Humour magazines: Classic or Dud?

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America has or had Spy and National Lampoon, and comic-based Mad and Cracked. UK has or had Private Eye and Punch, and comic-based Viz. I figure comic ones do okay ("Roger's Profanasaurus" in Viz is ace) but text-based satire mags light no one's fire (Spy going belly-up). Anyone read 'em? Ever? Thoughts?

― AP, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I liked 'The Moon.' Do you know anything about the people who made it? And all those satirical things you mentioned. But then I like the 'Dear Mary' column in the back of the Spectator. And I also liked all those comics (Mad imitators) even though the jokes aren't funny. I've got one that's not even 'Cracked', it's worse. I have a Cracked with the headline 'We Prove Humour Can Be Funny.'

― maryann, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

yeah that was the only funny line that's ever been in that magazine.

― duane z., Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

National Lampoon - 1969-1975 - the most awesome brutality since Swift invented the Irish theme restaurant. If anybody has any copies they want to get rid of, there's the e-mail. Serious.
There was a magazine called 'Crazy' which lasted about 6 months in the 70s, I swear they predated the Farelly brothers by 20 years - gags about masturbation and colostomies, characters with names like "Clyde Smegma", insults like "Go away and keep busy counting the empty whiskey bottles under your mom's bed". Maybe it wasn't supposed to be marketed to under-10s but it was published by Marvel Comics and had really crass, garish covers, so that's who bought it. Most of it wasn't even funny, just disgusting. Kind of like myself, in fact. I think this magazine ruined my chances of developing any social skills for good, as I read it at an impressionable age.

― tarden, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Mad Magazine: Classic, Classic, Classic. The movie and TV satires in particular were very often utterly perfect. I owe them my love of cynicism and self-deprecation. I've been reading them since I could decipher words and sentences. Classic. Unfortunately, in more recent times, they've been moving towards juvenilia.. and a few months ago they started publishing in colour and, worst of fucking all, accepting ADVERTISING. Which, I think, has ruined the whole thing for me. I will never forgive the corporate world for doing this to my own favourite magazine. Fuck you Time Warner. Bill Gaines is spinning in his grave.

― Mitch Lastnamewithheld, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

MAD has *adverts* now???? It hadn't been very good for a pretty long time but that is thee last straw...they no longer deserve to bear the name.
I think the day of purely humorous magazines is long gone, too bad but most modern people would think the very concept is unsophisticated. Like compared to LOADED or something (which actually *is* very "sophisticated", sure, yeah, but the statement "it's very sophisticated" doesn't contradict the statement "IT'S SHIT"...)...

― duane, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

In the continued absence of Ethan, can I just note the Simpsons' take on Mad:

A typical scene. Bart and Milhouse are reading Mad. Bart: "This is so good. They're really dishing it out to this Spiro Agnew guy." cf Also Comic Book Guy's attitude.

One trick in golden-era Spy I really liked — must dig em out/wd I still find it even a tiny bit funny? — was the Homeric epithet gag: that everyone was always referred to by the SAME two-word life-and-worth summary. Only one I can actually remember at this second: "short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump". Every time The Donald (which = another Spy gag, via some goofy thing Ivana once said) was written about, he was introduced and/or journalistically located as "short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump"

I *always* read Private Eye (= war on journalistic clichea) even though I basically detest its crappy snobbery (war only on SOME kinds of cliche). Assume Spy = ditto, snobwise, for 'Murkins, but Brits somewhat quarantined from sensitivity to same, by the Atlantic if nothing else...

― mark s, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Does the Onion count as a magazine? If so, it gets my serious CLASSIC vote. I read MAD as a kid, and I liked the irreverant attitude at times, but the drawings were such shit weren't they? Epecially that one guy (Berg or something) who did that two page spread of toons - that guy could not do a decent drawing of a chick in a tight T-shirt to save his own life. You'd think that kind of stuff would be a mandatory skill from Comic Cartoonist 101.

― Kim, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

The Onion proper is a printed publication, like a small little newspaper. You can subscribe to it. They used to, and may still, feature stories etc. that aren't found online.

What do people think of McSweeney's? I've gone back and forth on it because I am in favor of the "found humor" approach but it's just so fucking arch.

― Tracer Hand, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Contrary to popular opinion, Viz is actually still pretty goo. 'Eminemis the Menace' is a right old larf.

I like the covers to Private Eye. The content of the mag rarely lives up to them though.

― DavidM, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Like Mark I always read Private Eye while loathing its ethos: the endless succession of injokes, highly literary and "We're cleverer than you" element to its humour, and giving certain people names which stick for years on end (W.H. Smugg, Grocer Heath, Paddy Pantsdown etc.) remind me very much of what Tom was saying on ILM about the internal workings of public schools: no wonder it was founded by a gang from Shrewsbury and Oxford, and that a comprehensive-educated friend who writes for it uses terms like "How topping" and calls everyone "chaps" (he's a nice bloke, though). I still like it, but this is 90% due to the campaigning journalism side (Footnotes / In The Back is superb).

