An Overlooked NatLamp Spoof, 1977

Posted on March 31, 2020 by Cullum Rogers

National Lampoon subscription renewal packet

Did anyone else save this?

The first issue of National Lampoon, dated April, hit newsstands on March 19, 1970. It did not hit my P.O. box in Davidson, North Carolina, however, despite the Occupant being a charter subscriber at the bullseye of the target demo: White, Male, Twentyish, Collegiate, Too Old for Mad but still reading it. Thwarted by mail, I bummed a ride to the nearest newsstand in Charlotte and bought what turned out to be a famously underwhelming debut.

It eventually arrived.

“The April issue seems to be made up almost completely of dull material rejected from the three old [Harvard Lampoon] magazine parodies,” the Crimson wrote, citing “Pl*yb*y” (1966), “Life” (1968) and “Time” (1969). “The National Lampoon will be chalked up as a business failure unless the overall quality of the publication improves soon.” So it seemed: The inaugural “Sexy Cover Issue” sold 225,000 of 500,000 copies printed; the May issue, devoted to “Greed,” sold 120,000.

Both quality and sales picked up fast, but the Circulation Dept. never became a model of efficiency. After years of seeing copies in stores first, I let my subscription lapse and started buying retail. Several addresses later, most likely in the summer of 1977, I received this item in the mail. It’s not quite a magazine parody, but it does make fun of the industry’s most famous marketing gimmick. To my knowledge, it’s never been posted — or even mentioned — online, so as a service to posterity here’s National Lampoon’s “You Should Live So Long” Sweepstakes (fake) and subscription pitch (real).

The outer envelope

It’s modeled on the fat envelopes Publishers Clearing House and others used to send out by tens of millions, promising cash, cars and homes to random lucky-number holders. Finding one’s number and correctly filling out the entry form could involve hours of sticker-peeling, card-scratching and stamp-pasting, all crafted to jolly Occupant or Current Resident into buying short-term magazine subscriptions at steep discounts. Contest rules and federal law might swear no purchase was necessary, but lots of folks were naive or cynical enough to think signing up for six months of Knitting World couldn’t hurt. The final nudge was the separate envelopes for entries with and without orders, the latter often stamped “NO” in huge block letters.

“If your idea of winning a contest is crassly materialistic . . .”

Contestants were right to suspect something fishy: One lawsuit in the 1990s discovered thousands of never-opened “NO” envelopes in an unused office. State attorneys general eventually put most of the sweeps out of business, but it was the magazines that suffered most while they flourished. Back in 1893, publisher Frank Munsey cut the cover price of his self-titled monthly from a quarter to a dime. Sales of Munsey’s went from 40,000 copies to 500,000 in six months and pioneered a new business model: Price the magazine low to draw a mass audience and sell its eyeballs to advertisers at so much per thousand. When TV took off in the ’50s, publishers began hiring outfits like PCH (founded 1953) and American Family Media (1977-1998) to make sure the promised eyeballs were present, even it if meant giving copies away. The salesmen kept most of the money, and the mags got thousands of low-margin, short-term subscribers who seldom renewed. Publishers came to hate this arrangement but couldn’t afford to quit playing the numbers game unilaterally.

The brochure, with clips from 1970-76

National Lampoon mocked the sweepstakes ballyhoo mainly by being honest about the odds: ‘You May Already Be The Grand Prize Winner, Worth Up To $1,000,000! BUT DON’T BET ON IT!” warns one side of the outer envelope; “No Win Necessary To Purchase,” says the other. The mailing isn’t postmarked, but internal evidence sets it between the 1976 Montreal Olympics and the September 1, 1977, “entry” deadline. There’s no direct evidence it was written by the NL’s editors — who in 1977 included Tony Hendra, Sean Kelly, P.J. O’Rourke and Gerald Sussman — but it’s hard to believe the marketing department made the decision to list “Negroes In the U.S.: Have They Outworn Their Welcome?” among the mag’s “fast-breaking stories.” (The same crack was used on the front of the Sunday Newspaper Parody in 1978, though no such story appeared inside.)

