Online: The Lampoon’s “Transcript,” 1919.

Posted on July 19, 2016 by Cullum Rogers

Unlike later Lampoon newspapers, the “Transcript” looked like (and was) a 9″-by-11″ magazine.

Parody Of: Boston Evening Transcript. Title: “Boston Evening Transcript.”
Parody In: Harvard Lampoon. Date: May 9, 1919. Pages: 16 + cover.
Contributors: None credited. Availability: Online here at Hathi Trust.

The fifth printing’s new cover.

“The old Boston Evening Transcript, conservative, delicate, dignified, and ever ‘responsible,’ served from the mid-nineteenth century until its quiet demise in 1941 as the ‘Bible of Proper Bostonians.’ In 1919 it was the unhappy subject of the one of the Lampoon’s most popular and successful parodies, which went through five printings and sold eight thousand copies, a circulation record not broken until the Literary Digest issue of 1925.” — 100 Years of Harvard Lampoon Parodies (1976), p 36.

“The Lampoon’s effort is a brilliant piece of parody. Sometimes it is a little obvious, and the number of themes upon which it lays unholy hands could have been varied with advantage. But the headlines and memorial notices are alone worth the price of admission; and the editorial is so like what the Transcript actually preaches — it is perhaps rather better written — as to suggest that it was contributed in all seriousness from the Transcript office. … But the main thing, at the moment, is to send a copy of the Lampoon to every Transcript subscriber.” — Harold J. Lasky in the Crimson, May 12, 1919.

The “Transcript” deserved its success. It was filled with the kind of collegiate whimsy the Lampoon usually disdained, and the newspaper format kept the jokes brief and frequent. The 1919-20 Lampoon staff couldn’t boast a Robert Benchley (class of 1911) or Robert Sherwood (’17), but it cemented a tradition: After the “Transcript,” the Lampoon produced a parody issue, usually in the spring, every year for the next quarter century.

The ‘Poonies weren’t the first Harvard men to mock the Transcript. Two years earlier, in Prufrock and Other Observations, T. S. Eliot (’09) had watched the approaching evening:

Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript.

In his nine-line poem named for the newspaper, Eliot sketched Transcript readers as life-avoiding shut-ins. It’s simultaneously harsher and more subtle than the Lampoon’s parody, but both exploit the paper’s reputation for enervated propriety, and both succeed at what they set out to do. Prufrock and Other Observations changed the course of modern literature; the Lampoon’s “Transcript” made a lot of people laugh. — VCR

The dead in column 3 include “Harry Josephus Liski” and other thinly disguised Harvard notables. The Lampoon repaid British socialist Harold J. Laski’s kind words in the Crimson next January, when it spent a whole issue trashing him for supporting the 1919 Boston Police Strike. The Lampoon’s own history called the Laski issue “Red-baiting,” “blatantly anti-Semitic” and “Lampy’s Blackest Hour.”

The Harvard Lampoon’s very first “Life,” 1896.

Posted on July 16, 2016 by Cullum Rogers

The Harvard Lampoon's first Life parody, 1896.

Parody Of: Life. Title: “Life.” Parody In: Harvard Lampoon.
Date: March 26, 1896 (Vol. 31, no. 1), pp. 10-11. Length: 1 page (on 2 Lampoon pages).
Contributors: W. Ames ’95, J.P. Welch ’97. Availability: Lampoons from the 1890s turn up periodically (pun) on the web; good luck finding specific issues.

“Life, a national comic weekly founded by Lampoon graduates, was the perfect target for the very first magazine parody, which appeared in a regular issue in 1896. Later that year the Crimson was parodied for the first time and other magazines were assailed in turn by the ‘Lampy’s Contemporaries’ series.'” — Harvard Lampoon Hundredth Anniversary Issue, February 1976, p. 8.

The real Life in 1896.

Life the humor magazine — sometimes called “the old Life” — was launched on Jan. 1, 1883 by a group of Harvard grads, two of whom, Edward S. Martin and John Tyler Wheelwright, had helped start the Lampoon seven years earlier. The two magazines stayed close: Life began as a kind of national Lampoon, so to speak, and as Life’s circulation grew the Lampoon began to resemble its offspring.

This displeased the Crimson, which wrote sternly in 1887: “The [Lampoon] is a college paper and should retain its character as such and should not aim to be a cheap copy of a paper that has no more originality or excellence than is found in Life.” The Lampoon echoed the “Crime’s” putdown of Life in the parody’s “Editorial,” which took some nerve: Life had started running one-page parodies of Punch, The New York Tribune and others under the heading “Some of Life’s Contemporaries” in 1885. The Lampoon’s only variation 11 years later was to drop “Some of.”

