Here's my friend Dave Etkin's e-Christmas card. Always a treat.

Todd Jackson has an in-depth interview with Kurt Andersen here. Fascinating, for the seven or eight of us who like that sort of thing. There's a puzzling insistence on Mad Magazine as Spy's forebear, when Spy's lineage is obvious: Private Eye filtered through the graphic sophistication of National Lampoon. Lampoon was Punch's Harvard-educated American cousin; Spy played the same role with Private Eye. Like Private Eye, Spy was a irreverent, sharply written update on the doings of a well-heeled clutch of people on a island they mistook for the center of the universe. I like and admire Kurt Andersen (he blurbed Barry 1, bless him), and I'd love to see him write a book on American humor. He's smart as hell and funny, too. But I think Spy's legacy is mixed.

First off, its central premise was flawed. In our current culture, celebrities are more or less immune to satire (witness the continuing omnipresence of Spy bete noire Donald Trump). A humor magazine devoted to skewering celebrities constantly runs the risk of turning into just another celebrity magazine. That's why Graydon Carter could move from Spy to Vanity Fair so effortlessly. And that move suggests that, far from having an honest conflict within its original brief, Spy's heart was never pure. It didn't want to change the world, New York, or even the media; it simply wanted to be its arbiter, with all the power and privilege that accrues thereto.

This destroys its moral power, the primary weapon of any satirist. In all the interview's yammering about MAD, it doesn't mention that maybe one of the reasons that MAD has survived is because it was created by outsiders (Gaines, Kurtzman and Feldstein) for those eternal outsiders, kids. Gaines wouldn't even allow ads in MAD, that's how pure his heart was. He knew that in a culture dominated by advertising, hucksterism, and hype, MAD had to be beyond reproach.

Of course there was no way Spy could shun ads, even if it had wanted to. By 1986, Spy was the only new humor magazine the American magazine business could generate, because it fit their prejudices about how magazines had to work in the post-TV age--who they had to appeal to, how they had to be published and distributed, et cetera. This locked Spy into having to court the same old advertisers, ones that would always prefer supporting a magazine that didn't antagonize the rich and powerful (like Rolling Stone, or New York, or The NY Times Magazine), as opposed to one that did. And it meant that when it came time for the founders to sell, they would be looking for money from the exact same people they'd been sneering at. Perhaps Spy could've lasted over the long haul if it had used the Private Eye model: a like-minded angel (in the Eye's case, Peter Cook) supporting a constantly imperiled, vaguely disreputable, bare-bones operation. And if my aunt were a man, she'd be my uncle.

Still, Spy was better than nothing, and certainly vastly better than it had to be. Some great writing; consistently excellent design. It was thoroughly itself, which was admirable. But in all the time I read it, I never thought Spy grasped the central lesson of Harold Ross' New Yorker. The New Yorker only appeared to be exclusive. It was actually inclusive; it survived not because Manhattanites read it--they were then, as now, an overserved demo--but because it became a fixture on coffee tables and nightstands in Evanston and Denver and San Francisco. Spy, on the other hand, was genuinely exclusive--it really was for people who knew about The Odeon and the Ochs family and Spee. That's why it was doomed from a financial standpoint.

In the "not its fault" category, Spy also influenced a generation of writers and editors, convincing them that archness, knowingness, insiderness--what lazy-brained media types call "being smart"--was the essence of being funny. (This replaced the old definition which was, of course, being able to make people laugh.) Now, sweating it to make your audience laugh was the worst thing you could do--better to go in the opposite direction, to be affectless, deadpan, blank. Or best of all, ironic: express one thing, imply the opposite, and let the audience figure out the puzzle. The smart ones would follow, and screw the rest. The people who followed Spy confused a nice side-effect of comedy--welding people together through shared affinity--with the whole point of the exercise. "I don't want the most laughs; I want the right laughs." This attitude is catnip to comedy types because it feeds into their resentment towards the audience; it takes away the audience's power, and makes the comedian the decider of what's funny or not. Trouble is, professional comedy is a business transaction, and under those circumstances the customer is always right.