The line between editorial and merchandising was blurry from the start at NatLamp: The Harvard founders appeared in subscription ads (“Little Doug Kenney Will Go to Bed Hungry Tonight”), as did later editor P.J. O’Rourke and publisher Matty Simmons, whose “Authorized Signature” is the only name attached. The one trustworthy statement anywhere appears on the back of the return envelope: “Have you enclosed your check and subscription blank?”

Double-page ad from the mag adapted into a poster.

Publishers Clearing House is still around, mostly online; it’s better known today for its Prize Patrol ads at Superbowl time than for its mailings, and magazines are just one product among many. Especially since 9/11, publishers have shifted more of the real cost of their wares onto readers: In 2019, the average subscriber to People paid over $90 for a year (54 issues), or about $1.70 a copy. Still better than the $5.99 cover price, but a long way from four easy monthly payments of $1.79. — VCR

$31 “Grand Prize” = three-year-subscription discount

Parodies of Mad, 1954-2019

Posted on December 12, 2019 by Cullum Rogers

Top: Crazy (1959), National Lampoon (1971), Bijou Funnies (1973), Hans Gamber (1986); bottom: West Point Pointer (1983), Simpsons Comics (2013), Syracuse Syracusan (1957), Esquire (1964)

Some folks can’t handle success. Last year, Mad (b. 1952) passed Judge (1881-1947) to become the longest-lived U.S. humor magazine, newsstand division. This summer, it announced its October 2019 issue — number 9 of the current series — would be the last to run all-new material. Number 10 has since emerged looking just as new, so the obits need updating, but number 9 is still a keeper for its clever recreation of Mad’s mid-’60s heyday.

Cover and 2 pages of Mad Tarantino issue

Tom Richmond channels Jack Davis (left) and Mort Drucker (right) in Mad # 9 (Oct. 2019).

Leo-as-Rick by Tom-as-Jack; cover of the DVD bonus.

The “Special Taratino Time Warp Issue” — actually, the first twelve pages plus covers — began as a prop in Quentin T.’s latest film, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood!, set in 1969. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a fading TV star whose one hit was an early-’60’s oater called Bounty Law. Tarantino commissioned Mad’s Tom Richmond to forge Jack Davis-style covers of Leo-as-Rick for Mad and TV Guide. The job grew to include a five-page Bounty Law spoof, “Lousy Law,” written by Andrew Secundo and drawn by Richmond in a fine pastiche of Mort Drucker’s early duoshade work. (They also did a second, digest-size parody for the film’s high-priced deluxe home edition.) “I was totally blown away by how much screen time [the art got] and how big it was displayed,” Richmond told the Washington Post’s Michael Cavna.

“Lousy Law” is the heart of the “Time Warp,” which also recycles Harvey Kurtzman’s nymphs-and-satyrs nameplate, an early Al Jaffee Fold-In, and real and fake ads. Peter Kuper apes Antonio Prohias’s “Spy vs. Spy” look, and Jon Adams approximates Dave Berg in a “Lighter Side” that links then to now and ushers in the rest of the issue. It’s a good-looking piece of self-kidding nostalgia and a convenient excuse to run this semi-comprehensive list of parodies of Mad. (For parodies in Mad, see here.)

Not present: Cover-only parodies like these from Mod (1981), NatLamp (Aug. 1971), Wax Paper (Oct. 1978), Esquire and Texas Monthly (both June 1992), Weird Fiction Review #3 (2012), and Der Spiegel (July 20, 2019) are discussed nowhere in the text.

The list doesn’t include the dozens of wannabes examined in two excellent books: John Benson’s The Sincerest Form of Parody (2012) and Craig Yoe and Ger Apeldoorn’s Behaving Madly (2017). Nor does it note every publication that morphed a cover subject into Alfred or faked a Fold-In. The following vary in length and quality, but all have some heft: Most run three-plus pages and parody several articles; the handful that don’t have a mock cover are so noted.