Two items from the Lampoon’s “Life.”

Unlike its rivals Puck and Judge, which ran full-color political cartoons every week, Life stuck to chaste black and white and affected to be above party politics. Editor John Ames Mitchell advocated Good Government by the Better Sort of People, a kind of Gilded-Age version of Limousine Liberalism. He hated vivisection, child labor, and impoverished English Lords who cynically marry beautiful American heiresses for money. The last is an oddly specific issue, but Life was obsessed with it.

The Lampoon pits Life’s Charles Dana Gibson (left) against Punch’s George du Maurier.

Robert Benchley and Gluyas Williams targeted Life’s foibles in 1911 in the Lampoon’s first issue-length magazine parody, then went on write and draw for the real thing in the ’20s. But when they and other members of Algonquin set moved to a new magazine called The New Yorker, the Lampoon’s affections followed. The Depression killed Life’s ad revenues, and it folded in 1936 after selling its name to Time Inc.’s new picture magazine for $92,000. Thirty-two years later, ‘Poonies Henry Beard, Doug Kenney and Rob Hoffman quarterbacked a parody of that “new” Life, which got them thinking of producing a second national Lampoon. It debuted in April 1970, this time with the “N” capitalized. — VCR

Spy’s 10-Magazine Parody Pack, 1991

Posted on July 13, 2016 by Cullum Rogers

Vanity Fair and People as spoofed by Spy, 1991.

Parody Of (in order): Vanity Fair, People, The New Republic, Architectural Digest, Esquire, Rolling Stone, New York, GQ, New York Times Book Review, Harper’s.
Title: “Coming Soon to a Newsstand Near You.” Parody In: Spy, August 1991. Pages: 9. Contributors: Uncredited. Availability: Not hard to find.

Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter launched Spy in 1986 as a new kind of humor magazine, one that would mock New York’s rich and powerful by snarkily dissecting their actual behavior rather than making stuff up: “Not parody, [but] satire,” the prospectus said. But parody’s ability to make satire look believable proved too tempting to resist, and after a few years Spy took to running pieces that were fact-based without quite being real, like 1990’s Annual Corporate Report from the Gambino crime family. Another, more fanciful feature (“A Casino Too Far,” August 1990) used fake newspaper clippings to show Donald Trump’s fall from mogulhood to bankruptcy over the next six years. If they’d just looked a few decades further …

Spy, Aug. 1991, p. 45.

Spy’s “Coming Soon to a Newsstand Near You” also peered into the future, but only a few months, and only to cover an event everyone knew was coming: the September 1991 publication of Harlot’s Ghost, Norman Mailer’s much-ballyhooed novel about the CIA. On Spy’s newsstand, Mailer’s 1,300-page gobstopper is mere grist for the editorial mill. “Harper’s” counts the book’s four-letter words for its Index. “People” probes Mailer’s love life, while “GQ” and “Architectural Digest” grade his clothing and shelter. “Esquire’s” Jim Harrison can barely hear Mailer over the burble of his own gastric juices, and “Vanity Fair’s” Nancy Collins turns what should be a portrait of the artist into an advertisement for herself. In the broadest and funniest bit, Jan Wenner drops names, diet tips and the conversational thread in a “Rolling Stone” interview with his clearly bored subject:

JW: “You know what Mick does to stay fit? One weekend a month he does nothing but drink carrot juice.”
NM: “Mick?”
JW: “Jagger.”…
NM: “The ectomorph? With the articulated rib cage?”
JW: “Yeah. Now, you wrote The Executioner’s Song, right? …

Spy's parodies of Rolling Stone and New York

Spy’s “Rolling Stone” and (inset) “New York.”

Salman Rushdie in the “Times Book Review” and Leon Wieseltier in “The New Republic” are almost as self-absorbed, though they name-check Musil and Doctorow rather than Jagger. The navel-gazing climaxes with a gossipy “New York” magazine item about the story behind Wenner’s interview with Mailer that doesn’t even mention the book. And it’s not like those who do stick to the subject have much to say: A running gag shows each publication struggling to make something out of the same ho-hum Mailer remark: “A damned fat old man, that’s what I am.”

