Spy and Kong

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.