Editors Anand Swaminathan ’15, left, and Alec Gonzales ’15 lead The Wrangler staff this year.
By Jace Riley ’16
THE ROUNDUP
Sometimes a headline is just too good to ignore, even if it’s fake.
Take for instance, “Anarchy looking more and more appealing to student with C- in government class.”
Or perhaps “Freshman who got ‘sixteen numbers’ at Frosh Mixer now the king of Class of 2018.”
The headlines from The Wrangler show satire journalism is alive on campus.
Mr. John Damaso ’97 and Mr. Steve Smith ’96 direct The Wrangler satire newspaper, with seniors Anand Swaminathan ’15 and Alec Gonzales ’15 leading the humorous staff this year.
Satire writing is using humor and exaggeration in today’s topical issues.
Roughly once a month a new issue of The Wrangler comes out to student fanfare.
Swaminathan calls together meetings called pitch meetings, where they pitch ideas about what to satirize.
He then gives each person deadlines and articles to work on.
“Thirty to 45 people can be at a club meeting,” Mr. Smith said.
Story ideas that come from the pitch meetings are global events, but they make them relate to Brophy.
“We could say ‘what’s going on in the world’,” Mr. Smith said. “However, how do you make that Brophy centric? It becomes ‘Ebrola.’”
Swaminathan is the student president of the club, and he joined The Wrangler in freshman year, but said he wasn’t very active till his sophomore year.
“I joined my freshman year and had very loose involvement … I attended a few meetings,” Swaminathan wrote in an email to The Roundup. “My sophomore year, I became more involved with the publication when I, on a whim, volunteered to co-edit one of the upcoming monthly editions.”
While the publication has been a campus staple since its recreation in 2008, all of the leaders have things they wish to work on in the future.
“I’ve given a lot of thought to where I want to take The Wrangler,” Swaminathan wrote in the same email. “Essentially, I want to help evolve The Wrangler from a being just a monthly publication to functioning as a full-fledged organization on campus.”
Mr. Damaso and Mr. Smith were the two teachers who revived the publication in 2008.
“I think the big hope is to sustain quality and to encourage more of the student body to engage satire,” Mr. Damaso said. “The other hope is to … increase the quality of the writing.”
While Mr. Damaso wishes to increase quality, Mr. Smith said he looks to branch out to a wider audience.
“I think it’d be fun if we did even more online stuff,” Mr. Smith said. “I think it’d be fun if we do more movie stuff … comedy troop stuff. All of that stuff could be wrapped up under the banner of The Wrangler.”