Most people have jobs, and don't have time to decode layers of irony. What's more, they don't need humor magazines that might make them feel stupid, ill-educated, unhip--excluded. That's why Spy gave (and continues to give) the New York media crowd such a boner, and also why it couldn't carve out a sustaining niche from the most literate, most educated, richest mass audience in the history of humanity. Spy and its descendents proceed from the belief that most people would rather watch TV, so they make no concessions to the mass taste, and are content to appeal to small, compulsively literate subgroups. That may be valid as an artistic approach, but it also insures that print's impact on our culture will continue to dwindle. Humor magazines--the best ones, at least--aren't Nell's. You shouldn't have to know the bouncer to get in. When humorous prose is a puzzle, when it's a method of separating out the cool kids from everybody else, I agree with the rest of America: bring on the funny pictures.

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Italian scientists have discovered a way to replace the expensive silicon in solar panels with blueberry pigment You cannot make this stuff up. Whatever else it will be, our future will be indescribably weird.

Saw "The Madness of King George" a night ago and found myself, to my surprise, somewhat annoyed--I usually love Alan Bennett's work. For those of you who haven't seen it, King George III goes mad (historians now believe as a result of the hereditary eyzmatic disorder porphyria). He is tormented by doctors and forced into seclusion by his conniving son. But, just as he's about to be locked away for good, he's given a new doctor with strange, modern methods and is cured.

Okay, nice story, but not true. George went mad periodically for the rest of his life, and the Prince of Wales did eventually take over. So the catharsis of the movie--which is blatantly historical--is fraudulent. Furthermore, the "methods" of the hero-doctor involve slinging the King into a restraining chair (think of an electric chair without the metal cap where all the real business is conducted), then keeping him bound and gagged "until [he] learns to behave." The scene where George, formerly a King in all his confidence, suffers an outbreak of compulsive talking, then walks over to the chair and meekly offers himself to be strapped down, is heartbreaking.

"The Madness of King George" reduces authentic mental illness to a two-year-old's tantrum. It's lesson is that we can conquer anything--if we can just be masters of ourselves. This is a comforting idea. Unless you're gay. Or bipolar. Or mortal.

It's very British of the old school, that locked-down ethos that caused so much quiet suffering, and loud alcoholism. That attitude seems to be changing now, thank goodness, but "The Madness of King George" is nothing less than a paean to the proverbial stiff upper lip. And, in my opinion, a load of bollocks.

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From George W.S. Trow, via an essay about him in The New York Observer: "America is a glory of a country, and a glorious idea for a country, and we would be saved now by the love of it if the idea of the love of it hadn’t been strip-mined and left ugly.”

About sums it up, doesn't it?

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Stephen Metcalfe sums up writer George W.S. Trow and his major work, Within the Context of No Context. It's a reasonably good read for people interested in such things.

The scion of a prosperous New York printing family, Trow was a prime mover in the revivication that turned the Harvard Lampoon from a snotty finals-club tipsheet into something quite splendid. In addition to helping National Lampoon get off the ground, Trow wrote for The New Yorker back when that was more akin to an Oxbridge donship than to magazine work: lifetime employment among a collection of overbright individuals simultaneously more influential than they probably should've been, and yet much less influential than they thought they were.

Reading that back, it sounds harsh; I don't mean it that way. Trow and his ilk were extremely good at whatever it was that they did--you cannot question their seriousness or devotion, and the chasing of the dons from The New Yorker hasn't been an unalloyed good thing. The current magazine's closer connection to timeliness and pop culture, which replaced an unwavering adherence to a completely internal, idiosyncratic, persnickety sense of quality, has given The New Yorker many of the flaws of the current culture...while keeping its Olympian self-satisfaction intact. It's Baby Boomer magic: all of the arrogance and exclusivity, but none of the redeeming seriousness of purpose. The old magazine disdained the mass taste, and this squareness allowed it to champion worthy things that didn't fit into the marketing machines. Now, The New Yorker is as likely to profile Tim Allen as a Nobel Prize winner, and in a world glutted with entertainment, that's not really progress. It's to Trow's credit that he excused himself after Tina Brown arrived. Coming from money allows one to stand on principle; it's one of the things we look to them for, to remind the rest of us that it is possible.

If the decline of the Eastern Establishment interests you, Trow's Context is worth a read; also good is Nelson Aldritch's Old Money. Though the particulars change from book to book, the central thesis is simply this: the Eastern Establishment withered away when it could no longer project a set of values strong enough to compete against the commercial/celebrity culture--what Metcalfe calls "hustler culture."