J.S. Martin in “MADvocate” (1980)

The cover, “Spy vs. Spy,” Fold-In, Don Martin and “Lighter Side” are the most copied features, by my count. Only the bravest parodists attempt Drucker-style movie satires: The most successful before “Lousy Law” are Ernie Colon’s “Citizen Gaines” in National Lampoon and Jeff S. Martin’s “Seventh Schlmiel” in the Harvard Lampoon’s “MADvocate,” which is by far the best student spoof. Also the briefest.

Parodists have viewed Mad with feeling ranging from adoration to contempt, but their laughter is mostly affectionate. I’ve sorted them into four groups based on attitude and affiliation: the Usual Gang itself, rivals and critics, college humorists, and miscellanous fans.

Parodies of Mad, 1954-2019, . . .

. . . by Mad Itself:

“Julius Caesar,” Mad #17, Nov. 1954, 7 pp., no cover.
“How to Put Out an Imitation of Mad,” Mad #41, Sept. 1958, 2 pp., no cover.
“Some Mad Articles You Never Got to See,” Mad #120, July 1968, 8 pp., no cover.
“Madde,” bonus in Mad Super Special #19, Fall 1976, 24 pp.
“The Book of Mad,” Mad #243, Dec. 1983, 5 pp.
“Mad: Tarantino Time Warp Edition,” Mad #9 (new series), Oct. 2019, 12 pp + 4c.
“Mad: No. 98, Oct. ’65,” bonus in Once Upon a Time . . . In Hollywood! 4K Ultra HD Collector’s Edition, Dec. 2019, 24 pp.

Mad could kid its own formulas but had no desire to share them. In the comic, Kurtzman and Wallace Wood namecheck eleven rivals, including EC stablemate Panic, then break the fourth wall to “point out the various routines” in “a typical-type lampoon” of the 1953 film Julius Caesar. The assumption that Mad pioneered those routines hovers unspoken. By contrast, “How to . . .” openly and sourly attacks Mad-the-mag’s copycats, some of whom sassed back. It’s less a parody than a humor-mag parts catalogue, but it reveals the professional pride behind the what-me-worry facade.

Clockwise from left: “How to Put out an Imitation of Mad” (1958) and “Julius Caesar” (1954), George Woodbridge in “Madde”(1976), a Berg’s-Eye View “You Never Got to See” (1968)

Later self-parodies are less meta. “Some Mad Articles You Never Got to See,” by Frank Jacobs, presents a dozen that supposedly “ended up dull” or otherwise misfired. Most are bland except “The Lighter Side of Death,” a cringe-worthy takeoff of Dave Berg drawn by Berg himself. In “Madde,” the Gang travel back to the Revolutionary Era for some Bicentennial satire. Lou Silverstone does the same for Biblical times in “The Book of Mad,” cramming a Noah’s Ark cover and seven story ideas into five pages.

. . . by Rivals & Critics:

“How To Put Out An Imitation of ‘Angry’,” Thimk #4, Dec. 1958, 1 p., no cover.
“How To Put Out An Imitation of Frantic,” Frantic #2, Dec. 1958, 2 pp., no cover.
“Bad,” Crazy, Charlton Publications, March 1959, 6 pp.
“Special Sophistication Issue: Bad,” Esquire, Aug. 1964, 5 pp.
“Mad,” National Lampoon, Oct. 1971, 15 pp.
“You Know You’re Grown Up When . . .” (article), National Lampoon, Sept. 1977, 2 pp., no cover.
“Mud,” in Trash, Trash Publishing Inc., March 1978, 10 pp.
“Müd,” ed. by Hans Gamber, Maya Verlag, Munich, Germany, 1986, 36 pp.
“Mad” [with “a” inverted], Barf #1, Revolutionary Comics, April 1990, 2 pp + 2c.

