This past semester, the members of the Tufts Zamboni magazine compiled and published an issue under the theme “Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquissisue.” The theme was chosen by the group as a whole, and modelled after a joke in the television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, produced by the British comedy group Monty Python in 1970. Following how the Zamboni develops content, once the theme was announced, our staff of terrific writers and artists held brainstorming sessions to develop content for the issue. Sadly, some of the jokes in this issue did not land nearly as well as expected, and for that, we apologize.
Our goal as a comedy magazine is to provide absurd humor to the Tufts community, and as is the nature of comedy, we never expect our content to amuse everyone. We frequently work to eradicate offensive material in our issues, and with a staff comprised of people from a variety of backgrounds and religions, we feel comfortable with the content we produced. We do understand that not all levels of faith are represented by our publication, and we are deeply sorry to those we’ve offended. We value religious freedom and did not intend this issue as an attack on faith but rather as a brand of “poking fun” humor that typically we pride ourselves on.
We worked hard to quell any jokes that we thought went too far, as we do in every issue we publish, but we saw this issue as more benign than it was interpreted. We stand by our publication and its contributors, but we also acknowledge that it may have crossed lines.
One of the best ways that we, as creators, can learn and adapt to produce content that can reach more and more people with a positive outcome is to receive feedback. We are indeed a publication operated through the Tufts Community Union, and we are always happy to receive feedback, comments and to open a dialogue about how to better approach comedy on campus. Better yet, anyone who wants to can submit content and ideas to us, as we accept submissions from every person here at Tufts — just write us an email at tuftszamboni@gmail.com to send us submissions, or to get more info about our publication.
Thank you,
Jess Silverman & Craig Drennan
Editors-in-Chief, The Zamboni Magazine
