The Potato may make a fool of a few people

Just to warn people: when you get to pages ? and ?, please don’t take the articles on those pages seriously. It is April 1, after all.


We call those pages “The Potato,” a spoof on the greatest spoof paper of all – The Onion. Being Portage County, the state’s leading potato producer, The Potato is the perfect name.

While some people may not be fans of The Potato, which is understandable since humor is a fickle matter subject to the type of individual one is, others look forward to our spoofs every year. In fact, one of the articles was actually submitted by a reader.

The rest were written by Gazette staff members. We each have our own pen name – mine being Kent Clark in tribute to the journalist alter-ego of Superman.

We don’t spend much time writing them, as we’re busy enough with the real news, but it is a nice break to write something that doesn’t require too much thought and allows us to show our humorous sides.

Events taking place in Madison were the big topic staff members wanted to poke fun at this year. We tried our best to make fun of both sides of the matter, with one story focusing on Gov. Scooter Valker selling both Portage County and the Capitol building to a pair of out-of-state brothers, and another concentrating on protests by cat “nonlabor” unions.

I strayed away from politics and wrote about E.T. moving to Junction City. I went with the topic after one staff member suggested we write about aliens in Portage County, and another saying an alien would be named E.T.ski if it lived here. We laughed at the suggestion, which was enough to make me run with it.

We even poke fun at the media, which is usually the job of Comedy Central “The Daily Show.” We agree with Jon Stewart that someone needs to keep the media’s coverage, or lack of fair coverage, in check.

I’m a fan of The Onion, as well as that of other spoof news media, as long as people know it’s a joke. We tried our best to keep that fact clear by changing names of real people, like the governor, and making the stories outrageous enough somebody would have to be a real fool to believe them.

Having said that, it’s inevitable we’ll get a few calls or e-mails from people who fall for the joke and believe them to be true. To those people, we apologize. But we hope you have a good chuckle when you realize you’ve been had.