The parodies range in length from a few sentences to double-page spreads and are visually and typographically impeccable. As always with Spy, some of the choicest bits are in the tiniest type: Headlines on fake mini-mag covers include “The 50 Greatest Fretless-Bass Players” (“Rolling Stone”) and “The Oreo Returns” (“New York”). Humor magazines regularly ran multi-title “Burlesque Numbers” like this in the 1920s and ’30s, but for some reason they fell out of favor after World War II. Spy’s “Newsstand” is proof the old formula still has life in it. — VCR

Tiny covers from p. 45, enlarged.

A mysterious “Newsweek,” 1963

Posted on July 7, 2016 by Cullum Rogers

The real Newsweek on a “vicious” parody, Jan. 13, 1964.

Parody Of: Newsweek. Title: “Newsweek.” Parody By: Unknown.
Date: “November 18, 1963.” Pages: Unknown. Contributors: Unknown.
Availability: Vanished from the face of the earth, AFAIK.

1963 fake Newsweek cover. Of all the magazine parodies I’ve heard of but never seen, 1963’s anonymous “Newsweek International Edition” is the most puzzling. Calling it “a vicious piece of propaganda,” the real Newsweek for January 13, 1964, laid out the few facts available: “Purporting to be the Nov. 18, 1963, issue of Newsweek with a cover picture of Sen. Barry Goldwater, the hate pamphlet is a mishmash of doctored photographs and inflammatory captions in French and English, apparently designed to foment race hatred and anti-American sentiment. A number of copies were mailed from Europe, but efforts to track down the publishers and distributors have been unsuccessful.”

Newsweek offered $1,000 for info leading to the perpetrators, but apparently no one collected; the magazine never mentioned the parody again. A UPI wire story from the same month said that copies “had been sent to foreign embassies throughout the world. There was no return address and the fake copies bore postmarks from different European cities.” The parody’s use of French and its focus on “race hatred” suggest it might have been intended for readers in France’s former African colonies, but that’s just a guess.

I’m more confident that whoever created this “Newsweek” either hadn’t seen the original recently or assumed potential readers hadn’t. The cover resembles a typical Newsweek from 1949 or ’50, when its lopsided-red-border-and-square-photo format was new and not yet plastered with boxes and banners. Newsweek began stripping away this effluvia in 1961 and by mid-’62 was running full-bleed covers topped only by its underlined name, as in the real November 18, 1963, issue shown here. Whatever his(?) talents as a propagandist, the creator of “Newsweek” was no great shakes as a parodist. — VCR

Harvey Kurtzman’s “Sporty Illustrations,” 1957

Posted on July 4, 2016 by Cullum Rogers

Will Elder’s SI cover in Trump #2, March 1957.

Parody Of: Sports Illustrated. Title: “Sporty Illustrations.” Parody In: Trump magazine. Date: March 1957. Pages: 10. Contributors: Harvey Kurtzman, Bernard Shir-Clif (writers), Will Elder, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee (art). Availability: Reprinted in Trump: The Complete Collection (Fantagraphics, coming August 30, 2016).

Real SI, 1956.

I’ve had my hopes dashed before, but it looks like Harvey Kurtzman’s Trump is finally being reprinted 60 years after its brief run in 1956-57. Trump was the carrot Playboy’s Hugh Hefner used to lure Kurtzman and most of his artists away from Mad. The year before, Kurtzman had convinced Bill Gaines to turn Mad into a 25-cent magazine, but he still wanted more control and a bigger budget. Hefner offered both, but the sudden death of Collier’s in December 1956 spooked his bankers. Despite strong newsstand sales, Trump died after two issues, which quickly became collectors’ items. Thanks to Fantagraphics, new readers can now enjoy Kurtzman’s most elaborate magazine parody, “Sporty Illustrations.”

Launched in August 1954, Sports Illustrated was the first new magazine from Time Inc. since Life, and it took an upper-middle-brow approach to what most publishers considered a low-brow subject. Irreverent Time-Lifers christened the new mag “Muscles.” To erase that image — and the doubts of high-end advertisers — the early SI devoted as much space to yachting, ballooning, dog shows and other snooty pursuits as it did to ball games: In the first year there were two covers on bird-watching.

Two pages of Mad's article on sports magazines.

Mad #32 (April 1957), art by Bob Clarke.

