The Late Great Weekly World News

Moving robotlike in a supermarket checkout line, you’d perk up when you noticed that the magazine rack brandished the latest issue of the Weekly World News. Other tabloids would scream at you with the purported indiscretions of celebrities. But on the cover of WWN you’d see a headline so farfetched that it would instantly stick in your mind and be impossible to remove, like the ice pick in Trotsky’s skull.

“Jimmy Hoffa Found — in Elvis’ Grave!”

“Space Alien Backs Bush for President!”

“Mental Supermen Lock in ESP Duel; Top Psychic’s Head Explodes!”

“Saddam & Osama Adopt Shaved Ape Baby!”

“Meek Sue to Inherit the Earth!”

“Bigfoot Hooker Poses Nude for Centerfold!”

“Tribe Worships Camel Doodoo!”

Printed on tatty black-and-white stock, WWN was the journalistic guilty pleasure of the ’80s and’ 90s. And now it has nonetheless received an affectionate media sendoff. One writer called it “the newspaper of record for astrology and giant tumor-related news”; another, “easily the world’s best drunken supermarket impulse buy.” Bat Boy Lives!: The Weekly World News Guide to Politics, Culture, Celebrities, Alien Abductions, and the Mutant Freaks that Shape Our World, a 2005 book that compiled some of the paper’s most shocking (i.e., silliest) stories, quotes Johnny Depp as saying, “The only gossip I’m interested in is in the Weekly World News.” Which could be true.

ALIEN PAPER BORN IN FLORIDA!

WWN began as a spinoff of American Media Inc.’s National Enquirer — a way of keeping the old presses running when the Enquirer switched to color. Though the staid name chosen for the paper suggested a down-market version of Foreign Affairs, it was for its first few years one more celebrity gossip rag. Then Eddie Clontz became editor, and WWN gleefully leapt into the quicksand of fake news. (Read all about the paper’s history in a comprehensive Washington Post obit.)

Clontz pushed the tabloid tactic of exaggeration into distortion and then outright invention. No need for qualifying clauses on an implausible story; at WWN, innuendo went out the window. For the editors, Photoshop was their AP picture bank. For the writers, a wild imagination was their reporter’s notebook. Other newsmen might be held to a two-source minimum; the WWN staff strictly adhered to a no-source minimum.

Which is not to say the paper didn’t have traditional journalistic virtues. Its writers and editors, many of whom had come from more respectable venues, like The New York Times and the Philadelphia (not the National) Inquirer, were past masters at the fine craft of attention-grabbing. A headline like “Bloody Statue of Mother Teresa Has PMS!” would be topped by the deck “Vatican Experts Confirm:” and explained by the pull quote “After the blood stops, she gets grumpy.” Those are teasers that should be taught in J school.

Within its ethic of fake, WWN constructed an impressive cosmology. It focused on nearly every aspect of world and otherworldly news. The paper ransacked Bible history, then rewrote it, from Genesis (the Garden of Eden’s first lovers were Adam and Ed) to the Ten Commandments (“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” had the codicil “unless you in turn are willing to share thine own wife with him”) to the Last Supper (where the main course was pizza). But the supreme WWN Biblical expos´e, which I read in 1994, had a headline that read, as I recall, “Second Coming Came and Went!” The story reported that Jesus had returned as He’d promised and taken all the chosen souls back to Heaven with Him. The rest of us, the unchosen, might have thought we were still on Earth, but we were actually living in Hell.

The paper revealed more shocking historical secrets than The Da Vinci Code. It informed us that the seer Nostradamus had an idiot brother, Nostradumbass. One cover story declared that President Lincoln was actually a woman. The headline: “Abe Was a Babe!” In its approach to modern political issues, the paper was always pro-alien — Martians, not Mexicans.

Like other tabs, WWN had its evergreen celebrities. One was John F. Kennedy, who would show up every few years glimpsed behind estate gates. In 1993, a year before her death, his widow Jackie was “photographed” in a reunion with the wheelchair-bound President. The writers also proclaimed “JFK Proven Alive!” because they held a seance to talk to his ghost and the ghost didn’t answer. Can’t argue with that logic.

