Heavyweight wit

In some ways, William Steven Humphrey, editor of the 2-year-old weekly Portland Mercury, has never really grown up

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, Aug 30, 2002, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Ask William Steven Humphrey if he’s got a minute, and that’s exactly what you get. The editor of the Portland Mercury slaps a one-minute timer on his desk and sits back in his chair, grinning.

“At the end of the minute, he’s like ‘Now get out of my office!’ ” says Julianne Shepherd, the newspaper’s “arts editrix.” Humphrey also is partial to throwing paper-wrapped gunpowder “snaps” at staff members when they annoy him. “And we annoy him a lot,” she says.

When Portland’s alternative-alternative weekly newspaper, the Mercury, celebrated its second birthday on Aug. 10 with a party, “Hump,” as he’s known to friends, played emcee. He stalked the suitably strange venue, the Eagles Lodge at Southeast 50th Avenue and Hawthorne Boulevard, wearing a black suit and red ruffled shirt. The audience, part of a generation raised on Elvis impersonators, wore gas station jackets and foam trucker caps and sang karaoke.

The boss parties. And apparently the boss is popular.

“Put it this way. No one rolled their eyes when he left the room,” says Sean Tejaratchi, art director of the New York Press, talking of his time working at the Mercury.

Wm. is no wimp

Humphrey says the Mercury’s weird mix of styles and stories is inspired by the Weekly World News and the New York Post’s “Page Six.” In fact, he would like one day to edit a new kind of tabloid. He already has a name for it: TABLOID!

“It would have a lot more gossip, music and movie reviews geared down to a younger demographic,” he says. He throws out some theoretical headlines: “ ‘Burt Reynolds cancer scare?’ No. ‘(Rapper) Ludacris sleeps with hootchy-mama?’ Yes!”

Humphrey is a funny guy Ñ but a particular kind of funny guy: He listens. “I’m really good at response kind of comedy,” he says with a gentle twang. “Like if you said something I could riff off that, but I don’t think I could just stand up and say something funny.”

Mercury columnist Dan Savage Ñ who also is editor of the Seattle Stranger Ñ says he likes Humphrey because “he takes such pleasure in pleasure. É He’s mature, and he’s a little boy and he’s a disgusting pervert all at once.”

Mark Zusman, editor of Willamette Week, the target of much Mercury mockery, says dryly, “I admire how a fortysomething can use the word ‘pee-pee’ as much as he does.”

Incidentally, Tim Keck, co-founder of the national satirical newspaper The Onion, and Humphrey’s former boss at The Stranger, claims that Humphrey is 38; Humphrey claims that he was born “36 years ago or thereabouts.” His sister says he’s 34. Go figure.

Zusman continues: “I like the Mercury; I like how they don’t take anything seriously.”

Seriousness is an issue at the Mercury. Humphrey says the writing on music is serious and points to a recent story on spousal abuse as evidence that not everything is a joke.

In any case, the atmosphere at the office is playful. Humphrey works in a former bedroom on the top floor of an unmarked wooden house at Northwest Raleigh Street and 23rd Avenue, which still smells of cat urine from earlier days. To the delight of his staff, he has to hide from time to time from a disturbed woman who calls him a pornographer and is convinced he has stolen all of her money.

“He’s the funniest person I’ve ever met,” Keck says. “It seems like the funnier people are, the meaner they are, but Steve’s just a sweet guy.”

Southern boy

Something of a Kevin Spacey look-alike, Humphrey got his “Midnight in the Garden of Evil” drawl growing up in Gadsden, Ala., 40 minutes north of Birmingham. One of a long line of boys called William in his family, he started calling himself “Wm.ª Steven Humphrey” after writing about how McDonald’s tried to copyright the word “delicious.” His childhood, he says, was “very suburban, very Southern.”

His sister, Glynice, says he was a funny, sensitive boy.

“We’d vacation in the Smoky Mountains every year and buy these Indian drums,” she says. “And Steverino would dance to them, then freeze in outrageous poses. Our parents were really quiet and reserved. I’m sure they wondered where it came from.” His dad worked at the local Goodyear plant for 40 years, rising high in the union. (His Harley-riding elder brother, Darrell, still works there.)

Glynice adds that as a child, Steve was fixated on the Farrah Fawcett-Majors swimsuit poster in his bedroom. The budding thespian also had a clubhouse under the stairs where he wrote plays that he talked his friends into performing.

At college in Illinois, Humphrey studied drama, writing comedies and staging a musical sock-puppet version of “Macbeth” with characters from popular culture. At this time he met Savage as well as the founders of The Onion in nearby Madison, Wis.

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