Mocking Mad merch in Crazy’s “Bad” (1959) and Trash’s “Mud” (1978)

“How To Put Out an Imitation of Mad” didn’t go unanswered. Loco ran “How to Be A Copy-Cat” in October 1958; the next month Frenzy reprinted bits from Judge, Ballyhoo and the old Life in “How to Take All The Credit For Originating a Humor Magazine.” Thimk and Frantic piled on in December with parodies of the original story. The biggest pushback was “Bad,” a six-page look at “the great humor magazine that invented satire” (sarc.) in This Magazine Is Crazy, by future Mad and television writer Gary Belkin and artist Tony Couch, Jr. It mocks several long-gone features including Bob and Ray’s skits and the t-shirt ad. Trash delivered the most recent assault in its March 1978 debut; “Mud” looks a bit like Mad, but so do the 42 derivative pages around it. Though uncredited, it’s likely the work of Trash editor Tony Tallarico.

Two pages from Esquire’s “Bad” (1964); cover and page of Barf’s “Mad” (1990)

“For some time I too have been intrigued by the idea of doing a takeoff of Mad . . . and I wondered if it could be done,” Mad’s Larry Siegel wrote Esquire after its “Bad” appeared. “Well, I just saw yours, and believe me it hasn’t been done yet.” He went on to call the parody “cruel, vicious” and “more heavy-handed than Mad at its worst,” and ended with: “The guy who did your piece should have studied his subject more. You don’t do a takeoff of Mad simply by filling your article with ‘mainly,’ ‘gang,’ and ‘ecch.'” Siegel was too kind: Mad à la Esquire is an unrecognizable stew of horror comic, gags-and-gals humor and bathroom graffiti. Illustrator Blake Hampton may have glanced at the source material but didn’t bother imitating specific artists.

By contrast, National Lampoon’s John Boni, Sean Kelly and Henry Beard approached the job with the intensity of ex-lovers. Though uneven, their “Mad” (see also here) comes closest to meeting Siegel’s standards — unlike the two-page filler “You Know You’re a Grown-Up When . . .” six years later. Munich’s Hans Gamber translated these and other NatLamp pieces in his spoof of Mad’s German edition, “Müd” (which, with umlaut, means “Tired”). I believe it’s the only Mad parody published outside the U.S. San Diego comic Barf offered humor in a punk-grunge-anarchist vein from 1990 to slightly later in 1990 (three issues); it gave fuddy-duddy Mad the finger in a few snide pages and is mainly notable for beginning on the back cover.

. . . by College Humor Magazines:

“Dam,” Syracuse Syracusan, March 1957, 32 pp.
“????,” Michigan Gargoyle, 1957-58, ?? pp.
“Mud,” U. of Massachusetts Yahoo, January 1965, 32 pp. + 4 c.
“MADvocate,” Harvard Lampoon, April 1980, 5 pp., no cover.
“Grad,” West Point Pointer, May 1983, 23 (of 44) pp. + 4 c.

Pages from Syracuse (1957), cover from U. Mass (1965), back cover from West Point (1983)

Mad was required reading for college humorists in the 1950s and ’60s, but most knew they lacked the chops to make a reasonable facsimile. The Syracusan tried anyway in March 1957, when black-and-white Mad was just two years old. “Dam” contains nearly 30 pages of original illustrated stories; many are funny, but they’d never pass for the real thing. Yahoo’s “Mud” and the Pointer’s “Grad” are cruder, though “Mud” found a clever way around Mad’s plug-free purity in “If Comic Strip Characters Patronized Our Advertisers.”

Two-fifths of the Harvard Lampoon’s 1980 Mad-Advocate merger

The Lampoon’s mashup of Mad with the highbrow Harvard Advocate starts with a strong premise and dispatches it in five brisk pages: Contents, Movie, “Don Martin,” Fold-In. Future Simpsons showrunners Mike Reiss and Al Jean, both ’91, contributed. Gargoyle’s parody is the big unknown: The 1958 Michigan yearbook says “this year’s Garg staff . . . satirized Mad,” but the Michigan Daily’s reviews don’t mention it. Anybody got a copy?

