Lush for Life

Lush For Life was a bi-weekly comedy/satirical newspaper distributed in the Tampa Bay area. The newspaper was run by college students and targeted Universities and Community Colleges in the area.

Lush For Life claimed a regional print circulation of 20,000 and said it targeted the “prime demographic of 18 to 44 years olds".^[1] The paper, while quite small by the standards of other comedy publication such as The Onion and the Weekly World News, planned to grow rapidly through the South East United States and also spread to larger metropolitan markets like New York and San Francisco.^[2]

From their site:

Lush For Life employs over a thousand field reporters, writers, and editors in its massive international news conglomerate, with offices in every major market on four different continents, with its home office located in Tampa, Florida, and new branches scheduled to open in early 2008 in Antarctica and the planet Mars.^[3]

While clearly untrue, this is a good example of their style of humor.

Lush For Life parodied a traditional newspaper in format and style. With fake news, sports, entertainment and Op-ed sections as well as fake letters to the editor, and bizarre, made-up advice columns.

History

Lush For Life began as a website and then moved to print, normally the opposite for the industry. The site was started by the a group of college students as a way to work on writing projects together when one of the group was living in Japan, teaching English. The first story uploaded on to the site, as a test, was a fake news story. When the story began to circulate on the Internet, the group of friends decided to turn the writing project into a fake news site.^[4]

What started off being a hobby was now becoming a business with advertising and Lush For Life merchandise being sold. As most of the group worked for the University of South Florida's student publication, The Oracle, they had the skills required to take the concept to print. In late 2006, the group formed an LLC and began to print, using The Lakeland Ledger as their printer.

Regular Features

Ask Brett

Ask Brett! was a fictional, monthly, sit-down interview with legendary Green Bay Packers quarterback, Brett Favre. Conducted by Sports Editor, Danny Albertson, the interviews focused on subjects such as the political climate, on goings in the world of sports, Favre’s feelings on global warming and his answers to fake questions submitted by fake readers. Albertson painted Favre to be a hick, bigoted, beer-drinking moron out to aggrandize himself.

Favre was often characterized as riding his John Deere Tractor, swilling Milwaukee’s Best and “bird-doggin’” chicks.

Dear Dr. Belvedere

Dr. Audrielle Belvedere was a fictional resident Psychoanalyst at Lush For Life’s main headquarters in Tampa. She answers questions sent in by readers by giving blunt, frank and often demented advice.

Readers often complained of extremely odd sexual problems, such as being in love with cartoon characters, only able to be stimulated with metal only being aroused while high on cocaine in women’s bathrooms.

Dr. Belvedere also did not pull her punches. Often calling readers idiots, fat, losers and freaks. Her advice usually ended with suggesting suicide, plastic surgery or simply continuing on with the troubling way of life.

God Election

The God Election stories were an ongoing Lush For Life chronicle. The saga began with an article by Egbert Souse about God going to Dubuque, Iowa to help a nun dying of cervical cancer. Entitled “Man Kills God, Self”, a lone gunman shoots the Lord and kills him with a single round before turning the gun on himself.

After the huge negative response to the initial article, Lush For Life decided to continue the account with multiple stories chronicling the power vacuum left by God, the choice of successor, the election campaign of a new God and power struggles within certain factions of Earth, Heaven and Hell. The God Election series followed several fictional political campaigns of candidates nominated by different denominations of Christianity. Candidates included former basketball player Charles Barkley, retired late-night personality Tom Snyder, motivational speaker Anthony Robbins, television evangelists Jim Bakker and Joyce Meyer, the prophet Moses, Satan, and actor Craig T. Nelson. Reported in the style of political campaign reporting, the God Election series was extremely popular.

