Residents remember 'Indiana Daily Stupid'

Imagine this -- you wake up, roll out of bed and on your way to class grab a copy of the Indiana Daily Student. After scanning the headlines, your squinting, sleep-deprived eyes pop open. Assembly Hall is in shambles after a propane popcorn popper allegedly caused an explosion late last night. There are pictures to prove it. \nYou tell your friends, and maybe you decide to go and check out the damage. But when you get there you realize something isn't right. There are no firefighters or crowds of shrieking people. Inside, the floors even look polished. You're shocked -- until you realize it's April Fools' day. The joke's on you. \nIU students would have read this same story April 1, 1975, in what they thought was the IDS. What they had actually picked up was a copy of the "Indiana Daily Stupid," an April Fools' Day satire of the real newspaper. The "Stupid" was packed with articles and advertisements that at first glance, looked believable. \n"Our paper looked identical to the IDS," said Steve Danzig, a 50-year-old Bloomington resident and the man behind it all. "We even went into the IDS layout room and made sure everything looked the same." \nDanzig himself was a former IU student and president of the student body from 1973 through 1974. He was politically active on campus and was a part of the counter-culture movement during the 60s. He said he wanted to do something fun and came up with the idea for the "Stupid." Months before each Fools' day, he recruited writers, usually IDS staff, and raised money to publish and distribute the "Stupid." \nThe first challenge was to create believable satire. One mock article announced the Student Health Services was encouraging all women who had gotten their birth control prescriptions from the SHS in January to stop taking them -- 80 percent of the pills prescribed were placebo sugar pills instead of just the last seven slots. Hundreds of angry women called the SHS that day, Danzig said. \nThe satire also included playful pokes at important figures at IU, including former basketball coach Bobby Knight. Contributors for the "Stupid" found a picture of Knight and his players sitting on the sidelines reacting to the game. Their faces were contorted and Knight's legs were in the air. The IDS used to run a page devoted to feature stories called "Emphasis on," which "Stupid" contributors parodied. Under the photograph they wrote, "Emphasis on the Farts," and then fabricated a story about Knight's gas problem.\n"We made fun of fraternities, sororities, leftover hippies, and the president," said Dan Barreiro, former IU student and IDS staff writer. "We weren't reserving it for any one group of people because the idea was to bring the same sort of satire to everybody. Some of it worked and some of it was kind of stupid."\nThe next challenge was creating and distributing the "Stupid." Danzig would hold numerous meetings with contributors before April, 1. They would gather at Mother Bears, he said, and brainstorm. They collected photos and wrote captions for them.\nAs the first approached, Barreiro said, it became like a classic cramming for a test. In the days before the computer, they used exacto knives to cut out pictures and articles and then pasted them onto the page by hand.\n"We were up 36 straight hours putting it together," Barreiro said. "Then we would drive to some podunk Indiana town where there would be some small newspaper with a printing press. Danzig convinced them to help us print them."\nIn the U-Haul truck Danzig would rent, contributors traveled to Vincennes, Peru, Ind., and Columbus, Ind., to get the paper printed. The truck was so weighted down by papers, Barreiro said, laughing that he was convinced at one point they were going to drive off the road and die. \nWhen they got back to Bloomington, they would go out like ninjas in the night to distribute the "Stupid" everywhere they could on campus. Then they waited to see the effects. \n"I think we all laughed with the student body at the humor of it, some made clever fun," said Trevor Brown, Dean of the School of Journalism. "At the same time, I think we felt deeply uneasy, like whenever you laugh at a dirty joke. It's funny, but something's not quite right about it."\nBrown was a journalism professor during the short life of the "Stupid." He felt that the "Stupid" always had a high risk attached to it because the contributors were inventing things that could potentially undermine the credibility of the IDS, a paper striving to be professional and in competition with the Bloomington Herald Times for the news.\nThe "Stupid" appeared for roughly six consecutive years and then Danzig and others stopped working on it. \n "Whenever you do something like this it becomes a chore instead of a labor of love," Danzig said. "We felt it had run its course"