Alice Kahn in 1986. STEVE RINGMAN
‘They wanted to laugh with her.’
When Hannah Kahn would walk with her famous mom, Alice Kahn, through Berkeley past Peet’s or the Cheeseboard as a child in the 1980s, she was constantly annoyed at how often they would be stopped.
“I just couldn’t get her down the block,” said Hannah, explaining that it felt like everyone in Berkeley wanted to talk to Alice about her recent stories, get a take on something or just connect about the everyday things she spotted and made funny. “They wanted to laugh with her.”
A features writer and essayist for the East Bay Express and a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle who was nationally syndicated in the ’80s and early ’90s, Alice may be best known for popularizing the term Yuppie (Young Urban Professional Person) — and for making fun of the Yuppies. She also made much use of the term “Gourmet Ghetto,” famously interviewed the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia (after he turned down the Today Show) and frequently captured the nation’s cultural zeitgeist.
It’s more than appropriate that Alice’s journalistic work — which was so Berkeley, despite her Chicago roots — will be honored at UC Berkeley Journalism with what’s believed to be the nation’s very first endowed journalism master’s fellowship for students who intend to use humor or satire in their work.
The Kahn Family
The fellowship was established with gifts from Alice’s immediate family that were matched by Berkeley Journalism alum Angela Filo (’00) and her husband David Filo, creating The Alice Kahn Journalism Masters Fellowship Endowment. Friends and extended family made donations in Alice’s honor, too, making the endowed fellowship possible.
“Humor and wit aren’t just ornaments; they are essential tools for journalists to bridge divides, earn trust and make hard truths more accessible,” said Michael D. Bolden, dean of UC Berkeley Journalism. “The Alice Kahn fellowship is here to stay — or at least until the world finally loses its funny bone.”
The first two Alice Kahn master’s fellowships were just awarded to rising second-year student Chelsea Kurnick (’27) and incoming student Angela Torres (’28).
“Humor is a technique for stepping outside of our official voices and noticing and highlighting some of the offbeat,” said Peter Sussman, a former longtime San Francisco Chronicle editor who hired Alice to write columns for the paper’s Sunday Punch section. “Alice was brilliant at that. So much of journalism is written to formula, and there’s nothing formulaic about Alice.”
Alice, who is 82 and living with dementia, wrote scores of feature articles and columns, most of which irreverently captured the essence of parenting, marriage, culture and life in the Bay Area. Her books, which are mostly collections of essays and columns, include “Multiple Sarcasm” (1985), “My Life as a Gal: Memoirs, Essays, and Outright Silliness” (1987), “Luncheon at the Café Ridiculous” (1990), and “Fun with Dirk and Bree” (1991), a comic novel that featured Yuppies. The family donated her archive of publications, memorabilia and unpublished manuscripts to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. Her husband Ed organized over 500 of her “faded yellow clippings” and had them digitized so that all of her work would be accessible to students and the public.
In a mid-1980s television clip, Alice has a mischievous smile on her face as she chats breezily with national talk show hosts and explains that she had once intended to be a “mad poetess and sit in a cafe with a beret and write verse” — until she “looked in the paper and found that the offerings for poetry were very scanty”.
“[Instead] I became a teacher of teenagers, trying to foist poetry down the throats of adolescents,” Alice said, pausing slightly for the punchline, “which really gave me a deep loathing for both teenagers and poetry.”
In one of several national interviews — she was on “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross half a dozen times — Alice said she never set out to be funny.
“I said I’m going to sit down and describe the world and the world being this incredibly bizarre funny place that we all found out that it is. I just tell the truth.”
How Alice began to ‘let her freak flag fly’
Alice grew up on the West Side of Chicago, the daughter of a theater manager and accountant, a “pencil man” who did paperwork for the Capone organization, whom she would sometimes tag along with on his nighttime wanderings around Chicago. She and Ed met in high school: He was a serious math and science student and she was the class clown. She earned an undergraduate degree from Columbia University in 1965 and accompanied Ed to the Bay Area where he went to UC Berkeley for his graduate studies. She pursued her teaching credential from San Francisco State.
Alice and Ed had their first Berkeley apartment on the corner of Vine and Bonita before buying Country Joe McDonald’s home down the block on Bonita and later moving near Grizzly Peak.
Emma Rhodes and mom Alice in Provo Park in 1984.
Alice was working as a nurse practitioner three days a week and raising her daughters, Emma and Hannah, when she started to freelance in the early 1980s. Her first two stories were about unusual women — one about lawyer, musician and local politician Anna DeLeon and another about a traffic reporter named Jane Dornacker, who later died in a helicopter crash. Alice’s features in the East Bay Express were followed by her piece headlined “Yuppie!” which thrust her into a national spotlight. This encouraged Sussman to recruit her to the Chronicle and led to a New York agent, book deals and speaking engagements.
“She got a lot of encouragement from that and decided to let her ‘freak flag fly’ as the saying goes,” said Ed, an economist who was in the energy business. “And so she felt she had a lot to say and she went about doing it, and it gave her a lot of satisfaction.”