Coming as I do from more-or-less broke Midwesterners, I have a soft spot for the Eastern Establishment, which was nice enough to let me bed down with them for four years at Yale. But the solidity and memory that it represents to me--a sense of the individual in history that I have such affection for--doesn't really exist anymore. I'll quote Metcalf:

The hustler-elite, meanwhile, converted the old WASP hegemony into a pair of useful minstrels: the preppy and the yuppie. The preppy is the old country club nonstriver who never got the memo and so recluses stupidly within a set of dead social conventions. For her part, the yuppie is all too happy to play by the new rules. After mastering semiotics at Brown, she puts to use her new knowledge by creating content … well, by, for, and about the exciting world of content!

This shift, like most things in life, is a mix of good and bad. On the good side, there's more mobility than ever before--the circumstances of one's birth matter less and less. On the bad side, though, success has shrunken to a single skill: manipulating the media, the masses, or the market. Learning how to work in the world of commerce and celebrity--hardly ennobling pursuits, not really worth the sweat of a lifetime (just ask anybody who's "made it")--has become the only field for ambition.

Here's a bit of proof: at least according to one Princetonian, "starting a revolution" is the same as launching a cross between Rolling Stone and GQ." The youthful hyperbole can be excused--we're all there at some point in our lives, though most of us manage to keep it off the internet. But the dream of celebrity, of stardom through entertainment, is as paltry as it is common. When our best-educated, most able young people cannot think of a finer future than the well-compensated manufacture of shiny objects, something's deeply wrong. Person by person, generation by generation, I fear we'll become unequipped to do the serious work of society. And the worst thing is, we won't know it's happened, until a test comes and we find ourselves wanting, quoting "Seinfeld" lines to the onrushing tsunami. I suspect the homeless and the hungry suspect it's happened already.

Oh well, back to writing comic novels!

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Between Michael Richards and BORAT, there's been a lot of talk lately about comedy and prejudice. I've held out as long as I could, but here's my two cents. Playing a prejudiced character shouldn't get anybody in hot water. Acting prejudiced should.

Each of us can only inhabit one body/identity/gender. If we are virtuous, we try to empathize with others, imagine what it might be like in their skin, but this is an intellectual exercise. It's not very visceral or immediate; it's imaginative. When you add in the immutable preference we have towards ourselves and our own group (however we define that), slippage is inevitable. Prejudice can be tempered by education, shown up by diversity, and soothed by material comfort, but the tendency to deny the essential connectedness--even sameness--of us all is a regrettable fact of the human animal. It's a mistake in perception. Comedy can show this mistake, but it has to show prejudiced behavior to do so.

Humor based on prejudice has always existed, and perhaps this isn't an entirely bad thing: resentment dissipated through humor is resentment that doesn't fuel violence. The trouble, of course, comes when these attitudes leave the barbershop or bathroom wall and become accepted by the culture at large. Outraged right-thinking types primly call for punishment; racists feel emboldened; and the injured parties are justifiably frightened that injury will follow insult.

In situations like this, I think of two things: First, the diagnostic power of comedy. If prejudiced comedy finds widespread acceptance, the problem is with the society--the joke is the symptom of the disease beneath. Symptoms are unpleasant, disgusting even, but they can suggest cures. The outcry over Michael Richards, celebrity idiot, suggests that we're on the right track: people didn't laugh, they got pissed. And that's good.

Feminists disapproved of "woman driver" jokes, but it wasn't ordering people not to laugh that killed them--it was a generation (or more) of parents actually raising their children differently. "Woman driver" jokes proceeded from the assumption that women are inherently less able than men; once that perception faded, there was no joke there. We can only hope that America's racism will attenuate until current comedy involving race seems as outdated as Amos and Andy.

Second, I try to remember the complexity of the comedic game. Is the character Borat anti-semitic? Unquestionably--but he's also crude, unattractive, and vastly ignorant, nobody you'd want to be. Does his anti-semitism help him? No. Is it portrayed as a good thing? No, it reveals him as an idiot. Who are the "Jews" that Borat hates? A weird species of horned shape-shifters where the women lay eggs. Some sort of demon, not human beings of the Jewish religion.

I think I know what Sacha Baron Cohen is getting at with this. The only explanation for the persistence and virulence of an irrational prejudice--whether it's the anti-semitism of Europe, or the racism of the United States--is an insistence that the "other" is nothing like you, another species. And that's insane. In the movie, we see a nice elderly couple running a B&B; Borat sees a pair of horned shape-shifting witches, determined to poison him. Borat is insane; ergo, anti-semitism is insane. Anti-semitism is portrayed in "Borat," and it's shown to be a form of mental illness.

At least that's what I took from it. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

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