. . . by Fans:

“73,” 73 magazine, Wayne Green Inc., April 1967, 3 pp. + 1 c.
Bijou Funnies #8, Kitchen Sink Press, 1973, 36 pp.
Screw #1013, Milky Way Productions, Inc., Aug. 1, 1988, ?? pp.
Jab #1, Cummings Design Group, Spring 1993, 24 pp. + 4 c.
“Bits and Pieces,” Hustler, Sept. 1995, 13 pp.
Chunklet #14, pub. by Henry H. Owings, 1998, 2 pp. + 2 c.
The Comics Journal, Fantagraphics, July 2000, 3 pp. + 2c.
We’re MAD … about Machine Vision, Cognex Corp., Dec. 31, 2002, 12 pp + 1c.
“D’oh,” in Simpsons Comics #203, Bongo Comics Group, June 3, 2013, 7 pp. + 1c.

Cover and Spies from 73 (1967); opening page from Bijou (1973)

Sometimes, kids who fall in love with Mad grow into adults with access to printing presses; the results can turn up anywhere from porn mags to earnings reports. In 1967, Wayne Pierce drew an Alfred E. Neuman cover and “Ham vs. Ham” for the amateur radio monthly, 73. (The title is short-wave for “Best Regards.”) R. Crumb, Bill Griffith and other heavyweights mocked each other’s creations in the eighth and final issue of Bijou Funnies in the spirit of Mad comics. Editor Jay Lynch wrote an EC-style anti-censorship editorial and parodied Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. The cover was drawn by fabulous though not furry Harvey Kurtzman, who started the whole thing.

Screw (1988)

Screw’s August 1, 1988, front shows owner Al Goldstein grinning gap-toothed beneath the headline “Alfred E. Neuman’s Sex Secrets” as his old pal Bill Gaines vomits in the background. (Don’t ask how Screw treated people Goldstein didn’t like.) Inside are a long interview with Gaines and X-rated spoofs of Berg, Martin and the spies. Those features also turn up in Hustler’s 1995 salute, along with “You Know Your Girlfriend’s a Slut When…” and similar delicacies. It’s one of the longest Mad parodies at thirteen pages and captures Mad’s look and rhythm, but the humor ranges from juvenile to hateful and too many panels are “improved” by ‘shopped-in nudes.

Chunklet was a music and comedy magazine out of Athens, Georgia, known for its putdowns of “overrated” acts (basically all of them) and unhurried schedule (twenty issues in fifteen years, the last in 2008). Issue #14, undated but copyright 1998, says “completely Mad” up front but delivers only a bleakly funny “Pomo Spy vs. Pomo Spy” by Ted Rall and an advertiser’s Fold-In. There are clues that a longer parody was planned and dropped: Chunklet.com calls #14 “The Mad Magazine Issue, a.k.a. The Cease & Desist Issue.” The cover of The Comics Journal #225 was painted by Kelly Freas, Mad’s cover artist from 1958 to 1962; TCJ also imitated Mad’s contents, letters pages and Fold-In to plug interviews with Jaffee, Jack Davis and Al Feldstein.

Chunklet’s cover and Ted Rall’s pomo Spies (1993); TCJ’s cover and Fold-In (2000)

Cognex Corp. of Massachusetts makes robotic gadgets that can see defective products on assembly lines. In 2002, founder Robert Shillman got so “MAD about the negative effect of the worldwide economic slowdown” he made it the theme of the company’s annual report. The usual one-pagers are present, all involving gags about machine-vision quality-control systems. Highlights are the uncredited Norman Mingo-style cover and the very idea of doing such a thing. Jab was a humor mag out of Birmingham, Alabama, in the early ’90s that doubled as a sampler for publisher Frank Cumming’s design firm; all four issues contain Mad-like illustrated satires, but only #1 makes the connection explicit.

