By Amanda Valentovic
ASSISTANT FEATURES EDITOR

Attention aspiring comedians: There is a club on campus looking for your jokes.

Nonsense Humor Magazine aims to stand out from the crowd and make readers laugh.

“A lot of the time our goal is to be a voice at this school that isn’t here,” Co-Editor-in-Chief Zach Johnson said. “I think I joined because it was very different than anything else that I came into contact with here.”

Last spring, there were only about eight people on the Nonsense staff, but in the fall, a rush of new members allowed for the first print publication in a few years. “We usually like to start by scaring people as much as possible, and if they’re not scared off than they must have a pretty good sense of humor,” Heather Levinsky said, the other co-editor-in-chief.

Nonsense writes a mix of satire and, of course, nonsense. “There’s a pretty big distinction between satire and humor. We do some satire, but a lot of what we do is more creative writing,” Levinsky said.

Every writer usually comes up with their own ideas for articles. “I think part of what we wanted to say was if you have a voice of your own, why don’t we showcase it?” Johnson said, a junior creative writing and TV major. “And they all came back with things that were funny but different.”

There are limits to what the members of Nonsense write. Both editors said there are lines they wouldn’t cross for a joke. “We’re not trying to censor anyone, but we have to think about what we write,” Levinsky said, a junior theater arts major. “We usually try to stay behind the line. If there’s a problem we’ll bring it up with the person who wrote it and everything is fine.”

“We don’t want to write anything that is racist or sexist or transphobic,” Johnson said. “We’re putting out better stuff.”

After a few years of not being able to afford to print a magazine, the club was able to expand on their online content and spread their nonsense around campus.

“It went a lot better than we thought it was going to,” Johnson said.

They were able to attract attention before the issue came out by building up their online content on nonsensehumor.lol. “Sharing stuff online is really what got people paying attention,” Levinsky said. “It was easier to get more people to realize we’re a presence on campus.”

The issue was Hofstra-themed, which both editors thought was relatable to a lot of students.

“People were coming up to us and saying ‘I really like your stuff online’ and took one and walked away, and we were all really in shock. It was crazy,” Johnson said.

Nonsense has a lot planned for the future, with at least two more print issues planned for the year and constant online content. They’re also taking a trip to Princeton to the National Humor Magazine Conference in April, and have some video content in the works for YouTube.

“We have a lot of stuff coming,” Levinsky said.