The Bystander is designed to provide a classic print humor magazine experience similar to that delivered by National Lampoon, SPY, Harold Hayes-era Esquire and many others in the pre-internet era.
Issue #2 successfully funded April 21, 2016, with material from even more contributors than the first, including Merrill Markoe, Simon Rich, Todd Hanson, Nell Scovell and a cover by Charles Barsotti.
Instead, it uses social media and crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to gather readers willing to pay a price which reflects the actual printing and shipping costs of each issue.
Calling on friends and colleagues from SCTV and Saturday Night Live, McConnachie received backing from Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Brian Doyle-Murray, Lorne Michaels, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, G.E.
This allowed McConnachie and Managing Editor Jennifer Finney Boylan to produce a 32-page pilot issue for prospective backers, featuring material from John Caldwell, Sam Gross, Jeff Jones, M.K.
"[4] Unfortunately, despite an appearance on the then-new Late Night with David Letterman to promote the project, luck was not with McConnachie, and this early version of The American Bystander never went into production, instead remaining one of the great what-ifs of that generation of comedy.
In 2012, McConnachie and Alan Goldberg approached their friend Gerber, and asked him to apply humor-specific publishing/editing models he'd learned self-publishing Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody and resurrecting The Yale Record to make a new and improved Bystander which combined the sensibility of the '82 attempt with the publishing realities of the post-Internet age.