History by Magazine -- Tina Brown modernizes the New Yorker and Spy gets a social conscience
The snootiest places in the magazine world try to get laughs and Comedy magazine is born without a funny bone.
Cutting-edge humor isn't very cool
Dec. 2, 1993
Last week's issue of The New Yorker alone shows just what kind of impact editor Tina Brown is having since she started remodeling America's premier publisher of East Coast snoot.
Forget such radical Brownian motions as instituting a more-informative index, color photos and letters to the editor. There are three penis-cutting-off cartoons sprinkled among the pages of the Nov. 29 issue.
One of them is actually funny.
Speaking of funny and of purveyors of East Coast snoot, Spy magazine is promising a big redesign, renovation and refurbishing for the spring. It's all part of the new mandate it's given itself to become "a magazine of true dissent."
In an unsigned piece decrying America's obsession with "cool," Spy goes on at great length about what it doesn't like.
That includes just about everything, from the original cooler-than-thou attitude of Spy's founding editors in 1986 to the current King of Cool, Dave Letterman, who's committed the mortal cultural sin of making it hip to be trivial.
Spy says it's tired of the Cool World, of TV and visuals, and of all the ironic distancing that it says passes for humor in America. It's going to get engaged with society.
It's going to ridicule and expose the new establishment (which it defines as the troika of government, tele-media communications monopolies and the celebritocracy).
It sounds like Spy has plans to start exercising something very dangerous — a social conscience.
Based on a reading of this issue's announcement and what we know about Spy's 1960s lib-lefty editor Tony Hendra, that means Spy's satire will probably be freighted with plenty of anti-corporatistism, anti-authoritarianism and communitarianism (see Tikkun magazine, mid-1980s to present).
It should be real funny stuff. Until then, Spy is its still-cool self.
The January issue is pretty strong.
How can anyone complain about Jerry (I was funny for 15 minutes in 1991) Seinfeld and the Clintons as No. 1 and 2, respectively, on Spy's 100 worst people, places and things of 1993?
But humorist Joe Queenan's all-out attack on everything about jazz — "an art form that has been dominated by fat old men in sunglasses" — sure is strange.
One of magazinedom's best freelancers, Queenan seems to know his jazz. He makes fun of jazz snobs, boring 10-minute bass solos and Wynton Marsalis' tiresome lecturing of the unhipped masses.
Fair enough. And we'll forgive him for forgetting Kenny G.
But is Queenan being serious, recklessly provocative or just plain stupid when he savages such jazz icons as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Stan Getz as boring old junkies? It's hard to tell.
It's also hard to tell if he's acting cool or uncool when he says "Jazz sucks." (P.S.: Somebody please clue Mr. Q and Spy's copy editors that Sonny Stitt is dead. Still.)
Meanwhile, the Comedy Magazine has been born in Southern California.
The debut issue has illustrations of Letterman and Leno on the cover and is filled with a massive conglomeration of one-liners, cartoons and hundreds of jokes, plus mini-bios of standup comedians you've never heard of and, based on 'their sample jokes, never will.
Despite large chunks of Leno and Letterman's late-night shtick, the humor quotient is near zero. It's not a bad idea for a magazine, but Comedy's editors are neither funny nor smart nor blessed with enough taste or skill to make it go for long.
Looking through its 120-odd pages for something — anything — that is funny and not finding it makes you appreciate what a truly rare commodity quality comedv is ($20 a year; call (800) 266-3888 if you dare to subscribe).
The magazine market is as free and as rough and tough as they come. Ask Vanity Fair.
You'd think it'd be flying high, what with its ace feature writers and all those Demi Moore covers. But its ad pages were down big-time this year — 20 percent.
Editor Graydon Carter — one of Spy's original founders and the man who replaced Tina Brown after she hopped to the New Yorker — may soon be looking for a new job.
Ad page-wise, one of last year's biggest winners was Harper's Bazaar. Its ad pages jumped 58 percent. The beauty magazine Allure is also booming — up 53 percent.
(By about 1998 I retracted my snide and horribly mistaken remark about Jerry Seinfeld having only been funny for 15 minutes. As penance, I read the New Yorker for three straight months.)