All this was catnip for parodists: The Dartmouth Dart’s “Spots Illustrated” appeared just four months after SI’s first issue; by June 1956, college humorists at Valparaiso, Ohio State, Maryland and Annapolis had followed suit. Almost simultaneously with “Sporty Illustrations,” Mad #32 mocked “Sports Sophisticated” in a feature asking, “What’s Happened to Sports Magazines?”

Kurtzman gets in his own digs at the idea of a sports mag for people too well-bred to sweat: Al Jaffee’s photo roundup includes rich Texans spurring Sherpas up Everest and an “action” shot of a chess match. A column of ads drawn by Will Elder ends with a biodome-like golf cart the player never has to leave. The one piece on a popular team sport is Bernard Shir-Clif’s reconstruction of President Taft throwing out the first ball of the 1912 season.

Davis’s climbers and Elder’s puffers in “Sporty Illustrations”

The chief delights of “Sporty Illustrations” are its absurdity and its art. These come together beautifully in a two-page feature, drawn by Jack Davis, that takes one of early SI’s favorite visual motifs — the full-page, full-color photo of Not Much — and gradually morphs it into a Canadian Club ad.

Al Jaffee's bullfight art for Sporty Illustrations.

Al Jaffee mocks SI’s early taste for arty photos of uncommon sports.

It’s rare for a parody of a slick magazine to feature art as slick as its target’s, but Davis, Elder and Jaffee were at the height of their powers for Trump. Jaffee’s “artistic” bullfight picture actually is that, and Elder’s six-panel “Sgt. Bilker” strip is both painterly and cartoony, an early glimpse of the style he used in “Little Annie Fanny.” Davis’s art in particular is miles beyond what he was doing for Mad just months earlier.

Perhaps some of Kurtzman’s dissatisfaction at Mad grew from a belief that Davis, Elder and others (including himself) could only do their best work on a canvas worthy of their talents. If so, Trump’s two issues were enough to prove him right. — VCR

Harvey Kurtzman’s “Daily Poop,” 1954

Posted on July 2, 2016 by Cullum Rogers

Front page of Mad's Daily Poop.

Parody Of: The New York Daily News. Title: “Daily Poop.”
Parody In: Mad comics #16. Date: October 1954. Pages: 6.
Contributors: Harvey Kurtzman (writer), Jack Davis (art).
Availability: Findable. Reprinted in The Mad Reader (Ballantine, 1954), Mad, Vol. 3, No. 13-17 (Russ Cochran, 1987), Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad #6 (E.C. Publication, Spring 1999), The Mad Archives, Vol. 3 (Mad, 2012) and maybe elsewhere.

Harvey Kurtzman’s “Newspapers!” in Mad #16 is basically a six-page takeoff of the New York Daily News, but it’s preceded by a warning to comic book readers that tabloid journalism’s focus on sex and violence is corrupting American adults. Though clearly a satire of the 1950s anti-comics crusade, Kurtzman’s loathing of the prurience and vulgarity of the tabs is obvious, and his parody is cold-eyed, precise and damning. (So damning, in fact, that it subverts the story’s moral: If comic books are no worse than tabloids like this, maybe they should both be banned.) Even the name “Daily Poop” evokes a not-so-subtle Swiftian revulsion.

Proto-trolls commenting in the “Poop.”

The “Daily Poop’s” typeset text and four-column layout reflect Kurtzman’s growing desire to escape the comic-book format and put out a “real” humor magazine. He got his wish the next year, after the same anti-comics crusaders mocked in “Newspapers!” ran E.C.’s other titles off the newsstands, leaving Bill Gaines practically no choice but to convert Mad into a 25-cent magazine beyond the reach of the Comics Code Authority. It’s funny how these things work out, sometimes.

Parts of the “Daily Poop” are silly in the usual Mad way, such as an ad for “Nu-Mal-Trition,” the new weight-loss miracle that “merely knocks you unconscious for days on end.” Elsewhere, Kurtzman and Davis use Mad’s anarchic clutter to portray a society rapidly devolving toward mindlessness: Celebrity gossip crowds out news; movie ads shrink to pictures of lips and one-word titles (“Dames,” “Love,” “Kill”); letters to the editor grow shorter and angrier until all they convey is threats of violence. The world of the “Daily Poop” is a lot like Idiocracy’s. Or ours. — VCR

1954-mad16-poo4-sm

1954-mad16-poo-ad1-sm

The Not-So-Annual Parody Issue

Posted on June 30, 2016 by Cullum Rogers

Purple Parrot's American Home and the Duke'n'Duchess's Dook.

