Being an Ivy League student is serious business, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t laugh a little,” says Frank Lesser ’02. An art-semiotics concentrator from Columbus, Ohio, last year he helped revive the Brown Jug, a long-defunct student humor magazine that debuted in February 1920 and boasted such notable alumni as S.J. Perelman ’25.

The original Jug stopped publishing in 1933, only to reappear briefly in the 1960s before being revived again last fall. Lesser and several other students had taken charge of Exit 20, another student humor magazine, and decided to rechristen it in order to reflect a change in editorial direction.

“We wanted it to be more along the lines of The Harvard Lampoon, but of course better,” says Lesser, who now serves as editor. This year the magazine hopes to publish two issues per semester, offer subscriptions, and develop a Web site.

As in its original incarnation, each issue of the new Jug will be based on a theme. Last spring the magazine satirized the Brown social conscience and the many faces of rejection, and Lesser and his colleagues are on the prowl this fall for new pretensions to deflate.

Now if only students could lighten up. “Sometimes people don’t understand satire unless its labeled ‘satire’ in 78-point, bold type,” he says.