Mad parodies by Jab, Cognex and Simpsons Comics

Covers from Jab (1993) and Cognex (2002); “Don Martin” by Cognex and Simpsons Comics (2013)

Simpsons Comics #203 may be the most loving tribute: The lead story is about Krusty the Clown’s attempts to profit off Bart’s hand-drawn comic book “Bad” (renamed “D’oh!” because the title was too close to goth monthly “Sad”). The flip-side samples “D’oh” itself, bending the usual Simpsons line just enough to hat-tip Drucker, Martin and Aragones. Bongo Comics shut down last October after Simpsons Comics #245, and Mad is tottering, so I’ll close with the final panel of “The Rise and Fall of D’oh.” —VCR

Bicentennial Burlesques, 1975-76 (and 2008)

Posted on July 12, 2019 by Cullum Rogers

Louis Glanzman’s portraits of Jefferson and Washington on Time‘s 1975-76 specials.

In addition to bringing tall ships and fireworks, the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976 provided a perfect excuse to swell the nation’s small stock of 18th-century magazines. Time‘s special issues were the most impressive, representing two years work by 26 researchers and writers. “Independence,” dated July 4, 1776, came out in May 1975 with a vulpine Thomas Jefferson on the cover; it was sent to 4.7 million subscribers and sold 1.3 million copies on the stands. “The New Nation” did nearly as well a year later. Dated Sept. 26, 1789, it led with the start of George Washington’s administration and the passage of the Bill of Rights. Names making news in other sections include Adam Smith, Voltaire and Captain Bligh of H.M.S. Bounty. Though too straight-faced and factual to qualify as self-parodies, the past Times can’t help resembling souvenirs from an elaborate masquerade party.

National Lampoon‘s Hamilton had no use for “radical nonfenfe.”

The 199th Birthday Book (1975), a National Lampoon newsstand special edited by Tony Hendra, is not as overwhelming as NL‘s high-school yearbook and Sunday newspaper parodies, but it takes the same care with details and leaves few patriotic icons ungored. Its bogus artifacts include an 1876 Electoral College humor magazine, “The Spittoon,” and three pages of Kiplinger-style investment tips from a hard-nosed Alexander Hamilton unlikely to inspire any musicals.

Mock-colonial scenes by Norman Mingo and George Woodbridge in Madde (1976),

“Madde,” a 24-page, comic-book-size “Centennial Year [sic] Collectors’ Item” in Mad Special #19 (Fall 1976) subjects the whole Revolutionary era to the Usual Gang’s usual treatment. (I’m still not sure Dave Berg was entirely in on the joke when he did “The Lighter Side of Valley Forge.”) The Onion, founded twelve years after the Big Whoop, did its bit in 2008 with a 225-year old, eight-page issue dated October 6, 1783, early in the nation’s first post-war era. “40,000 Pounds of Slave Have Been Lost at Sea,” one headline announces — a bit of deadpan brutality worthy of the 1794 “New Times.” —VCR

The 1783 Onion (2008), with Ben’s latest brainstorms.

Playboy Parodies 2: U.S. Newsstands, 1957-2018

Posted on December 3, 2018 by Cullum Rogers

Two competing Playboy parodies; three inside other mags; two from foreign parts.

(This is the second of a now three-part series on Playboy parodies. The first dealt with college parodies; the next will cover parodies circulated outside the U.S.)

Unlike their college brethren, commercial publishers in the 1950s and ’60s showed little interest in parodying Playboy. Theft was another matter: As long as Playboy’s sales kept climbing, rivals tried to duplicate its appeal. The last and most blatant imitation was Ronald Fenton and F. Lee Bailey’s Gallery, which debuted in November 1972, the same month Playboy sold a record 7.2 million copies. Gallery aped Playboy down to the length of the title (precisely seven letters) but succumbed to sleazery within a year or so.

Cover, ad and bachelor pad from “Plowboy.”.

The outlier was “Plowboy,” issued in 1957 by an obscure outfit in Manhattan called Bannister Publishing. “Plowboy” was the only non-college Playboy parody of the ’50s and the only one before the Harvard Lampoon’s 1966 “Pl*yb*y” with wide distribution. It acknowledges the real thing’s chief Selling Points in a dozen pages of photo-agency cheesecake, though there’s no full nudity and the “Plowmate” is a pencil drawing. The standout piece is a four-page tour of “Plowboy’s Platinum Hayloft” worthy of a funnier and subtler magazine.

