At Features, we believe our job is relatively straightforward. Every week, we try to make the students laugh. Life as a student at Andover can be filled with stress and unhappiness, and we firmly believe in the power of laughter as a means of overcoming the difficulties of boarding school life. Ideally, the community as a whole can appreciate our jokes, but our primary audience is—and always will be—the student body. If put in a situation where we believe the student body will laugh at a joke, but the joke will be deemed inappropriate by the administration or faculty, Features will more often than not run the joke. While we believe inappropriateness is an important part of humor, we draw a distinction between humor that is inappropriate and humor that is offensive. We do not attempt to victimize or insult members of the community for the sake of humor. In fact, we go out of way and pour over each article multiple times to ensure that it could not be construed as offensive. Laughing and humor, we feel, are basic human emotions. One of our editors just read the book Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl, which discusses the author’s time in concentration camps during the Holocaust and how people psychologically dealt with enormous suffering. One of the things he mentioned was the way in which inmates altered their senses of humor so, despite the incredible pain they were forced to endure, they could find solace in laughter. This is an extreme case but just serves to stress the important role that humor serves in everyday human life. While some may view our jokes as childish or unsophisticated, we disagree. If we can make just one person laugh, then we have done our job. Obviously, we hope to make hundreds of people laugh, but everyone has his or her own distinct sense of humor and that goal is not always attainable. At the same time, our motto will always be to make people laugh, to lighten their day just a little bit and relieve some of the stresses that seem so overwhelming here at Phillips Academy. Our only request is that our audience understands these goals and always considers them before judging any article we run. If it might be offensive to you, understand that we did not mean for it to be and we certainly felt it would not victimize anyone. Our only goal with every article is to make you, the reader, laugh. With that in mind, we understand that we may occasionally make a bad judgment and publish an article that we should not have published. We recognize that jokes that we may at first believe to be victimless can sometimes be interpreted differently by some members of our readership and can lead to situations in which people feel victimized or insulted. These situations are to be expected here and there when running a two-page section week after week. Some weeks, we are short on content and less careful about the potential reactions to the articles, but we try to filter out content we feel will offend members of the community. We are the first to admit that we have run questionable articles in the past, and we acknowledge that we will probably run more in the future, but we would rather run the occasional questionable article than risk running a humorless and politically correct section each week. Our perspectives, as a group of teenage males, are vastly different from many members of this community, especially faculty and alumni. We urge you to consider this gap and how it may affect our view on a potentially offensive article. We may not consider the fact that some joke is sexist or offensive in some other way, while some other members of our community may feel that it is blatantly so. If this is the case, we hope that offended readers will feel comfortable e-mailing either of the editors of this section (ryost@andover.edu or jbielasiak@andover.edu) to discuss their problem. It is much easier for us to understand and adjust if your complaints come directly to us. The entire editorial board of The Phillipian meets weekly to go over the last week’s edition with our faculty advisors and the members of Upper Management. Often, we find that members of the community have complaints regarding articles we have run the previous week. Many times these complaints are word of mouth, often passing through multiple people before reaching the Features Editors. Many times the specific issues and complaints are lost somewhere between their origin and the Features Editors. The most helpful and constructive criticism we’ve received has come from direct conversations with the members of the community who have an issue with an article. Receiving a specific and clear reason for a complaint is incredibly helpful and can go a long way in ensuring that we address the problem in the future. The last thing we want to do is create a situation in which we continue to make the same problems week after week and it seems to our audience as if we don’t understand or don’t care about the community’s complaints. We simply ask that members of the community who take issue with Features direct their complaints not to the Dean of Students, not to the Faculty Advisors, and not only to Upper Management, but also directly to us, the Features Staff. In accordance with the first two parts of this address, we would like to add some final thoughts that come directly from us as a response to some of those complaints and issues we’ve run into in recent weeks. Two weeks ago, we published an article that many members of the community apparently took offense to. While we met with Upper Management, our faculty advisors and Paul Murphy, dean of students, to address these problems, we feel as though the issue was not completely explained. We understand that there was a gulf between our understanding of the article and the offended people’s understanding. We apologize for allowing that to happen. In the future, heed our requests in “We’re Human: Mistakes are Inevitable” and please e-mail us directly or write a letter to The Phillipian. This will be a much more effective complaint and we will be sure to fix the problem. At the same time, we think that people in today’s society can often be overly concerned with not offending anyone. We hope that our readers can trust that we are not intending to offend anyone, and we do so only by accident and through a different understanding of the material than a reader may have. We’ve grown up in an era where racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. still exist, but to much lesser degrees than they may have existed decades ago. Nothing that pokes fun at any of these historically persecuted groups is meant to be derogatory. We simply come from a time and place that is less concerned with these issues. While we do understand that we must be careful to ensure no member of the community is offended by our content, we believe it is an incredibly positive thing that we can publish articles now that we would never consider inappropriate because we simply don’t view these groups as inferior. Women, minorities, and homosexuals (to use the same examples) are all equal to anyone else. We make no distinctions based on race, gender or sexuality. So, if we make a joke at the expense of any of these, we treat it the same way we do a joke about, say, a white male. This is not to say that using any of these groups as the repeated butt of our jokes is appropriate. We recognize that we must be especially careful when writing jokes about groups that have historically been persecuted, and we will, again, do our absolute best to ensure that no one is offended by our content. Thank you. On to the jokes. – The Features Staff
