MADreads

Looking back on SPY magazine

May 14th, 2007 Jim - South Madison

I turned to SPY The Funny Years, a history of the satire magazine SPY, just to glance at it and kill a little time.  I ended up reading this coffee-table tome from cover to cover.

SPY magazine was a particular favorite of mine during its heyday in the late eighties. It rightfully prided itself on being a literate, smart, funny, take-no-prisoners satire/investigative magazine with a penchant for pranks.  It was celebrity obsessed, New York focused, information packed, from time to time obsessively fascinated by minor figures and minutae, but in the end, it usually offered a sharp-eyed perspective on social trends and mores.  No social sphere was exempt from SPY’s gaze;  publishing, academic, art world, and political elites all took a riddling.

According to one of SPY’s founding editors, Graydon Carter (now chief editor at Vanity Fair), SPY was intended as a cross between the very early New Yorker and National Lampoon (the original home of SPY’s other founding editor, Kurt Anderson).  It was unique in that it was a humor magazine that meant to be more than just funny; it made news, and as with all great satire, fostered introspection.

I turned to this history in hopes of finding fondly remembered articles and comics from the magazine.  There is a great deal of original material from the magazine interwoven throughout the book. However, as the title indicates, this truly is a history of the magazine as opposed to an anthology.  There needs to be an anthology. It is the original material from the magazine that really make this book worth checking out.

However, the history offered here is fairly engaging and sadly instructive.  Written by longtime SPY writer George Kalogerakis, it is funny, self-obsessed and self-mocking, and fascinated with absurdity in the style that marked much of the magazine’s articles.  It provides an interesting look into the world of magazine publishing in America. 

Largely financed by a bevy of relatively small investors, in its early years SPY had remarkable editorial independence.  Kalogerakis’ history is a sad one telling of how time and financial necessities gradually robbed it of much of this independence and much of the satiric spirit that distinguished the magazine at the outset.

Entry Filed under: Nonfiction