Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The American reader of any nineteenth-century newspaper or magazine would be confronted at end of an article with short pieces of filler that contained odd and compelling little stories to distract from the serious news of the day. Known as “squibs,” this filler included humor columns which served up a couple of jokes, a gentle anecdote, or a tidbit of doggerel to round out a page. Newspaper editor Frederick Hudson despaired of the practice in his 1873 history of American journalism...

These odds and ends, often undignified with bylines, offered distinctive servings of that history-is-weird feeling so beloved by the Internet these days. The columns often included racist overtones, sexist underpinnings, and were blithe about topics we now perceive as sobering, or sober about topics we find hilarious. The context for the jokes are often now completely lost, leaving one to grope for meaning on Google, not even knowing which search terms to enter...