― Robin Carmody, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

"highly literary" = pseudo-literary

PE's attitude really has zero to do any "ethos" actually on offer at Shrewsbury, which is as mediocre and sports-nuts and merely lame as most private schools: MUCH more likely it was a mini-hellfire club attitude built up by a tiny clique who happened to be friends there, to protect themselves AGAINST and sneer AT Shrewsbury's ethos. A lot of the most poisonous UK snobbery is intra-class.

(yeah, as in "highly literary" = pseudo- literary: heh heh sigh)

― mark s, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Actually I suspect you're right here, Mark. What I've read about the clique when they first met suggests an uncharacteristically arty / intellectual bunch for a British public school circa 1953 who were at least as snobbish against the sporty LADS as anyone in the school was against THE PROLES (notice Ewing-esque middle-class comic-style use of capitals).

Your take (and probably also mine) on some of PE's jokes: putting in as many literary references as possible without really knowing what they're writing, yes?

― Robin Carmody, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Kim - judging MAD art by *Dave Berg* is like judging the Beatles by a Wings album. I'm really surprised that some comix-art nerd hasn't posted yet & ranted at you at length about this.
Yeah that simpsons take on MAD actually parallelled my own childhood experience of it - reading (& laughing at) satires of things from 10 or 20 years ago - it was ages before it occurred to me, Oh right , the actual current issues aren't very funny.

― duane, Saturday, 16 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Kim- Two words: Mort Drucker.

― Mitch Lastnamewithheld, Sunday, 17 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Other great Mad artists - Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Don Martin ('Mad's Maddest Artist'.)

Mad a bit like the Louis Armstrong of comics - nearly half a century on, almost impossible to grasp just how revolutionary it was when it first appeared (1953?) The number one inspiration for underground comix artists - Crumb, Shelton, Spiegelman etc. Created by an honest-to-goodness genius, Harvey Kurtzman, and pretty much the first mag to satirise the pop cult of the day (and Kurtzman cld be v. savage. As an aside, I recently found a 1965 Penguin Private Eye anthology, and was also struck by how much nastier PE was back then - good and bad thing, 'cos there was plenty of homophobia and anti-semitism, not to mention the philistine loathing of 'big ideas' that still persists in the mag to this day. ) After Kurtzman left Mad, Al Feldstein took over (not a genius, but a 'pro') and created the Mad formula which stopped being funny - oh, thirty years ago? Kurtzman hooked up with Hefner, to create the ho-hum 'Little Annie Fanny' strip in Playboy, but before that they also produced an absolutely gorgeous, full colour humour mag called Trump - a resounding flop, sadly.

Viz facing many of the same probs as Mad - something totally unique, never seen before, now fallen into a rather predictable formula. 'TV Go Home' poss. the first post-Viz 'mag' ?

― Andrew L, Sunday, 17 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

There are tons of great MAD artists, including a few that contribute to the newer issues. I said in the celebrity thread that I'd never met anyone famous, but I did meet some of the staff of MAD in 1995. I was dumbstruck.

― Mitch Lastnamewithheld, Sunday, 17 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Andrew: oh yes, although I think the Eye's exposes of a lot of the worst aspects of the Blair project is them loathing a big idea which fully deserves loathing. But you shouldn't read it for any sort of support of a big idea with greater integrity - you suspect they'd be sarcastic about Estelle Morris or whoever but *sneer* at George Monbiot or Nick Cohen, which would destroy a lot of the point.

I see what you mean, though. They did bite where it hurt in the Macmillan / Wilson period. Compared to then, the joke pages these days are just a few lame pisstakes.

― Robin Carmody, Sunday, 17 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

fourteen years pass...

David Wain directing a biopic of NatLamp cofounder Doug Kenney (Will Forte stars)... Thomas Lennon as Michael O'Donoghue.

http://deadline.com/2016/04/domhnall-gleeson-national-lampoon-co-founder-netflix-film-a-futile-and-stupid-gesture-1201731814/

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/joel-mchale-portray-chevy-chase-880980

― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 7 April 2016 20:27 (nine years ago)

Watched the newish National Lampoon documentary a couple weeks ago. Worth watching if you absolutely, positively need to see as much background footage and historical footage as possible, but you might be better off just tracking down a couple of back issues from the 70s-era run and reading those.

No mention of the weird Altman version of OC and Stiggs either.

― Elvis Telecom, Friday, 8 April 2016 07:17 (nine years ago)

Last year we had a huge book purge, most of them given away to Goodwill, and I foolishly got rid of the Complete NatLamp DVD. Seller's remorse kicked in a couple of weeks ago and I went to Amazon to buy another copy of it — it's out of print and the only seller who has one wants $190.

― Honor thy pisstake as a hidden intention. (WilliamC), Friday, 8 April 2016 12:23 (nine years ago)

FWIW, the whole run is available on the dark web

― Elvis Telecom, Monday, 11 April 2016 07:25 (nine years ago)

Yeah, I found a source after I posted that.

― Honor thy pisstake as a hidden intention. (WilliamC), Monday, 11 April 2016 12:43 (nine years ago)

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