The biggest star was Elvis, who had “died” two year before WWN was born. The weekly ran frequent stories about the singer (“Painting of Elvis Weeps Real Tears”), but its greatest news coup, and its top-selling issue, was the one that announced Presley was alive in a Kalamazoo, Mich., hideout. WWN’s explanation of his 1977 disappearance — what was reported as his death — was typically ingenious. Building on the fact that Elvis had a twin brother Jesse who died at birth, WWN claimed that Jesse had in fact survived, brain damaged and hidden away, and that when Jesse died in 1977 Elvis took this as his cue to disappear. It was Jesse, the twin, whose body was displayed in Elvis’ open coffin.

Tabloid readers, like the rest of us, want to live forever with no effort, and WWN playfully pandered to their wishes. Among the self-help headlines:

“It’s a Miracle! U.S. Soldiers at Iraqi Detention Facility Discover Mashed-Up Pages from the Koran Make Wrinkles Disappear!”

“Strap Down Your Bratty Kids With Toddler Straitjackets”

“Sleep in a Tub of Lard and Look 20 Years Younger”

“Key to Long Life: Porridge, Whiskey and Cigarettes”

Lose 70 Pounds in 15 Days — with flesh-eating bacteria!

These were fish stories, and WWN had plenty of those: the mermaid sushi and the fish with legs that washed up on a Riviera beach, not to mention “Miracle Carp Says the End Is Near!” The paper also indulged in rampant francophobia, evident in such headlines as “Vengeful Frogs Eat French Chef’s Legs” and (one of our favorites) “Sissy French Kids Trade Cards of Female Impersonators.”

WWN: THE MUSICALS

To gauge WWN’s influence across the media, consider that it’s the only tabloid newspaper to have inspired two terrific musicals. The first was David Byrne’s 1986 movie True Stories, which shows two guys in a laughing fit over a WWN headline (“Starving Peasants Sell Their Blood to Vampires for Blood Money”) and features a character called the Lying Woman, whose claims of being involved in every imaginable sexual, political and extraterrestrial scandal echo many a WWN story.

Byrne, the Talking Heads leader who wrote and directed the movie and its music, and serves as on-screen narrator, tells us that in this part of Texas, “People here are inventing their own system of beliefs. They’re creating it, doing it, selling it, making it up as they go along” — an apt description of the WWN ethic. True Stories (which landed Byrne on the cover of TIME) also has a wonderful pop score, including the all-time great group lip-synch, “Wild Wild Life.”

In 1997 librettists Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming and songwriter Laurence O’Keefe collaborated on Bat Boy: The Musical, based a creature dreamed up by the WWN staff in 1992. Half-human, half-bat, he was discovered in a West Virginia cave, and proved so popular that the writers had him escape custody every now and then and go on a new adventure. In the excellent musical version, which starred Devin May and had a long off-Broadway run, he is a practically a Christ figure, sacrificed and venerated: “Hold me, Bat Boy, / Touch me, Bat Boy, / Help me through the night.” He’s a metaphor for humanity’s fascination-repulsion with the bizarre, which was right up WWN’s back street.

WHAT’S TRUE? WHO CARES!

The primacy of truth, or verifiable fact, has taken a beating lately in mass culture; hardly anyone bothers with the distinction between info and tainment. “Reality shows” are as scripted as any World Wrestling Federation slamdown. The “Alien Autopsy” TV documentary of the mid-‘90s was a hoax; so was the Internet’s “lonelygirl15.” Art Bell, on the overnight radio show Coast to Coast A.M., lavished air time on hundreds of antichrists and alien abductees, and 10 million listeners tuned in to these ghost stories in the dark.