A peek at “Playkid,” Mad #61 (March 1961).

Treating the Playboy fetish for brand names and status as literally childish, Larry Siegel and Bob Clarke put more satiric bite in the seven pages of Mad’s “Playkid” than there are in all of “Plowboy.” There’s nothing smutty or suggestive, Mad being famously prudish in that regard, but the very premise of “Playkid” is radioactive today and may have prompted second thoughts even in 1961: As far as I know it’s never been reprinted.

Pallid parodies from Sick (June 1965) and a Cracked special (1968).

Mad wannabes Cracked and Sick also tackled Playboy in the ’60s. “Boysplay,” a 16-page, comic book-size bonus in Biggest Greatest Cracked #4, is touted as a “Lampoon Edition of Playboy” on the cover but looks more like a fast-food giveaway and can’t articulate its own premise, if it has one. Sick’s “Playbore” is the skeleton of a comic idea fleshed out with two-line jokes and slapdash art. Both make excellent arguments for ignoring Cracked and Sick.

Hefner, Punch editor William Davis and Trog’s foldout; William Hewison aping Arnold Roth.

“Punch Goes Playboy,” with Norwegian actress-model Julie Ege on the cover, took up most of the English weekly’s November 10, 1971, issue and was reprinted in the U.S. the next fall with different ads and a 75-cent cover price. Trog’s four-page caricature of a nude Hugh Hefner is the visual highlight of both editions, which otherwise suffer from murky printing and lack of color. The writing, by contrast, is dead-on, nailing Playboy’s weakness for deep-sounding thumbsuckers (“Pollution and the Post-Vietnam Ghetto Interface,” by “Dr. Morton Krimhoretz, Ph.D., Jr.”) and workaholic Hefner’s pose as a carefree hedonist: “After a hectic day’s counting,” says one caption, “our November Playmate relaxes among his matchless collection of early American balance sheets.”

Pages from NatLamp’s “Playdead,” Jan. 1973.

Harvard’s 1966 “Pl*yb*y” was a giant step on the road to National Lampoon, which tried to duplicate the earlier book’s success by running a centerfold parody in its very first issue. (Alas, the result was an unsexy, out-of-focus mess.) NatLamp tackled Playboy twelve times between 1970 and 1988 — more than any other publication — but the pièce de résistance was “Playdead” in the January 1973 “Death” number. Visually, “Playdead” is impeccable, from the Possum logo in the cufflinks ad to Warren Sattler’s full-color fakes of cartoonists Dedini, ffolkes, Buck Brown and John Dempsey. What’s almost shocking, and all the funnier for it, is how natural Playboy’s vision of airbrushed perfection looks in a mortuary. Unafraid of either bad taste (the Interviewee was newly dead Bonanza actor Dan Blocker, silent throughout) or puns like “Playmort of the Month,” “Playdead” is one of NatLamp’s greatest parodies. The mag turned to Playboy more and more as its creative juices dried up, spoofing single features and grinding out formulaic editions for gun lovers and computers.

Semi-sorta spoofs from Howard the Duck and Wings flank covers that promise but don’t deliver from Laffboy and Bleep; below: “Laffboy” pages, Crazy and Girls & Corpses.

The only other publication to run multiple Playboy parodies was Playboy itself, with samples of four unlikely new editions I’ve written about here. Marvel’s Howard the Duck magazine (1981) promised a parody on its covers but followed through with eight vaguely Playboy-looking pages wedged between its usual black-and-white comics. Crazy (1974) and ultra-niche quarterly Girls & Corpses (2011) were even lazier, promising parodic goodies on their covers they failed to deliver inside. Ditto the two issues of Laffboy (1965) and one-shot Bleep (1974), oversized pulps with tired gags and bubble-captioned photo trying to pass as sophisticated satire. They’re mentioned here mainly as a warning. New-Age satire sheet Wings tried harder, devoting about a third of its March-April 1979 issue to “Playwings,” but most of the parody was typical Wings content poured into a barely modified layout; like “Playduck,” it failed to sweat the details.

