The former editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Heckler, Jack Stuef (COL ’10), has quite a history of offending people. His time as the editor of the satirical magazine was marked by controversy over a piece that mocked The Hoya for its own controversial April Fool’s Day 2009 issue. Now, Stuef drew the ire of Matthew Inman, the creator and author of The Oatmeal.

In case you’ve never been on the Internet before, The Oatmeal is a fabulously successful webcomic. In a recent article contributed to BuzzFeed, Stuef picked apart The Oatmeal’s success after a panel in an Oatmeal comic featured a rape joke. Although the online community usually worships Inman and his work, this joke was seen as going too far. After a barrage of criticism from Reddit and Facebook, Inman initially removed the offending panel but with the scornful line, “To all those who complained: thank you for censoring me,” he wrote. “It worked.” This, too, was removed and he later apologized.

Aside from bringing attention to the rape joke, Stuef’s article dug up some dirt on Inman’s career. “Unlike most cartoonists, online and off, Inman, 30, came to the profession by way of one of the Internet’s most-hated practices: Search engine optimization tricks. Inman […] was an online marketer who made his name devising quizzes and cartoons aimed at going viral on the web,” Stuef wrote. “But the real purpose of this linkbait was what was hidden inside: search-engine keywords and links to his clients’ websites, an underhanded tactic meant to shoot them to the top of Google.”

Stuef also attempted to show the extent to which Inman’s seemingly small-scale website has expanded into a six-figure business.

“Inman plays into this myth of the solitary, struggling webcomic artist, calling The Oatmeal a ‘one man operation,’ though he employs family members to run his sprawling retail business. When Inman declined to be interviewed for this story, the word did not come from Inman himself, but from his publicist.”

Unfortunately for Stuef, Inman has a knack at deconstructing arguments against him. When Forbes criticized The Oatmeal for a comic extolling Nikola Tesla, Inman tore them up for it. He did the same thing after being sued by FunnyJunk.

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Ever sat down at your friend’s computer, began to type “why” in the search engine, and found Google completing a question you didn’t exactly expect but are happy to know the answer to: “does some poop float and some poop sink?”

Well, of course you have, and former Editor-in-Chief of the satirical newspaper The Georgetown Heckler Jack Stuef (COL ’10) recently started a weekly advice column for New York Magazine’s blog, The Cut, to interpret the thousands of results Google will produce from a simple search. Call him the “Google Whisperer,” he says in his first post.

Confused? Here’s how it works. Stuef receives questions from readers. Using Google, he analyzes the different results to form the most apropriate response. He is, essentially, doing the dirty work and saving us the embarrassment of a strange search history.

“I’m probably the last person anybody should be going to for advice, but if there’s anything worse at it than me, it’s got to be search engines,” Stuef wrote in an email to Vox. ”Yet I think people these days probably consult Google more than any other source of advice, often with bizarre or hilariously poor results. I guess the idea behind the column is to explore that.”

In one of the entries, Stuef takes a question (“My drug dealer keeps asking me out. I don’t want to date him, but I really like him as a dealer. What should I do?”) responds candidly:

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Unbeknownst to most students, last Tuesday, a special election took place to fill a vacancy in the Georgetown University Student Association Senate. With 76 votes, Andrew Foley (MSB ’10) beat out David Lee (NHS ’10), who had 63 votes, for the off-campus seat that Senator Josh Mogil (SFS ’11) vacated when he went abroad.

And, all things considered, Foley is lucky to have won. Lee’s strong showing appears to have been the result of a joke write-in campaign organized by his friends and roommates, including Nick Calta (COL ’10). (At least Lee didn’t win—last year, students elected two joke candidates to the Senate.)

“I’m Nick and I live with David.  My roommates and I (not including David) have decided that he should win the GUSA Senate Special Election happening today,” Calta wrote in an e-mail. “We all agree that based on our experience of living with him for the past 8 months or so, he is a perfect candidate for this position.”

Calta then listed a few promises he expected Lee to make if elected, like “[eating] gummi bears at every meeting (assorted flavors)” and “[throwing] said gummi bears at people he disagrees with.” [Disclosure: David Lee is the former business manager for the Georgetown Voice.]

Senator Andrew Foley was also the beneficiary of a last-minute disqualification of his only other official opponent. The opponent? Recent Georgetown grad and former Georgetown Heckler editor Jack Stuef (COL ’09), who successfully signed up to run in the election. Stuef campaigned undisturbed by election officials for two days despite having graduated in December, living 500-or-so miles away in Michigan, and Tweeting profusely about his campaign on a Twitter feed followed by several Senators.

Read Calta’s full letter and check out a chronicle of Stuef’s campaign after the jump!

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Stuef speaks at last night’s forum

Heckler Editor-in-Chief Jack Stuef (COL ’10) answered questions and tried to explain his point of view on a recent controversial Heckler issue at a forum Tuesday night, while students debated the articles and expressed why they were offended by the satirical articles.

Copies of the Heckler’s article about Hoya staff members holding a Ku Klux Klan-like crossburning were passed out before the forum, and much of the conversation centered on that article.

“The KKK isn’t funny,” Stuef said. “The article is to take the situation to the extreme, to show what is maybe buried in this campus.”

Stuef said that he was sorry for offending anyone, but added that with satire, offending people “comes with the terrain.”

LaMarr Q. Billups, Georgetown’s Assistant Vice President for Business Policy Planning, argued that the Heckler should not have used the picture of a KKK crossburning for the article because its hurtful power.

“This is an image that is deeply rooted in our souls,” Billups said. “In my own lifetime, thousands of people were lynched. Cross were burned in people’s actual yards.”

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From the Heckler‘s blog

Tonight, recent issues of the student satire magazine Georgetown Heckler will be the subject of a student forum planned by students who have found some of its content offensive. Jack Stuef (COL ’10), the Heckler‘s editor, told the Voice last night that he planned to attend, too.

“I haven’t really planned this out yet, but obviously I’ll try to explain who we are and where we’re coming from because I think there’s a lot of confusion as to who the Heckler is and what our point is,” he said.

“I stand behind everything I’ve ever printed and everything I’ve ever written at the Heckler and I’ll continue to do that at the meeting. And I’ll try to explain where I’m coming from and hopefully there will be some understanding.”

The forum will take place in White Gravenor 201A at 8:30 p.m.

Chair of the Working Group on Admissions Ryan Wilson, who is the incoming Chair of the Student Commission for Unity, said the latest Heckler warranted discussion because it had gone too far.

“I think the Heckler missed the mark,” Wilson said. “While the paper strives to give insightful and intelligent commentary on different campus articles, the articles they’ve written over the last couple of months haven’t really done that.”

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The end has come for @JackDeGioia, our humdrum president’s hilarious Twitter doppleganger.  Things began to look grim when the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the University of Texas at Austin’s president’s pseudo-Twitter was shut down last Thursday. According to a tweet from the man behind @JackDeGioia, Georgetown Heckler Editor Jack Stuef, Twitter sent him an email notifying him of the account removal yesterday.

Luckily, Vox was able to get some screenshots of the account so at least the final tweets can be enjoyed in perpetuity:

More after the jump!

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