The Internet has opened the floodgates of unverified assertion. The top news source is Wikipedia, whose compilers are free to create or distort any fact. Corrections are made only if someone more responsible weighs in. Mike Godwin, the new chief counsel for Wikipedia, shrugs off the inaccuracies, some of them defamatory, on his website. “In another 25 years,” he told The New York Times last week, “all of our children will have grown up in a world in which media like these are mutable and changeable and people prank each other, and it will seem less important.” By “it” Godwin means facts — what we used to know as the truth.

Stephen Colbert formed the word “truthiness,” but decades before, WWN was the original friend of faux. It played the truthiness game at world-class level, as a joke on its readers and the rest of the media. Touting itself as “The World’s Only Reliable Newspaper,” WWN pioneered the notion of straight-faced news comedy. Yes, Saturday Night Live had inaugurated its “Weekend Update” in 1975, but the tactic there — as in the Brit and U.S. versions of That Was the Week That Was, in the ‘60s, and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report today — was essentially a real headline with a sarcastic joke attached. WWN went further: the headlines were the jokes, utterly fabricated, designed to amuse some readers and confuse others.

Amuse-confuse was in the air in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. In the comedy clubs, performers like Albert Brooks, Andy Kaufman, Harry Shearer and Art Metrano were blazing the conceptual trail of “post-funny comedy.” Kaufman would play the Mighty Mouse theme on an old phonograph, or read long passages from The Great Gatsby, or assume the guise of obnoxious Tony Clifton, all to the discomfort of an audience who might have come to hear jokes. Metrano donned a tux and sang, endlessly, the old razzmatazz “Fine and Dandy,” but only the notes: “Da da DA da, da Da da DA DA…” Squirms outnumbered giggles; perplexity ensued. If someone asked, “Is that supposed to be funny?” the comics had achieved their goal.

WWN twisted their ploy into the more daring “Is that supposed to be true?” More daring because its audience comprised not the putative hipsters in comedy clubs but ordinary people waiting to pay for their groceries and not used to finding irony in. In a word, Americans.

Satire is essentially political; it builds an Us-vs.-Them dialectic and aims its barbs at Them. The reader or listener is expected both to get the joke and to agree with its political thrust. For example, the audiences for The Daily Show and Colbert, are part of the shows’ (basically left-wing) Us, laughing at the (basically right-wing) Them who are the butts of the jokes. WWN recognized no such niceties. It tore down that wall. It ripped not just at the goofiness of pop culture but at its own readers’ prurience and gullibility. (“Redneck Vampire Attacks Trailer Park.”) The main audience for this satire was not those who might laugh at it but those who might take it as true. “It is my belief,” Derek Clontz told the Post, “that in the ’80s and into the ’90s, most people believed most of the material most of the time.”

It was one small step from WWN (“America’s Only Reliable Newspaper”) to The Onion (“America’s Finest News Source”). Soon the Onion staff found jobs as writers or producers on Late Night With David Letterman, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and were festooned with Emmys and movie deals. But the hip mainstream ignored the WWN writers; they continued to toil away anonymously in American Media Inc.’s Boca Raton, Fla., home office, whose most severe brush with notoriety was during the anthrax attacks of Sept. 2001, when a photo editor opened an envelope containing the bacteria and was killed. And that was no joke.

THE DEATH OF THE NEWS

American Media’s reason for closing down the paper was that the paper’s circulation had dropped from over a million in its late-’80s-early-’90s heyday to a current circulation under 100,000. Old-time staffers complain the paper’s quality went in the commode when the veterans were replaced by young comedy writers. But the real explanation, I think, is that fake news has spread beyond The Onion and the satirical TV shows to the front pages of the most distinguished newspapers. Over the past six years we’ve read such headlines as:

Saddam Caused 9/11 Attacks!

It’s Crystal Clear: Sunnis Love Shias!

U.S. to Be Greeted as Liberators in Iraq!

Iraq OK in Just a Few More Months!

Kerry No War Hero!

Global Warming a Hoax!

The New York Times, Fox News, The Weekly Standard: these are the Weekly World News of our time.