the joke, but you only get to use this card once. Here, the card is played when we're asked to believe that a nice guy not finishing last in a real race causes an uproar. That's funny. Now expand on it as if it were real. When you ask us to also believe that Gray Davis doles out literal slaps on the wrist as punishment (taking this expression literally is also funny, but not here--maybe as a separate newsflash), and throw in oddball references to 9/11 and an elderly cunnilingus joke for shock value, it distracts from the main joke. Instead of appreciating your premise, we're distracted by weirdness that falls all over the map, and the result is a newsflash which doesn't quite work.

If you find that your premise doesn't sustain further jokes, and that you can't find enough realistic ways to expand on it, there are two options: One is to realize your idea is too thin and give it up. The other is to simply write a short newsflash. Sometimes the whole joke is really in the headline, and your job is to tell it as quickly as possible and get out of there (Holohan, "Boy Goes to Jupiter, Gets More Stupider").

This problem of deviating from the premise with gratuitous weirdness is not a unique one. It's probably the biggest problem with most of the submissions we reject (aside from those that just aren't funny at all).

What I've said here applies to most newsflashes but not all. There are exceptions, in which random silliness or tangential jokes do actually work. However, in many of these exceptions, what is happening is that the apparent "premise" of the newsflash is a mere front, a red herring. The premise of "Declaring Things Dead Declared Dead" isn't really even about how passe it is to anthropomorphically declare fashions or ideas "dead." It's really about watching writer Stephen Handley go off on a anti-hipster stream-of-consciousness rant as only Stephen Handley can--and secretly, *that's* the real premise. (Some might argue that it's not very good, and only proves the importance of a consistent premise, although I generally find Handley's writing unique and charming enough that I like it anyway.) Luke Filose's "Random Words Attack Newsflash" may seem like another exception, but actually adheres to its premise very closely; the extended non-sequitur is clearly the entire point of the piece.

In "Student Receives Worst Hand-job in History," the newsflash veers off into self-referential dialogue about the reporter observing the proceedings--which deviates from the handjob premise but is really providing a joke on the newsflash's origins, which were clearly a retelling of a real-life anecdote. Again, some might argue that this wasn't a particularly good newsflash, and although I enjoy it, poorer efforts at this kind of gimmicky self-referential ending have been done to death in rejected submissions ever since. So occasionally this stuff works, and you just have to trust your judgment and comedic instincts once they're well-honed from practice. But in general, it's not a good idea.

All this may seem to be very limiting, especially since, after all, we're just talking about comedy here. Comedy has no rules, right? Well, maybe less than other kinds of writing, but comedy writing is still writing, and good writing does have certain elements in common. The point of all this isn't to confine your comedy, it just happens to be what you realize after reading a lot of failed efforts and analyzing why they don't work. Squelch writers don't sit down and think about their premise like it's a template; it just happens to be the mold that most good articles fall into. Following this advice doesn't automatically give you good ideas--that's up to you--but it should help you avoid screwing up a good idea with a muddled approach.

The Newsflash Format

by Tommaso Sciortino, Editor-in-Chief

Although the comedic material is different for each newsflash, each of them must also function as a parody of the newspaper article format. Newspaper articles require a different style of writing from what is used when writing a story. The newspaper article has all of the important information in the opening paragraph, if not the opening sentence. This information includes who, what, when, where, why and how. It is written this way because most people do not read an entire newspaper article all the way through. So newspaper writers put the most important information at the beginning.

A typical newspaper article contains five (5) parts:

Headline:	This is a short, attention-getting statement about the event.
Byline:	This tells who wrote the story.
Lead paragraph:	This has ALL the who, what, when, where, why and how in it. A writer must find the answers to these questions and write them into the opening sentence(s) of the article.
Explanation:	After the lead paragraph has been written, the writer must decide what other facts or details the reader might want to know. The writer must make sure that he/she has enough information to answer any important questions a reader might have after reading the headline and the lead paragraph. This section can also include direct quotes from witnesses or bystanders.
Additional Information:	This information is the least important. Thus, if the news article is too long for the space it needs to fill, it can be shortened without rewriting any other part. This part can include information about a similar event.

If you are ever in doubt about how to go about formatting a newsflash, simply follow this model. Below is an example of a squelch newsflash that follows this format:

Headline:	You Need to Apply Yourself, Study Finds
Byline:	Tommaso Sciortino, Your Mother
Lead paragraph:	Results of a study conducted by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have revealed the need, by you, to apply yourself. As a strong indicator of this need, the study cites recent slacking and an unexpected drop in study time productivity levels, which occurred shortly after the fourth week of classes, after you went to that party.
Explanation:	“It’s something that we’ve all expected to see proven for quite some time,” said Professor Brian Lee, a researcher on the project. “But it’s reassuring to see hard numbers on the incredible amount of time you spend watching and talking about sports and video games about sports.”
Additional Information:	The study, which was conducted by watching you waste your life day in and day out, cites several reasons to believe that you have so much potential. It indicates that that one project you did for your class last year really blew everyone away and showed that when you do apply yourself, there’s no limit to what you can do. Also it implies that if you spent much time worrying about your grades as you did about those stupid video games, you could actually accomplish something.