Decades before remote Zoom-life, Alice spent her first years as a Chronicle columnist working from her home office. Ed suspects her editors preferred it this way because she could be anti-authoritarian in the newsroom.
“Whenever she would be pissed at me or the world, she would just go out for a run and feel better,” said Ed, who explained that he and Alice got into running like everyone else in the world in the early 1980s. And of course that habit made it into one of her essays called “Upwardly Mobile,” about running up to the Berkeley Hills from the flatlands.
Her daughters landed in columns, too — much to her eldest daughter Emma’s dismay
There was the column about 13-year-old Emma, generally a good kid, who sneaked out with friends to a party that involved drinking — and getting caught.
“I both loved and hated her career,” said Emma Rhodes, a journalist who lives in London. “I loved it because it was so cool and different and especially because she was ahead of her time as a woman who always worked and created many careers.”
Ed says he and Alice brought economics to bear in placating Emma: “paying her for damages.”
“Every time she’s in a story, she gets some money,” explained Ed about the couple’s strategy. “Emma and I disagree about this, but I claim I invented this plan and most importantly, I named the price because I wanted it to be enough — so it was like not just a quarter — but I didn’t want to be taken to the cleaners.”
Hannah said she would sometimes get dropped off at a friend’s home by Alice and be greeted with “‘Is your mom with you? Oh, tell her how much we love this article. Oh, we laughed so hard.’”
Alice Kahn’s speech at the 1989 Berkeley High School graduation.
Alice carried around a reporter’s notebook and would often jot notes at the school bus stop and other gathering spots, curious about everything.
“She found those zeitgeist things and she made fun of them and she was unafraid to take risks, politically speaking,” said Hannah. “She was a bit of a ‘shock jock’ — like she would say the thing that everyone’s thinking but might not say out loud. And you know, she harmed some relationships in the process.”
Hannah, Director of Grants Management at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, said this relatable quality drew people to Alice and her writing.
“My mom was a part of every Berkeley and Bay Area family’s weekly experience — of picking up the paper and reading something about life that they could relate to and that they could laugh at,” Hannah said.
Hannah recalled when Abigail Van Buren — the columnist Dear Abby — invited Alice for a visit to her home in Los Angeles. She was a fan. Alice and third-grade Hannah were picked up from the airport in Dear Abby’s stretch limo, got the chance to call friends on the limo’s car phone and stayed at the posh Beverly Wilshire. And of course, Alice wrote a column about the experience.
Was Alice as funny at home as she was on the page?
“This is how funny my mom is,” said Emma. “My mom says, ‘How does a girl from Berkeley rebel against her parents? She goes to the Midwest and joins a sorority and gets an MBA….and then she marries a guy who’s working at Fox News.’”
This was all true. Emma has an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University’s Medill and was a TV news producer before she pursued an MBA from Columbia University, married David Rhodes — a journalist and media executive who was vice president of news at Fox News Channel, president of CBS News, and now CEO of Sky News in London.
Alice Kahn and family at the wedding of Emma and David Rhodes at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan in April 2005.
David says he and Alice had a special connection, often writing lengthy emails and stories to each other. He noted that Alice was funny, yes, but also brilliant at uncovering cultural moments as sort of “an early warning system.”
He said Alice would call herself a “sit-down comic” versus a “standup comic,” meaning she could find the absurdity in small things. He particularly loved her essays about the challenge of taking a bus in Los Angeles and or finding a women’s bathroom without long lines at a concert venue.
He also noted her unique writing style — something you certainly can’t get from AI-generated content.
He said that now is the perfect time for a fellowship devoted to humor in journalism given that the field, he says, is too “self- serious.” He also said a California-based fellowship fits for honoring Alice.
Alice’s daughters both mentioned the cathartic nature of recognizing their mom’s work while she’s still alive, but they also noted the pain and poignance of the “long goodbye” to a loved one with dementia. It’s not easy.
“Part of what’s so heartbreaking about dementia is that people can’t access her anymore,” said Hannah. “They can’t have a conversation with her anymore….I’ll just be honest, people don’t know what to do with your loved one when they’re in that state.”
Hannah said the fellowship felt like a way for friends and family to connect with and honor Alice.
The Kahn family pictured with UC Berkeley Journalism Dean Michael D. Bolden and Assistant Dean for Advancement Steve Katz in January 2026. Photo: Marlena Telvick
Ed is also working on a project to publish some of the unpublished manuscripts that he uncovered while organizing her materials for the Bancroft Library.
“There is a compelling story in these papers about fallout from the political turmoil in the radical Berkeley of the 1960s. It captures her narrative voice in a more contemplative manner than satirical journalism,” said Ed. “This is all that’s left of her voice.”
About the fellowship and papers at The Bancroft, Emma said: “It’s helpful for our family. As we’re saying goodbye, we’re also continuing her legacy.”
— Andrea Lampros
Upcoming Events
24 Jun
Sacramento Alumni Meetup
