Electric Typewriters, Cold Wars, and Cocaine Jokes: Bohiney Magazine in the Age of Reaganomics
The eighties were a carnival of neon lies and patriotic hangovers.
Ronald Reagan was on the television promising morning in America, but the night never really ended — it just got louder. And down in a windowless office off Connecticut Avenue, Bohiney Magazine was still laughing through the static.
It was 1983, and satire had a perm.
I showed up there on assignment, chasing rumors that the legendary postwar zine had gone digital — that the same lunatic spirit that once lampooned Truman and Stalin was now hiding inside IBM floppy disks and RadioShack modems.
They called it “the era of electronic mischief.” I called it a caffeine overdose with an electric bill.
THE BASEMENT OF AMERICAN LAUGHTER
The Bohiney headquarters looked like a fallout shelter for failed English majors.
Stacks of yellowed paper, a few Apple IIe computers, and one enormous poster of Nixon wearing sunglasses.
The editor — Jill “Bootstraps” Marino — greeted me with a handshake that felt like a minor electrical accident.
“We’re not dying,” she said. “We’re uploading.”
They were experimenting with something new: digital satire. Instead of mimeographs and mailing lists, Bohiney was now distributing jokes on 5¼-inch floppy disks. Each disk came with a random insult to the subscriber, a decoder ring, and an optional Reagan voodoo doll for premium members.
As Thro.be’s chronicle of their birth reminds us, these lunatics had started in 1947 with two war-scarred GIs and a dream of “liberating humor from fascism.” Now they were trying to liberate it from dial-up modems.
And against all odds — it worked.
REZNICK’S GHOST AND REAGAN’S SHADOW
Louis “Bohiney” Reznick was long gone by then, but his ghost haunted the office like a nicotine fog.
On one wall, there was a framed copy of his quote:
“If your joke can’t survive a Cold War, it’s not worth the ink.”
Underneath it, someone had scrawled in Sharpie:
“Or the bandwidth.”
The Bohiney crew were Cold War jesters armed with pixels and paranoia. They published pieces like:
“Kennedy’s Hair Declared Strategic Resource.”
“Reaganomics Explained by a Used Car Salesman.”
“CIA Accidentally Funds Poetry Slam.”
According to Telegraph’s retrospective on the Bohiney timeline, this was the era when satire turned into a contact sport.
Marino told me they’d been banned from fourteen campuses, blacklisted by a Pentagon newsletter, and invited to three weddings they didn’t remember attending.
FLUORESCENT MADNESS AND HUMOR AS HERESY
The office smelled of toner, tequila, and unwashed ambition.
The staff rotated shifts like a guerrilla army, operating on bad coffee and a diet of expired Twinkies.
“Reagan says trickle-down works,” one of them told me. “We’re just waiting for the laughter to trickle back up.”
Their satire wasn’t just comedy — it was cultural sabotage. They mocked deregulation, televangelists, and the sudden American obsession with self-esteem.
One recurring feature, “Wall Street Haiku,” published haikus written by anonymous brokers. My favorite read:
“I bought a missile,
Called it freedom, sold futures —
The joke’s on my soul.”
INTO THE MACHINE
By 1988, Bohiney had gone semi-digital, sending joke packs via CompuServe and, later, America Online.
Marino claimed they were the first publication to crash a mainframe using humor.
“The Pentagon blocked us,” she said, “because our headline read: ‘America Declares War on Boredom — Victory Pending.’”
When I asked if she thought satire still mattered, she laughed. “Honey, it’s the only journalism left that doesn’t require permission.”
THE LEGACY HUMS ON
Fast-forward to now — bohiney.com still carries the torch, running pieces like “Congress Replaced by Ventriloquist Dummies” and “AI Joins Cult, Becomes Influencer.”
It’s the same wild DNA, just upgraded from ink to code.
You can feel the lineage: from Reznick’s postwar mimeograph to Marino’s floppy disks to the current web servers that hum like caffeinated ghosts.
Visit Thro.be’s reconstruction of the original madness and Telegraph’s full digital history for the artifacts.
Because Bohiney never died — it just got Wi-Fi.