Newsman Takes Early Retirement to Become Humorist

By: Sonya Moore What makes a real newsman decide to write fake news stories with headlines such as "Crash-Test Dummies Endorse Nader," "Did the President Evade Boy Scout Service?" or "Trump Tells Bush: You're Fired"?

Former editor and columnist for the Portsmouth (N.H.) Herald, John Breneman, has launched a new Web publication, The Humor Gazette, now a month old. "I've known for a long time that I was meant to be a writer," he explains, and perhaps he was destined for something a little offbeat. Back in high school, his piece on wombats received such a favorable response that the school paper was renamed for the furry marsupials.

His career then took him to The York (Maine) Weekly, the Portsmouth Herald, and Cambridge (Mass.) Chronicle. Breneman returned to the Portsmouth Herald in 1998 as Sunday editor, where he continued to write humor pieces.

Breneman, 42, now says he "prematurely retired from real news" to "follow the dream of writing humor for a living." He names Andy Borowitz -- author and writer whose work appears in The New York Times and The New Yorker -- as one of his inspirations, not only as a good satirist, but also as someone who's successfully made a living of the profession.

Though he leans to the liberal side, Breneman says he still tries to maintain a certain balance in his satirical look at politics. "Equal-opportunity satirist" and "ambidextrous" are the self-descriptions he prefers. "I would be doing a disservice if I were too slanted," he explains.

The Humor Gazette began as an archival site for his previous work available for potential publishers. However, he soon decided he wanted the Gazette to be something that really looked and felt like a newspaper, a path followed by other satire publications such as The Onion. And certainly it remains Onion-esque, as this excerpt from a current story on President Bush and gay marriage suggests:

"White House spokesman Scott McClellan explained the president is acting on solid intelligence that gay men possess biologically incorrect weapons and are not afraid to use them. Earlier, in an exclusive interview with the Humor Gazette, Bush confided his belief that gay marriage threatens our way of life because the thought of two men together 'gives me the willies.' When pressed, however, Bush admitted that daydreaming about two women gets him 'a little hot,' unless Rosie O'Donnell is involved."