Point/Counterpoint: Has UV jumped the shark?

Web Editor

Point: Yes. UV is full of shit.

Michael Robert (3L)

UV was once a forum for law school gossip, ribaldrous humour (dick jokes) and the occasional SCC case summary knocked off from the Globe and Mail. Now? It’s all of those things on steroids, minus the SCC case summaries.

In this, my last Point/Counterpoint, I’m reserving my good-natured bile, pettiness and ad hominem attacks for UV itself.

Oh, and also for its piece of shit writers and editors.

Exhibit A: An actual couple was pictured pre or post-coitus (it is unclear) on the paper’s COVER last month. Pardon me for being a prude, but that was kind of fucked. This took the hot-chick-with-boobs-hanging-out cover from November to the next, awkwardly arousing level.

The pornography on the cover aside, how does a C student birth control review make the front page of any publication? Those students get Cs because they have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about. Which they candidly admit in every article.  I don’t know about the rest of you, but crass, disgusting and sexist jokes about birth control would be way funnier if………actually, I can’t really finish that thought.

Exhibit B: Matt Brown

Did you know that he has set the record for UV cover appearances with 13, in under 3 years? For all I know, he’s currently shooting more soft core porn for next September’s C student review of bathroom tiling, which he and Luke Gill will be eligible to write with a few more Cs.

Exhibit C: Me.

Yeah, I’ve written thousands of words of content for this paper. You know what? I’m ashamed of myself. I’m also terrified. One day, someone whose opinion I actually care about might Google me and find the crap I passed off as Top 10 lists.

Top 10 Ways to Make Bora better? Yup. I even made fun of Bora’s move to gender-neutral bathrooms on the main floor. Unbeknownst to me, this was done to ease an individual’s gender transition. Yes, I am indeed an asshole.

Top 10 OCI Moments? Some were funny. But even I have trouble controlling the content of my dick jokes. My new employer called me out just a week after hiring me after I described its in-firm tactics as “cock-blocking.”

Exhibit D: Dr. Valencia

Ummm…have you read what this “doctor” writes? And more importantly, have you read what our depraved student body has been asking him?

I also can’t help but think that part of the joke is that he’s a member of a minority group.

UV is not – as Andrew Robertson wrote so eloquently last year – CNN or the New York Times. These days at least, we can all be pretty happy we’re not CNN.

But what should UV be? Edgier students than me might be able to thumb through the paper without gasping, but what about the other members of the law school community? The Hamish Stewarts, Jim Phillips and Deans Moran?

Even dick jokes need some moderation.

Counterpoint

Josh Stark (3L)

The first step in responding to MPG’s argument is, of course, to take a long hard look at the phrase “jumped the shark.” It derives from a 1977 episode of Happy Days where a character named “the Fonz” jumped over a shark. Using waterskis. It was, I am told, not a compelling hour of television. Later, fans observed that this was the episode that marked the beginning of Happy Days’ decline into poor writing, derivative plotlines, and cultural irrelevance. Thus, a show “jumps the shark” when it starts being shitty.

The phrase was coined by Jon Hein in the late 1990s when he created the website jumptheshark.com, which catalogued the moments when various TV shows “jumped the shark.” The site became a minor internet phenomenon in the early 2000s, making it one of the first examples of internet content going “viral.” (The standards for what went viral were much lower in those early days. Remember that this was before anyone had thought to put pictures of cats on the internet.)

Now, this brings me to two points.

Firstly, who the fuck has even ever watched an episode of Happy Days?  Why, why god, must we be continually reminded of an antiquated mediocre sitcom whenever we want to say that a TV show sucks now? The entire premise of “Jump the shark” is that Happy Days was shitty, but by continuing to use the phrase “jumped the shark”, we artificially extend the lifespan of a show that should die the true death. It’s a Zombie cultural product, clawing its way back into our brains not by virtue of what the show was, but simply because it accidentally came to be associated with a useful concept. That is bullshit.

Fuck you, Jon Hein.

Second, dear reader – and here is where we finally get down to it – UV has not jumped the shark. UV will never jump the shark. UV cannot jump the shark.

UV won’t slip into decline, decay, and irrelevance, because UV has a built-in mechanism that guarantees continual renewal. This feature is called Graduation.  Remember that UV is, really, just 20 people. It’s not a newspaper or an institution…it’s 20 people. A little more than that if you include very occasional contributors. So no matter how much you think UV is shit today, tomorrow the people you think suck are going to be gone, and then it’s your turn to make it better.

There are always things in UV that people do not like. I can’t really defend most of the things MPG talks about across the page. Part of trying to be inclusive as a newspaper means publishing everything and anything, and not being picky about whether everyone on the entire editorial board finds something funny. Which would never ever happen.  There’s always going to be bad stuff in this paper, but there’s also some great stuff. As Walt Whitman wrote:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well, then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes)

Anyways, look. Make UV better if you want UV to be better. Submit articles. Become an editor. As for rebuttal, I will simply note that MPG’s half of this article contained more dick jokes and crass content than mine did, and so by his own argument, I’m right. Or something. And yes MPG, you are an asshole for making fun of gender-neutral washrooms. And I’ll bet you even watched reruns of Happy Days when you were a kid, didn’t you? Fuck you, man. And fuck Happy Days.

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