Off the Wall

Japing capitalism's chronicle

"We are pleased to announce a change in management," intones a somber-looking display advertisement. But behind the familiar type and layout style is not the characteristically purposeful lineup of executives in a boardroom. Instead, a body in a business suit crashes out through a skyscraper window.

Welcome to Off the Wall Street Journal, a wickedly effective parody of the U.S.'s leading business newspaper. Modeled after a 1980 send-up of the New York Times, (called Not the New York Times) and put together by former National Lampoon Editor Tony Hendra, along with a coterie of co-editors, mostly recent graduates of the University of Chicago, Off the Wall Street Journal will go on sale April 1 with an initial press run of 500,000 copies. The 24-page broadsheet will be distributed by Warner Publisher Services to newsstands in 75 cities and to retail outlets including the 780-store Waldenbooks and 600-store B. Dalton chains.

At $2 a copy, Off the Wall Street Journal is a worthwhile investment for anyone who thinks that the state of the American economy is something to laugh at. Among the funnier send-ups: a deadpan report on a failed takeover bid by the Mobil Corp., this time for Bill's Hoagie Stop; a slice-of-life jape about the current fascination with economic jargon, depicting a scatological barroom brawl over monopsony, diminishing rates of transformation, and the Laffer Curve.

About 40 writers contributed to the project, including such notables as Commentator Jeff Greenfield of CBS, Novelist Cyra McFadden and Business Reporters Andrew Tobias and Chris Welles. Every story was read by a lawyer, but the editors are seeking $1 million worth of libel insurance. Thus far, there has been no protest from the chief target of the gibes, the Journal itself, perhaps because the paper is inured to annual imitation by The Bawl Street Journal, produced by the financial community's Bond Club of New York. Much fun is had with the bucket-thumping editorial-page style of the Journal's editor, Robert Bartley; one editorial works itself into a frenzy and gradually goes crazy, with the print getting bigger and bigger until the sentences finally collapse into incoherence.

Though Off the Wall by and large treats the Journal with respect, some harsher thrusts are directed at the paper's supposedly smug and selfish readers. One story reports that market forces have diverted distribution of a drug that will cure leprosy to use instead in treating tennis elbow. The jokes range from the incisive to the tasteless, and even the racist and antiSemitic. An Op-Ed column headlined COLORED PEOPLE MUST SUFFER TO PROSPER is signed "Thomas Soweto," deftly mocking the free-market views of Thomas Sowell, a conservative black economist who contends that racism is not the major cause of economic deprivation for blacks. Help-wanted ads have executives soliciting young male proteges and "preteen women."

According to Robert Vare, one of the project's editors, a key objective was to bring a chuckle or two to businessmen because "people in the financial community need a laugh so badly " If anyone misses the joke, Hendra is planning a future parody of a document so familiar that it can be found in just about every hotel room in the country: Not the Bible, to be published by Ballantine Books this autumn.

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