Talk:Michael Gerber (parodist)

Untitled

he also does his own one man version of the "the daily show" called newsbreaks.

So he's from St. Louis? What high school did he go to? J1.grammar natz (talk) 17:20, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

Beefing up the stub for Michael Gerber (me)

Hey folks--thanks for all your work keeping Wikipedia accurate and appropriate. I'm not going to pretend I quite understand how Wikipedia's editing/moderation works--even after reading some of the Help--but I noticed that my entry has been turned into a stub. The following is meant to give you a fuller idea of my activities, so that my biographical entry is more reflective of who I am and what I do. I'd add it myself, but I can't seem to be able to.

First off, here are some citations for pieces: The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1999/05/10/1999_05_10_051_TNY_LIBRY_000018129
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2000/09/18/2000_09_18_094_TNY_LIBRY_000021700
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1999/07/12/1999_07_12_090_TNY_LIBRY_000018621
The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/08/the-periodic-table-of-rejected-elements/305046/
The Village Voice
http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-08-19/books/we-want-to-get-sued-like-al-franken-but-fox-keeps-ignoring-us/
http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-06-25/news/from-the-crazy-mixed-up-files-of-the-national-security-agency/
http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-05-14/news/why-the-s-hate-the-s/
http://www.villagevoice.com/2001-09-18/news/what-falwell-really-meant/
Esquire
http://www.esquire.com/features/lunch-oppenheimer-1199
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/24/opinion/harry-potter-and-the-errant-golf-cart.html
The Wall Street Journal
(not online)
NPR
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/tnbt/2003/apr/25/
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/tnbt/2003/apr/25/all-the-news-you-hope-to-miss/
Playboy
Important Information Regarding Your Privacy--p59, published November 2001.
(Playboy.com piece not available online, I guess.)

I am not including everything--for example, I had a regular column for Seattle Weekly in 1994-5--but these are the most major venues within the very limited universe available to print humorists, and thus including them is reflective of...something I suppose.

Second, this may or may not be germane, but my material has been collected/reprinted in at least two books: Fierce Pyjamas 0-575-50475-3 More Mirth of a Nation 0-06-095322-5 (there's a textbook, too, but I don't remember the title)

Third, the Barry Trotter series should receive its own entry, as Bored of the Rings and Doon have. The Barry Trotter series is probably the bestselling series of parody books ever written; publishers do not release sales figures, but the figures I do have (~1,000,000) suggest that this is the case; Bored may have sold more, but it's been around for 30 more years, and it's not a series. Second, Barry Trotter was the FIRST professional print Harry Potter parody--everybody was terrified that Warner Bros. would sue them, and that's why I had to self-publish it.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20011224/40732-author-to-self-publish-potter-parody-.html

Once I did, this fundamentally changed the game in two important ways: other people could now parody Potter in print, for money, with the clearest precedent; and the more lenient US stance towards print parody took root in the UK and Europe. For better or worse, all the print HP parodies that you list under "Parodies of Harry Potter"--and certainly contested books like Tanya Grotter--would likely NOT have happened if I had not taken the risk with my book. Fan-fic is one thing, and it's great, but a commercially distributed print parody using the artistic precedents of print and the increased legal scrutiny is quite another. Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody was the first of a massive wave of longform print parodies throughout the UK and Europe, and this was widely noted in the European press at the time; it, and the 1969 book Bored of the Rings, inspired what has become a fully fledged genre in European publishing. (It existed in the US before Barry T., thanks to Bored and other things.) I'm surely biased in this case, but I feel that Barry Trotter has some real significance for the aforementioned reasons, and submerging it within an omnibus entry "Parodies of Harry Potter" strikes me as illogical in light of free-standing entries for Bored and Doon. Because it faced chilling legal threat (unlike, say, a parody on SNL or even in MAD, which is owned by Warner), had to be self-published, and achieved massive success that inspired a lot of other books--Potter-specific and not--it's somewhat of a landmark in the changing landscape of parody/fair use.

Finally, I don't know quite how to present my ongoing involvement with college humor magazines and mentoring college humorists, so I'll just tell you as succinctly as possible: I didn't just write for The Yale Record, I ran it for two years, and put it back on its feet after 20 years of intermittency. Saying I wrote for The Yale Record is like saying Conan O'Brien wrote for the Harvard Lampoon--accurate, but not the full story. Consider adding some information, as per your entry on Conan. I was Chairman of The Record from 1989 to 1991; as a Senior, I did a parody of The National sports newspaper which reached 60,000 people.

I run The Record's advisory 501(c)3--it's the closest thing I've ever had to a real job. This may be worth adding; The Record is a genuine American literary institution, and has influenced everybody from Harold Ross' New Yorker, to MAD Magazine. (Ross looked at The Record and other college humor mags when creating the dummy for TNY, and Harvey Kurtzman did the same when he turned MAD from a comic book to a "slick" magazine.)

In the last five years, I've personally overseen student humor magazine startups at DePaul, Ohio State, UCLA, and several other high schools and colleges. I'm currently talking to students at Cambridge, Seattle Central, UCLA, and two high schools. This isn't important, but it might be interesting/useful for your readers, and is accurate. I'm the only humorist I know who does this kind of intensive one-on-one mentoring.

I'm involved in some projects right now--a new book, a startup--that may or may not blossom into something worthy of the entry--how do I add these activities?

Anyway, all this is submitted respectfully in the spirit of accuracy. I appreciate having an entry on the site, and wish to refer people to it, so I'm interested in it addressing my work and career fully. Not that either is that important. Handle this however, I just want to give you the info, so that you could confirm, beef it up, or investigate further if you were so inclined. Thanks! Mgerber937 (talk) 04:50, 21 August 2012 (UTC)