Lucy Louse is the hot new doll all the little girls want. Her high-tech scalp actually produces head-lice larvae, so young mommies-to-be can practice gently combing nits out of Lucy’s silky hair.
When James Clunie wrote a blurb about Lucy Louse in his satirical newspaper the Parenteer, he figured no parent in their right mind could possibly think the doll was real.
Wrong. Just as many readers of The Onion fail to get the joke, a handful of people failed to be amused by his story.
“Can’t wait till every kid in school has to have their heads shaved because someone brought [the doll] to show and tell,” fumed one mom on The Parenteer’s Facebook page. “So wrong and so stupid,” commented another.
Then there was Clunie’s farcical story about a home-schooled 6-year-old joining a solitaire team. A made-up quote from a psychologist claiming “all home-schooled kids end up in jail for some horrific, perverse crime,” enraged one woman, who wrote: “I have nieces who were home-schooled, and they got a superior education to any public school.”
Such misunderstandings are a hazard of the job for Clunie, a father of two who writes and edits The Parenteer from his Upper West Side home.
“It’s pretty amusing when people get the wrong end of the stick,” he says. “People can get a little riled up about things that relate to their kids. It’s a shame because being a parent is supposed to be fun, but the whole thing has gotten so serious.”
Luckily for Clunie, plenty of fans share his offbeat humor, which pokes fun at political correctness and lampoons helicopter moms. Everything from breast-feeding in public to the city’s fabled Gifted and Talented program is ripe for send-up.
It’s become so popular that the print edition of the tabloid-size free newspaper he launched in April 2011 — with a distribution of 8,000 copies in cafes, stores and apartment buildings — recently evolved into a Web version.
One thing’s for sure, Clunie will never be short of material.
“Parenting in New York is such a natural place for comedy,” observes the 36-year-old. “It’s a hilarious world, whether you’re having to go on play dates with other parents you hate or trying to get your kid into the ‘right’ school.”
Most of his inspiration comes from everyday experiences. An article headlined: “Scientists Still Searching for Cause of ADHD,” was triggered by the ExerSaucer of his adorable 19-month-old daughter, Marcelle. (An ExerSaucer is a gadget-ridden “activity center,” which would send even the most passive baby’s brain into overdrive.)
Meanwhile, a story titled: “Is Purell Slowly Killing You?” derides the paranoia over hand sanitizer.
Other contributions are more risqué. There is an article, for example, about a fictitious homophobic father from Staten Island who is nevertheless relieved when his gay son reveals he’s a “top.”
Not surprisingly, hipster parents are prime targets for Clunie’s jokes. “They’re the kind of people who dress their kids in Ramones and
CBGB T-shirts,” laughs Clunie, who recently wrote a column about a stubborn child named Carter who refused to comply.
“You know that the kid is saying: ‘I want to wear Thomas the Tank Engine,’ but they’re saying: ‘No, no, you’ve got to wear this black T-shirt with a bunch of dorks on it, and you have to like Wilco.’ ”
Clunie knows his spoofs would likely bait Brooklyn’s “crunchy granola” brigade, which regards childhood and parenting as a sacred rite of passage. But a quirk of architecture has limited his exposure in neighborhoods like Park Slope.
“The area is mainly brownstones, so you don’t have the high-rise apartment buildings with lobbies [where copies would be stacked],” he says.
He didn’t have the same problem with the hive-like Upper West Side, where “The Parenteer” has earned cult status. To Clunie’s relief, most people see the funny side. Though slow to catch on, a handful of advertisers even came onboard, including the breast-feeding and lingerie store “The Upper Breast Side.”
“The owner loved the paper and wrote out a check on the spot,” says Clunie. Online, automatically generated ads come from larger retailers like Target and Whole Foods.
Clunie quit his six-figure, full-time job at BBDO ad agency to become a freelancer last year. His long-term ambition is to become a sketch writer for late-night TV shows. (Lisa, his wife, is a 36-year-old ad exec.)
But in true New York uber-parenting style, he admits he was wary about “outing” himself as the editor of such a subversive publication. Clunie waited until his son, Jimmy, 4, was safely accepted into a prestigious Upper West Side preschool before publicly revealing his identity six months ago.
“I was thinking it might not go down well with the admissions director if they knew little Jimmy Clunie’s dad was responsible for all this [snarky] stuff.”
jridley@nypost.com