Satire has been a staple of Technician for more than 60 years. According to the fall 2007 NC State alumni magazine, the first satire issue of Technician was printed on April Fools’ Day in 1958. Early iterations of the satire issue were printed under the regular Technician name with a disclaimer at the end. The 1958 paper issued a warning (see image above).
Later, the satire became more obvious and began running under puns on the names of local and national news organizations. The Teknishun was printed in the 1990s, The News and Destroyer was printed in the 1980s, and in the 1960s “The Technician” was printed upside down flanked by two sheep.
In the 1970s, the staff began printing a satire issue on the day that NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill played each other in basketball at home, known first as The Daily Tar Heel, then later as The Daily Tar Hell. The staff even drove to Chapel Hill to cover the copies of The Daily Tar Heel with the satire issue on stands across the UNC campus. Technician has also run a satirization of itself and NC State as a whole known as Technishit periodically since 1980.
In February 2014, Editor-in-Chief Sam DeGrave decided to not run The Daily Tar Hell and cited past instances of racist, sexist and homophobic language as his reasoning. DeGrave received vocal outcry from readers saying that The Daily Tar Hell was a tradition that must be kept. The next Editor-in-Chief Ravi Chittilla made the same decision and went on to run a full center spread of reader letters strongly reacting to the decision.
The Daily Tar Hell was reinstated the following year with 2015-16 Editor-in-Chief Kaitlin Montgomery and continues to run the week that NC State and UNC play at home, though the decision to create the special edition remains with each editor.
Montgomery and Managing Editor Megan Ellisor decided to reinstate The Daily Tar Hell with the intention of creating satire that was new, unique and at NC State as well as UNC. Under Montgomery, Opinion Editor Mary Anna Rice, and Assistant Opinion Editor Gabe DeCaro’s leadership, a satire section was started in 2015 known as Ivory Belltower.
“It gave people a chance to try their hand at satire,” Montgomery said. “It was something that a lot of people who were writing for Opinion at the time were interested in doing. Of course satire is hard to write, so it wasn’t masterpiece things that were coming out, but it was cool to give them a chance to try something new that you usually don’t get to write … It was a cool way to look at Opinion in a little bit of a different light.”
The first Ivory Belltower articles were published on Oct. 6, 2015, by Rice and Staff Columnist Katherine Waller poking fun at fraternity philanthropy and the universal love for dogs. Before he was news editor in 2017, Luke Perrin also wrote for Ivory Belltower and helped the section grow. Perrin noticed that previous satire sections had been too directed and wanted to write satire that was edgy and funny without being too pointed.
“We really tried to focus on ‘How do we write satire relevant to students?’ because that’s always been an issue for Technician — is making sure what we’re writing is relevant to students,” Perrin said. “Also we wanted to make it actually funny. We tried to figure out this fine line between humor that is biting that might be a little bit edgy… and still returning it to the student body.”
Perrin even wrote a satire piece about the Brickyard preacher sending over 19,000 NC State students to hell after condemning them in the Brickyard.
“That was probably the biggest moment because that piece actually got picked up by Westboro Baptist Church,” Perrin said. “They said that we were making fun of Christians. They put it on all of their social media pages. It’s hysterical looking back three years later and thinking I wrote that, and now I’m studying theology.”
While much has changed on campus and in society, Technician’s satire issues show that students have found similar things funny since 1958.
“Humor always brings people together,” Montgomery said. “It’s a lot easier to talk about difficult situations sometimes if it’s through a more humorous lens. I mean, think of all of the self-deprecating jokes that people make when they’re uncomfortable. It’s a lot easier for us to laugh at something than it is to think about it a little more seriously and satire is a really cool marriage between those two things.”
Technishit edition of Technician Dec. 1, 2016