The Purple Parrot’s “American Home” (1945), the Duke’n’Duchess’s “Dook” (1949)

Remember my scare-quotes in the last post regarding “annual” parody issues of college humor magazines? I used them because most college hu… I’m tired of typing that … most CHMs, even in their 1920s-50s heyday, didn’t put out a major parody every year.

(By “major,” I mean a full-length parody of a national, or at least non-student, publication. This rules out every collegian’s favorite punching bag: the campus newspaper. Such papers are so ripe for parody that, in the absence of a CHM, student journalists will gleefully do the job on themselves, usually on April 1 or in the last issue before exams.)

The Harvard Lampoon's 1968 Life parody. The Harvard Lampoon may be the source of the “annual” misapprehension. Early on, its parodies really did appear every year: 27 in the quarter-century from 1919 to 1943. (Here’s a list.) They also came thick and fast in the ’60s, including “Pl*yb*y” (1966) and the brilliant but money-losing “Life” (1968). Since then, the Lampoon has produced a national parody roughly once every four years, and the intervals are getting longer. In the past 25 years there have been only two: “Premiere” (2005) and “National Geographic” (2008). Today’s ‘Poonies would rather parody best-sellers like The Hunger Games and websites like The Huffington Post, which inspired 2014’s online-only “Huffington Psst.” Links to the “Huffington Psst” no longer work, but copies of the Lampoon’s 1917 “Vanity Fair” still do. Advantage: print.

Others with long parody streaks include the Yale Record in 1954-67, the Ohio State Sundial in 1947-60 and the Stanford Chaparral in 1949-61; Chappie’s run ended with an item called “Layboy” that got the mag shut down for a few years. No doubt more examples are tucked away in college archives, but I suspect they’re exceptions. In every complete(ish) CHM collection I’ve examined in person or online, the parody issues are distributed fairly randomly. Four examples:

Though the Ohio State Sundial (1911-73, with several interruptions) had a good run in 1947-60, its only full-length national parody in the three decades before that was “Vague” (i.e., Vogue) in May 1924. After the early ’60s, Sundial struggled to produce any issues on a regular basis, let alone parodies. The most recent resuscitation attempt was made in 2011-12.
Despite being a mixed humor-feature mag, the Northwestern Purple Parrot (1921-50; online here) put out five major parodies in its first 21 years, then got the bug and did nine in a row from 1942 to ’50. Its more feature-oriented successor, Profile, produced only one, “Esquirk,” in 1952.
The Duke University Duke ‘n’ Duchess (1936-42, ’46-51) did three full-length parodies in its eleven years. Two were produced by the same staff: “Esquire,” in November 1940 and the “D&D New Yorker” the following March. The third was put together quickly in November 1949 to answer a Look magazine photo-feature on homecoming at rival UNC. Called “Dook … ‘n’ Duchess,” it aimed its venom mainly at the Tar Heels; the Look format was only a vessel. D’n’D’s successor, Peer (1953-69), produced only one notable parody, a 1967 spoof of the local Durham Morning Herald.
The Missouri Showme (1920-63 with many interruptions; online here) was famous in college-humor circles for producing talented cartoonists and barnyard humor. The latter earned it several suspensions, though in the end it died of neglect rather than persecution. In the 29 years it did appear, Showme issued only two full-length parodies: “Strife” (i.e., Life) in February 1937 and the “Saturday Evening Pest” in November 1950. Later parodies of Confidential (“Confidental,” October 1957) and men’s adventure mags (“Sweat,” February 1961) were briefer and made little effort to duplicate their targets.

Covers of the Missouri Showme's Post and Sweat parodies.

Perils of parody: Showme’s 1950 “Pest” and 1961 “Sweat.”

Showme’s experience proves how tricky parody issues can be. “Sweat” was neither well-done nor popular, but its aroma of he-man raunch was strong enough to get the magazine shut down for over a year. “It included a parody of the life of a house-mother … who tried to trap a male janitor in the laundry,” co-editor Dale Allen said later. “University house-mothers were outraged by this affront to their dignity. They demanded that the university cease publication of this scandalous sheet … [and] the publications board … pronounced a death sentence.”

