Weapons of Mass Distraction
By Jim Vickers
Cleveland magazine; May,
2004, Pages 18,20
Funny Times has lampooned modern American society for 19 years now, turning
Susan Wolpert's and Raymond Lesser's left-leaning humor newspaper into
an underground favorite.
Steven Spielberg is a subscriber. So is actor James Garner. Hillary Clinton
was sure to note her change of address before moving to 1600 Pennsylvania
Ave. Raymond Lesser, publisher of Funny Times, recalls these bits of trivia
in somewhat murky detail when talking about how his newspaper has grown
from 600 to 65,000 subscribers since 1989.
"I don't even know who all the famous subscribers are," Lesser notes
with a semi-embarrassed shrug, kicked back in his chair at the small Funny
Times' headquarters on Lee Road in Cleveland Heights.
Lesser & Wolpert launched Funny Times as a local advertiser-supported
humor biweekly in 1985. Four years later, they turned it into a national,
subscriber-supported monthly humor newspaper that takes shots at modern
life in the United States from a liberal viewpoint.
"We're living in the funniest of all times, probably in the history of
mankind," Lesser declares. "Our job is to go out and find all those funny
things that are being generated by our modern world, collect them all
into one easy-to-digest monthly source and have our subscribers rolling
in the aisles."
Buoyed by word-of-mouth and gift subscriptions, which account for 40
percent of new Funny Times' subscribers, the list of customers has grown
exponentially, while a small staff has kept the business profitable in
a world where such ventures are easily swamped by the crush of media options
competing for the average American's attention.
Former Free Times columnist and humor writer Eric Broder serves as coeditor
of the newspaper and helps Lesser slog through the dozens of submissions
the magazine receives from cartoonists and humor writers each month. Since
subscribers pay $23 for 12 issues, Lesser demands quality. "It should
be something that's good enough that people will freely part with their
bucks because they want to purchase it," he says.
Lesser & Wolpert have published work from a laundry list of well-known
cartoonists and comedy writers over the years, including Matt Groening,
Garrison Keillor and Dave Barry. In 2002, Three Rivers Press collected
some of these contributions in a Funny Times anthology.
Naturally, as President Bush's public opinion polls have dropped, the
commander in chief and his administration have become more frequent targets
of political cartoonists and humor writers. However, Funny Times also
skewered the strange crew of Democrats jockeying for the party's nomination
earlier this year and routinely pokes fun at a host of nonpolitical topics
ranging from airline food to Wal-Mart to the media.
"I have no greater desire than to make fun of Democrats for the next
four years," Lesser says with a wide smile. "I would love to make fun
of someone's sexual foibles and stains on blue dresses again. What a great
year that was."
SEEDS OF DISCONTENT
 It
started out as a marketing ploy. But sometime after distributing them
on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in 2000, The Funny
Times' Texas Homegrown Dope Seed Packets
became the gag gift of the moment among Democrats. Since then, Raymond
Lesser says, the Funny Times has moved more than 100,000 of the packets,
which question President George W. Bush's mental fitness for the nation's
top office.
"We were asking ourselves, 'How can we let people know about the Funny
Times other than giving them the paper?" Lesser recalls.
 Now,
Lesser and his crew are gearing up for the 2004 presidential election
with a new gimmick: Soldier Bush Bean Seed Packets. The seed packets poke
fun at the media spectacle the president created by donning a flight suit
and landing on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. "We
look to do the same thing as we did in 2000," Lesser says. "Hopefully,
we'll be able to distribute about 100,000 of these before the election."
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