Urban legends and similar inventions have to start somewhere. But tracing how they
began is usually guess work and finding the identity of their authors generally leads to a dead end.
So it was a pleasure to hear from George Hunka, who nailed down the origin and source of the
anonymously written list in Newspaper Wit and Wisdom, which described major
American newspapers and their readers in funny, unflattering terms.
When I googled the list, the earliest trace I found of it on the
Web was Sept. 17, 2000. And I discovered no author I could name. Hunka, the blogger of
Superfluities, writes: “September 2000? I can do
even better than that. This little joke appears to be based on a piece of dialogue from ‘A Conflict
of Interest,’ an episode of the BBC series ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ that premiered on December 29,
1987.” Here’s the script:
Jim Hacker (The Prime Minister): “Don’t tell me about the press. I
know exactly who reads the papers:
The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the
country;
The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country;
The
Times is read by people who actually do run the country;
The Daily Mail is read by the
wives of the people who run the country;
The Financial Times is read by people who own
the country;
The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by
another country;
And the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.
Sir Humphrey (The Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet):”Prime
Minister, what about the people who read the Sun?”
Bernard Woolley (Hacker’s Personal
Private Secretary): “Sun readers don’t care who runs the country, as long as she’s got big
tits.
“The source is here,” Hunka adds. (He thinks this list is
“funnier, too.”) It’s from The Yes
(Prime) Minister Files.
By the way, Wit and Widsom’s American list struck a chord with Straight Up readers. One of
them, Leon Freilich, suggested these additions:
The Washington Times is read by people who realize it’s the revealed
word of God (translated from Korean).
The Star is read by people who can’t read but who
recognize celeb faces.
Freilich now enters the annals of the anonymous, unless some chronicler of urban legends and
similar inventions chooses to preserve his name.