The “Pest,” on the other hand, succeeded editorially but failed commercially. It was Showme’s most elaborate parody at 52 pages, some enhanced by spot color; highlights included a nonsensical short story by editor-in-chief Jerry Smith and convincing imitations of famous Post cartoonists by artist Glenn Troelstrup. “Unfortunately, the very costly issue was late in arriving, and [was] sold on the worst day of the week for student activity on campus. It was quite a monetary loss,” Smith recalled. Promo ads had promised the “Pest” would be Showme’s “First Annual Parody,” but instead it was the last to fill a whole issue. Who knows how many “annual” parodies at other schools ended up in the same position? — VCR

The Most Parodied Magazine?

Posted on June 26, 2016 by Cullum Rogers

Parodies of Life, The New Yorker, Playboy and Time.

College parodies from Missouri (1937), Yale (1961), Arizona (1955) and Penn State (1928)

(WARNING: The following observations are based on the author’s own haphazard — though extensive — collecting and are informed speculation, not gospel. It is even possible his list of Most Parodied Magazines is imperfect and should include Confidential, Liberty, Mad, National Geographic, Police Gazette, Popular Mechanics, Rolling Stone or Vogue. Further research is called for, as they say in grant proposals.)

What is the most parodied magazine of all time? Playboy thinks it is, but magazine parodies were popular decades before Playboy. The ’20s saw an explosion of “Burlesque Numbers” on campus and in Life and Judge. College mags put out “annual” parody issues — sometimes decades apart — until they fell on hard times in the ’60s everywhere but Cambridge. Newsstand parodies spiked in the early ’30s and boomed in the ’70s and ’80s in the wake of National Lampoon.

New Yorker parodies from Duke (1941), Ohio State (1947), Punch (1954) and Harvard (1976).

Titles from The Harvard Law Review to Strictly Elvis have been spoofed multiple times, but only a few can draw parodists year after year the way a flame draws moths. My own list contains an even dozen, only four of whom are contenders for the Top Spot. In order of appearance (or reappearance after major surgery), the eight runners-up are:

Ladies’ Home Journal (1883)
The Saturday Evening Post (revamped 1897)
Reader’s Digest (1922)
Esquire (1933)
TV Guide (1953)
Sports Illustrated (1954)
Cosmopolitan (revamped 1964)
People (1974)

The Journal was the first magazine with one million subscribers; the Post the first with twice that. Their oversize pages were thick with four-color ads and the best illustrations money could buy, which likely made some would-be parodists despair of getting a likeness. Similarly with Esquire, though its risqué content in the ’30s and ’40s led many collegians to plunge ahead regardless. Spoofing the Digest or TV Guide in normal-sized magazines posed an unwelcome choice: Print the parody separately (expensive), or run it sideways, two-up (awkward). SI, Cosmo and People are among the top targets of the past forty years, but they missed all or part of college-parody era.

Playboy parodies from Texas (1956), U. Mass (1964), West Point (1965), and Berkeley (1966).

So who are the top targets? Chronologically, the Four Most Parodied Magazines Ever are:

Time (1923)
The New Yorker (1925)
Life (1936)
Playboy (1953)

The top twelve share three qualities that appeal to parodists:

Familiarity: It’s no fun imitating something nobody recognizes. All these magazines except The New Yorker and Esquire achieved multi-million circulations, and all except Life and People ran at least sixty years. (People will reach that milestone in 2034; Life’s logo still turns up on newsstand specials.) All are, or were, Top Dogs in their respective categories: There are ten parodies of Time for every one of Newsweek, and the ratio is similar for Playboy over Penthouse and Life over Look.

Personality: Parody thrives on distinctive voices and viewpoints: the tortured syntax and “jeering rancor” of early Timestyle, the folksy certainty and small-town conservatism of Reader’s Digest. A strong personality also keeps a magazine from vanishing up its own genre. There are many parodies of movie, scandal and pulp-fiction mags, for instance, but few target one particular title. (Science-fiction parodies, on the other hand, tend to be very specific.)

Adaptability: A “magazine” was originally a storehouse, and the most parodied can accomodate a huge variety of goods in many sizes. Ten of our twelve could plausibly run a story on any subject, though some would skew it toward a particular demographic; the other two cover television and sports, which barely restricts them. Parodists also favor magazines that run many pieces of varying lengths and styles rather than a few long ones; they’re more likely to tackle the New York Times Book Review than the New York Review of Books. The New Yorker is a partial exception here, but its air of detached, worldly amusement was a model for four decades of college humorists, and the urge to try on Eustace Tilley’s monocle often proved irresistible. It still does, if this summer’s “Nuë Jorker” is any indication.