Fictional Reporters and Editors

James Avalon

Avalon apparently lives in Tampa, Florida, where he writes for Lush For Life and continues to pursue his lifelong passion of achieving heightened spiritual awareness through sensory deprivation. During summer, Avalon still finds time to go back to New Orleans, his hometown, where he still owns a condo in the historical French Quarter.^[5]

Danny Albertson

Lush For Life's Sports Editor, Albertson apparently lives in Tampa, Florida, where he works for Lush For Life, and spends his off time between his studio apartment in New York City and his cabin in the Everglades, where he poaches alligators on board his full-sized airboat and distills his own bourbon whiskey in his backyard swamp.^[6]

Egbert Sousè

Dr. Sousè is Editor in Chief of Lush For Life. When not working, Dr. Sousè apparently enjoys spending his leisure time at the local horse tracks, where he places two dollar bets and attempts to make contact with extra-terrestrial life. He currently lives in Tampa, Florida, and during summer he resides at his remote villa in Key West, Florida, where he enjoys drinking home-made Absinthe while he continues to complete his Great American Novel.^[7]

Duncan Idaho

Mr. Idaho is the Managing Director of Lush For Life. When he’s not running the business and writing, he enjoys playing golf at St. Andrew’s in Scotland, and supervising the development of his family’s winery, Ross-Munro Vineyards, in South Africa. During the summer months, he resides on board his luxurious full-sized yacht off the coast of Hong Kong, snorting cocaine off the breasts of $10,000 female escorts while further developing his off-shore contacts with Japanese and Chinese businessmen. ^[8]

Edward Payne

Hoping to create the world’s first perfect FemBot, Mr. Payne apparently achieved master's degrees in Artificial Intelligence and Linguistics. After the government pulled his funding, he took a position as a part-time correspondent with Lush For Life. He continues to travel the globe, establishing numerous contacts for microchips and silicon enhancements on all seven continents. He resides in Berlin during the summer months, while also making monthly visits to Lush For Life's secondary base on the planet Mars.^[9]

Gale Force

Dr. Force is apparently a part-time writer and on-site correspondent for Lush For Life. Born into poverty in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, where she spent the majority of her childhood and adolescence, Force made ends meet by learning the skills of blacksmithing while apprenticing for a group of thieves who hijacked Japanese shipments throughout the Coral Sea and southern Pacific Ocean. After saving enough money, Force moved to Manchester, England, where she attended University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, receiving her doctorate in Legal Studies. For the last twenty-five years, Dr. Force has been splitting her time between litigating against money-hungry insurance companies and her secondary trade of the buying and selling of abducted children on the black market. At the age of 54, Dr. Force is planning on entering early retirement so she can fully devote herself to her enduring, lifelong passion of hijacking steamboats on the open sea and performing unnecessary ophthalmic surgery on aging tigers.^[10]

Johnny Gonzales

Johnny Iglesia Gonzales, apparently on assignment in Southeast Asia, is Lush For Life's UK correspondent. A part-time contract killer, Mr. Gonzales is often around sensitive political situations and close to the story. To contact Mr. Gonzales, go to the Japanese Embassy in London with a stick of red chalk and write "Love You Long Time", in any language, and you will soon be contacted with a non-negotiable quote for the hit. Or you could just email him instead.^[11]

Porcious Crank

Porcious Crank is apparently a part-time writer and on-site correspondent for Lush For Life. Crank worked as an in-house nurse to dying Negro AIDS patients as he continued to complete his bachelor's degree in Religion at the University of Colorado. After an LSD experience with a group of homosexual beatniks from Berkley, Crank abandoned his religious quest and became a drifter, wandering the West Coast in search of Truth and Reason.^[12]

Memphis Bryant

Memphis Bryant is the smooth talking and quick witted sales guy. Memphis sells all the wonderful advertising you see in the paper and deals with large clients like Bad News Kennels and many more the world over. Unfortunately, he models his life after the role Nicolas Cage plays in the movie Gone in 60 Seconds, however he's too much a of sissy to actually steal a car. Mr. Bryant is highly educated with multiple degrees in business from highly prestigious schools in the United States, where the education system lags behind other developing countries.

Distribution

Lush For Life’s target demographic was college students. Their 20,000-copy distribution was split between college campuses and the places where college students hung out. The University of South Florida was their main distribution spot with around 30 distribution points as well as a street team that handed out papers directly to students twice a week. They also covered the University of Tampa, a small, private university in downtown Tampa where they handed out around 2,000 papers a week. Lush For Life also covered the local Community Colleges, Hillsborough Community College.

The other 10,000 or so copies were distributed in local college hangouts. These included about 100 locations around the University of South Florida campus. The distribution stops were focused on bars, cafés, hookah lounges, thrift and antique clothing stores, college restaurants, liquor stores and college housing.^[1]

See also

• List of satirical magazines
• List of satirical news websites
• List of satirical television news programs

References