Bitten early by the bug (or bat)

I’VE been a devotee of the Weekly World News since the early 1980s, when I used to pick it up on college supermarket runs. It is the sine qua non of tabloids, the paper Francine Prose must have been channeling when she wrote her 1986 novel “Bigfoot Dreams.” Where else are you likely to find stories about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s affair with a space alien, let alone the stunning headline “Scientist Clones Himself ... so he can cheat on his wife!” This is a tabloid that parodies the very notion of tabloid culture, no mean feat in a world where the National Enquirer has become a source of breaking news.

For a taste of the paper’s spectacular magic, take a look at “Bat Boy Lives! The Weekly World News Guide to Politics, Culture, Celebrities, Alien Abductions, and the Mutant Freaks That Shape Our World” (Sterling Publishing: 198 pp., $12.95 paper), a collection of its stories compiled by Executive Vice President David Perel (with an assist from the editors, such as they are). “Bat Boy Lives!” pokes fun at everything from politics (“President Bush has lost his wallet with his driver’s license, daughters’ photos and the secret codes that launch our nuclear weapons, reveals a White House source”) to celebrities (“Oprah to replace Lincoln on $5 bill”). “Scientists claim to have found heaven at the center of the Milky Way galaxy and they have the photograph to prove it!” one story tells us, while another one notes that “Goliath was shot with a .38!”

The Weekly World News may not be (as a friend once claimed) the finest fiction magazine in America, but without it satirical outlets like the Onion and “The Daily Show” would be very different -- if, indeed, they existed at all.

-- David L. Ulin