The Juggler: campus humor in print

First issue December 1919 · Notre Dame · semiannual today, as a literary and art magazine

The boundary, stated once for the campus entries: Notre Dame and Saint Mary's stand in the unincorporated Notre Dame CDP, outside South Bend's city limits, as the Place section of this history states; the campus comedy institutions are covered here in full under that line. The Juggler was the university's first student-run humor magazine. Its first issue is dated December 1919 — the university Archives publishes the cover — launched from Sorin Hall by Delmar J. "Pinky" Edmondson of the class of 1918, Andrew "Shrimp" Moynihan '20, and Laurens "Moonshine" Cook '20, and named for the medieval jongleur of Notre Dame, the juggler of the legend. Vincent Fagan '20 drew the covers; advertising was sold to South Bend businesses; the magazine sold at twenty-five cents a copy.

The course, and the date conflict: The founding year prints as a conflict and is not averaged: the Archives and Notre Dame Magazine document the December 1919 first issue; the university's own news office, in 2007, rounds the founding to 1920, "as a monthly humor magazine." The standing the magazine reached is documented in the university's own yearbook: the 1930 Dome called The Juggler "unquestionably one of the leading college comics of the day, and the finest exponent of Catholic humor in the country" — printed as the yearbook's account of it, at that size. Across the decades the magazine absorbed the campus's literary role and shifted to serious prose, poetry, and art; it publishes today as a semiannual student literary and art magazine, the humor magazine's name carried by a literary one. The name also set a dance band going — Casasanta's 1927 orchestra, the Jugglers — which belongs to the music record and is pointed to here only.

Sources

1. Notre Dame Magazine, "Le Jongleur de Notre Dame" — the December 1919 first issue, the Sorin Hall founding by Edmondson, Moynihan, and Cook, Fagan's covers, the twenty-five-cent price, the South Bend advertising.
2. University of Notre Dame Archives — the first-issue cover and the magazine's course to its present semiannual literary form.
3. The Dome (1930), the university yearbook — "one of the leading college comics of the day, and the finest exponent of Catholic humor in the country."
4. University of Notre Dame news office (2007) — the founding rounded to 1920, the conflicting dating.