Randy Cassingham’s Sly Asides on News Stories That Are Stranger Than Fiction Have Made Him an International Hit on the Internet
By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times, January 3, 1996
Randy Cassingham cracks up over the one about the Detroit woman who clobbered a would-be car thief into broken-legged submission with her Club anti-theft device.
He laughs out loud over the greedy Coney Island, N.Y., principal indicted for stealing ceramic statues made for charity by kindergartners at his school. And he smiles at the Scottish ex-con who wrote a consumer guidebook on British prisons.
At 36, the lanky Southern Californian has a keen eye for life’s bizarre twists. He’s a regular punch line in search of a joke. And yet he’s never set foot onstage.
Computer keyboard in hand, Cassingham is a humorist for the Information Age, a Internet-savvy satirist and social commentator. The Jay Leno of cyberspace.
Every Saturday from his Pasadena apartment, he assembles wacky wire-service news items and nonsensical newspaper shorts from the mainstream press. Highlighted by Cassingham’s sly asides and caustic comments, the stories make up his syndicated This Is True column, enjoyed each week by readers in 88 countries—popping up, by request, in more than 140,000 electronic mailboxes.
It’s a regular not-necessarily-the-news stand-up routine that has tickled online insomniacs and workaholics from Australia to Austria. In less than two years, Cassingham’s obtuse observations have become among the most popular columns on the Internet.
“This is True,” wrote a Washington Post reviewer, includes “the kind of news items that keep comedians and commentators in business.” Newsweek called it “All the news that’s not fit to print.”
Indeed, Cassingham has never met an off-the-wall news story he didn’t like, never encountered an all-too-serious headline he couldn’t lampoon. Amazingly stupid criminals. Outrageous lawsuits and arguments. People caught in incredibly weird sexual situations. It’s all column material.
“I’m just a sucker for bizarre events,” he says. “I revel in people’s own reactions to the stupid things they do. Most of all, though, I like stories that tell of the comeuppance of people who deserve it, especially criminals.”
Cassingham’s story is the stuff of his own column: He’s the Wrong-Way Riegels of the information superhighway, the computer version of that misguided player from the 1929 Rose Bowl who ran the other way up field.
In a publishing universe scrambling into the Modern-Age computer realm, Cassingham is using his Internet column to break into the dinosaur world of print.
And it’s working.
Magazines from Car and Driver and Adult Video News to Little India, a magazine for Indian expatriates published in Reading, Pa.—as well as newspapers in Europe and North America—have begun printing Cassingham’s weekly musings.
“I always wanted to break into print at the top, not at some Podunk little paper,” says the former college journalism major. “This seemed like the right time to take the information system as we know it and reach out to an international audience.”
International, indeed. They’re laughing in Singapore, Ukraine, Sweden and Ireland. The most recent publication to jump on board is Mladina, a weekly magazine from Slovenia. Add that to Internet readers from Iceland, England and Croatia, and Cassingham has a head start on what could be called the Worldwide Randy Web.
“Why do I like it? Because it’s funny as hell,” says subscriber David Hakala, editor of Boardwatch, a magazine devoted to life online. “It rarely has anything to do with the Internet, which always has appeal around here. What it does is highlight people’s foibles in a way I find both gentle and non-cynical. Randy doesn’t go off on a rant about how stupid one person can be, but he does save me from taking the whole human race very seriously.”
Good press for a Walter Mitty-type techie who once only dreamed of the high-profile life.
Last year, Cassingham was an overworked Jet Propulsion Laboratory technical writer who found that penning user documents for scientists trying to get their experiments aboard the space station just didn’t bring in the laughs.
His only creative outlet was his regular posting of oddball news clippings on the bulletin board at work—replete with his own wise-acre asides. He castrated crooked politicians and beat up the British royal family. Often his sense of humor bordered on sick.
Like the clipping he posted involving the woman who kept her asthma inhaler and handgun under her pillow—until she killed herself by accidentally putting the gun—instead of the inhaler—to her head. Cassingham’s aside: “There she goes, shooting off her mouth again.”
His audience ate it up.
“You’d read it and gasp—Randy’s comments were always funnier than the articles themselves,” says Dotti Johnson, a former JPL worker. “If I was in the office and heard guffaws, I knew he had put up new batch of stories. Pretty soon, people started coming by from other departments.”
He was funny. Brash. Opinionated. And unpublished.
While friends suggested he write a regular column, Cassingham knew the world of print was a tough sell. But he also knew a lot about computers. And that gave him an idea.
Last June, he sent some sample columns to 50 friends with e-mail boxes on the Internet. He advised them to subscribe if they liked what they saw—and pass it on to their friends.
The idea was to build a following and, in turn, a demand. Internet users would get the column free of charge. Everyone else would have to pay for it. Word caught on. Cassingham began spending nights and weekends researching his column—visiting the library, perusing his subscriptions—considering some 200 articles each week. Now he answers from 200 to 400 e-mail messages daily.
Not a day passes that he doesn’t attract at least one new subscriber (would-be subscribers can sign up by going to thisistrue.com).
Cassingham, who also runs his own Freelance Communications publishing company, has even compiled a book (“This Is True: Deputy Kills Man With Hammer—and 500 Other Bizarre-but-True- Stories and Headlines From the World’s Press”).
A few examples of Cassingham’s between-the-lines column nuggets:
“HONOR AMONG THIEVES: A low-security jail in Wetherby, England, was broken into by burglars, who stole a safe containing $1,165, mostly prisoners’ wages. Inmates are now complaining about poor security. (Reuters) . . . Are they sure it wasn’t an inside job?”
Or how about this long shot?
“WANNA BET? Hundreds of soccer fans in Toronto realized that a local sports lottery was still taking bets on soccer games that were already over. Of the 1,940 betting tickets sold, 1,690 were winners. The lottery, which realized the error too late, paid out $800,000 in winnings. (Reuters) . . . Who were the 250 smart guys who bet the other way?”
His razzes of Associated Press headlines are no less cheeky:
“Beats the alternative: Group: Average American Aging.”
Or: “If I lie, let God Stri— . . . Priest Killed by Lightning.”
Marjorie Wells began reading the column during her cancer recuperation. “I was really sick. I couldn’t get out to see any movies or cheer myself up, so having his column come in through cyberspace really cheered me up,” says the Bay Area artist and computer programmer.
“That laughter meant a lot in the awfulest moments. I love his irreverence.”
Cassingham has even gotten some northern exposure: At the 2,500-circulation Ft. Nelson News in British Columbia.
“Everybody loves it,” says publisher Judith Kenyon. “People say, ‘Where does this guy live and where did you find him?’ It’s as though he’s been reading our paper and listening to the radio. He takes the nose of the Information Age and tweaks it.”
Some columns perhaps tweak too far. Such as the one slugged “Really know how to party” about the four Virginia men who, on a prank, were decapitated when they tried to lie down in the tracks beneath a passing train. Cassingham’s retort, which inspired some heckles from readers, “Next week: Wing walking on a 747.”
Undaunted, Cassingham continues to sharpen his politically incorrect sense of humor while he plans for the future: He’s cut back his day job to four days a week and one day hopes to earn his entire salary from the column. He soon hopes to have readers in 100 countries.
Then he’ll be launched, as one friend puts it, “from JPL into outer space.” No one is more surprised at his success than Cassingham.
“My worst fear about writing a column was that I’d discover that I didn’t have anything to say,” he says. “But people have really reacted to the thing. It’s made me realize that I really do have a point of view.”