Despite that, The New Yorker isn’t THE most parodied magazine. Neither is the other third-place contender, Life, though the first full-length parody appeared within months of its debut (the Missouri Showme’s “Strife,” February 1937). Playboy is comfortably ahead of both, but hasn’t inspired a notable parody in the U.S. since “Playbore” and “Playboy: The Parody” fought it out on newsstands in 1983-84. Which leaves Time.

Mock Times from, top row: Annapolis (1928), Harvard's Advocate (1932) and Lampoon (1941), Dartmouth (1948), Ohio State (1948); bottom row: Alabama (1952), Davidson (1953), Punch (1960), National Lampoon (1984), Emory (1998).

Mock Times from, top row: Annapolis (1928), Harvard’s Advocate (1932) and Lampoon (1941), Dartmouth (1948) and Ohio State (1948); bottom row: Alabama (1952), Davidson (1953),
Punch (1960), National Lampoon (1984) and Emory (1998).

The Penn State Froth’s “Froth Time” of January 1928 is the earliest Time parody I’m aware of. The Navy Log and Yale Record piled on the same year, and in the late ’40s and ’50s parodies of Time popped up on one campus or another almost every month. The Harvard Lampoon issued four between 1941 and 1989. At the other extreme, in 1953 Davidson College’s Scripts ‘n Pranks slimed Time in its only full-length parody ever.

Newsstand mags that have mocked Time include Vanity Fair (in 1933), Ballyhoo, Punch, Esquire and National Lampoon. The New Yorker’s 1936 “Time, Fortune, Life, Luce,” written by Wolcott Gibbs in maliciously heightened Timestyle, is thought to be the most reprinted magazine parody ever. It’s certainly the most quoted: “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind” supplied the title for a Gibbs anthology only a few years ago. Just recently, Tom Connor and Jim Downey (“re-Wired,” “Is Martha Stuart Living?”) released a 64-page one-shot with “President-Elect” Donald Trump inside the famous red border.

In February 1952, the University of Alabama Rammer Jammer celebrated the school’s centennial with its “first 100% parody issue,” called, appropriately, “Tide.” (One contributor was a junior named Gay Talese.) “We had several national magazines in mind before we struck our colors to Time,” editor Leo Willette wrote. “Though a good portion of our readers had heard of The New Yorker, only about ten percent ever read it with anything approaching regularity…. Comparable shortcoming manifested themselves with Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, True, Argosy and most of the spectrum of reading fare. In Time, we assume, the student will find a familiar friend. Then, too, Time (1) has a style not difficult to interpret and copy; [and] (2) gives outlet for a potpourri of short, easily digested chunks of gripes and gags….”

What more could a parodist want — except, maybe, a centerfold? — VCR

Aardvark’s “National Reactionary,” 1964

Posted on June 22, 2016 by Cullum Rogers

Aardvark magazine, Winter 1964

Parody Of: National Review. Title: “National Reactionary.”
Parody By: Aardvark Magazine. Date: Winter 1964. Pages: 3
Contributors: None credited.
Availability: Not online; hard to find elsewhere.

In the early 1960s, a number of college jesters around the country independently had the same idea: Why not move off-campus, where Deans and Publications Boards hold no sway, and turn our anemic humor rag into a slick, money-making, grown-up magazine? The results included Bacchanal in Texas (1962), Charlatan in Florida (1963-66) and Aardvark in Chicago (1961-64?). They weren’t particularly slick, and none made money, but they displayed early work by Gilbert Shelton, Jay Lynch and other future stars of underground comics.

Aardvark was going to be the humor magazine at Chicago’s Roosevelt University until the Powers That Be saw the first issue. Shut out at home, founders Jeff Begun, Ron Epple and Howard R. Cohen decided to broaden their reach to all the city’s campuses. Aardvark survived for at least 11 issues (the last I know of is Vol. 3, no. 2, from 1964) and at its peak was distributed from Madison to Urbana. Its strengths were sharp writing and smart interviews with humorists including Mort Sahl and Shel Silverstein; its handicaps included cheap paper, sloppy layout and ugly columns of typewriter-font text.

That’s not a big problem for “National Reactionary,” whose target was no designer showcase itself. Aardvark‘s parody limits itself to National Review‘s cover and two pages of front-of-the-book material, including table of contents and “In This Issue” column, an efficient way to mock a publication’s editorial matter without having to replicate much of it. The humor is broad — changing “Buckley” to “Cuckold,” for instance — but not deep. The main running joke has the “Reactionary” lauding largely forgotten troglodytes like Gerald L.K. Smith and Father Coughlin. Most NR readers had other heroes in 1964. (Strangely, the parody makes only one brief mention of Barry Goldwater.) A couple of items satirizing conservative unease over the civil rights movement are funnier and more pointed: “New facts just brought to light: … American Negroes, although they speak a different language, are, in appearance, identical to Cuban Negroes. Cuban Negroes are strong advocates of Castro’s bloody communism.”

Maybe “National Reactionary” was a victim of circumstances. On one page its date is given as “October 22, 1963″— exactly one month before John Kennedy’s assassination — but on the next there’s a reference to Lyndon Johnson being president. If Aardvark’s “NR” was planned and largely written before JFK’s death, the editors might have found themselves cutting a lot of suddenly inappropriate material just before going to press. That could explains the parody’s truncated feel and its reluctance to poke fun at current public figures. As always in comedy, timing is everything. —VCR

Two pages of Aardvark's National Review parody

More New Yorker parodies online

Posted on June 19, 2016 by Cullum Rogers

New Yorker parodies from Northwestern and Dartmouth

New Yorker parodies from Northwestern (1942) and Dartmouth (2006).

In case “The Neu Jorker” doesn’t sate your appetite for fake New Yorkers, here are two more you can read in their entirety online:

Parody Of: The New Yorker. Title: “The New Yorker.”
Parody By: Northwestern Purple Parrot. Date: February 1942. Pages: 36.
Contributors: Portia McClain, Mary Ellen Sams (editors), et al.
Availability: Online here in the Northwestern University Library.

College humor magazines flourished from the 1920s through the ’60s. Now that most are safely dead, the same institutions that barely tolerated them alive are digitizing the remains. Northwestern University, for one, has a nearly complete run of the Purple Parrot in its online archive. The Parrot (1921-1950) was not so much a humor magazine as a general-interest mag with a large humor section, but in the 1940s it imitated a different publication almost every year. In February 1942, it chose The New Yorker.

The Parrot‘s version — called, oddly enough, “The New Yorker” — is more an impersonation than a parody: The “Talk” items, articles and reviews concern Evanston, Illinois, rather than Manhattan, but they’re straight-faced and factual. The “Profile” is of future TV star Garry Moore, then a young local radio emcee; and the “Department of Correction” is a real letter complaining of errors in the previous issue. Like most collegiate parodists, the Parrot crew easily nail The New Yorker‘s typeface and layout but can’t touch the effortless-looking professionalism of its art. Some of the cartoons are funny enough to overcome their visual awkwardness, but overall the Parrot’s “New Yorker” has more to offer Northwestern alums than parody buffs.

"My Face," from Dartmouth's 2006 New Yorker parody

“My Face,” by “John Terwilliger” (Mike Trapp) in “The Nü Yorker.”

Parody Of: The New Yorker. Title: “The Nü Yorker.”
Parody By: Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern. Date: Fall 2006. Pages: 28.
Contributors: Cole Entress, Fred Meyer, Alex Rogers, Owen Parsons (editors), et. al.
Availability: Online here at the Jack-O-Lantern.

The Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern‘s “Nü Yorker,” unlike the Purple Parrot‘s, is all fake and strictly for laughs, from Jerry Lewis’s letter to the editor (“I respectfully request … that neither my social security number, nor a photostat of my birth certificate be reprinted in any subsequent issues”) to the caption contest featuring Jacko‘s favorite running gag, “Stockman’s Dogs” (two canines drawn in 1934 and present in nearly every issue since). Notably funny pieces include “Letter From A Truck Stop Outside Neola, NE: This Place Sucks”; a deranged “Profile” of a poor guy named Jack Napier who can’t convince the author he’s not the Joker; and a wonderfully pretentious poem, “Skipping Cultural Stones on the Sea of Aspersions.”

The Jacko folks don’t show much interest in parodying specific writers and artists, and in the “Talk of Town” they don’t even bother to use The New Yorker‘s detached, distinctive editorial “we.” Some of the cartoons are so aggressively dumb they’re funny, but too many look like they were drawn with chewed toothpicks; they’re out-of-place amid the clean design and cleverly faked ads. Such flaws are easily outweighed by the silliness of a piece like “My Face” (above) or a “Shouts and Murmurs” column made up entirely of voices murmuring and shouting. College humor mags were the breeding ground for this type of crazy/clever whimsy, and “The Nü Yorker” revels in it. — VCR

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