Wayne Pierce’s ham-flavored tribute to Annie Fanny in “73” (1966).

73 Magazine was a technical monthly for ham radio buffs that ran from 1960 to 2003. Founder Wayne Green had soft spot for parody, and in April 1966 he ran a Playboy-like cover by reader Wayne Pierce, a high-school art teacher in Kansas City. Pierce also did four of the parody’s five inside pages, including a takeoff of “Little Annie Fanny” set in the world of ham radio obsessives. Pierce was no threat to Will Elder in the art department, but he’d obviously studied Harvey Kurtzman’s page layouts and storytelling rhythm; the fact that his hobby-specific jokes will sound like gibberish to most current readers is a surrealistic bonus.

Ironically, National Lampoon’s decline overlapped with the Great Parody Boom of the ’80s, whose harbingers were NL’s own “Dacron Republican-Democrat” in February 1978 and former NL editor Tony Hendra’s “Not The New York Times” that October. They were followed by scores of parodies of newspapers and magazines, including two of Playboy, one edited by Hendra, the other by his former collaborator Robert Vare.

Hendra and Vare had worked together on “NTNYT” and jointly edited the first “Off The Wall Street Journal,” which sold 350,000 copies in 1982 but showed only a tiny profit. After the two parted ways, Vare founded American Parody & Travesty Co. to produce a series of one-shot spoofs starting with “Playbore,” while Hendra became creative director on “Playboy: The Parody” for TSM Publishing, an offshoot of a marketing firm cofounded by former NatLamp publisher Gerald Taylor. Hendra recruited old associates David Kaestle, Danny Abelson and Rick Meyerowitz for “PTP,” which had led some sources to mislabel it an official National Lampoon publication. In fact, at least as many NL vets worked on “Playbore,” including Chris Miller, Jeff Greenfield and Ellis Weiner. (Bruce McCall somehow got into both.) George Plimpton, Roy Blount Jr., and soon-to-be Spy founders Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter also had a hand in “Playbore,” while “PTP’s” stable included writer David Owen and Items From Our Catalog creator Alfred Gingold.

“Playbore” features, including a jab at Hef’s rivals Larry Flynt and Bob Guccione (center).

“Playbore” hit the stands in late September, two months before its rival, but in most respects “Playboy: The Parody” came out slightly ahead. It cost a dollar more, carried 29 pages of real ads to “Playbore’s” six, and better captured the look and tone of Playboy circa 1983, likely because it gained Hefner’s approval and used several of his photographers and models. Not surprisingly, it treated Hef and his empire relatively gently, while “Playbore” made running jokes of “Hugh M. Hepner’s” galloping senility, shrinking assets and eyebrow-raising decision to turn the business over to his daughter — a step the real Hefner had taken the year before. Its foldout showed “Crispie Hepner” lounging in a soapy bath as a certain pipe-smoking editor-publisher massaged her shoulders. “Playboy: The Parody” countered with a full-frontal fake of Princess Diana, which prompted a boycott by distributors in the U.K.

DIY pinups, Bruce McCall’s cars, JFK in ’63 and Annie as Grannie in “Playboy: The Parody.”

Sales of both parodies were good but not spectacular. Early on, Vare predicted “Playbore” might sell over a million copies; results were closer to 750,000. Taylor initially hoped “Playboy: The Parody” would do better than the Harvard Lampoon’s “Cosmopolitan,” which had sold a record 1.2 million copies in 1972, but TSM never announced final numbers; press runs for its later spoofs, including “Cosmoparody” (1984) and “Parody People” (1986), were around 750,000 copies each.

U.S. parodists mostly abandoned Playboy after ’83, as did many readers — circulation fell by a third during the 1980s — but Canada’s Thomas Hagey struck gold in 1984 with “The Best of Playboar,” a porcine entry in the then-hot subgenre of parodies starring animals. Hagey (pronounced “haig-y,” not “hoggy,” unfortunately) grew up on a pig farm in Kitchener, Ontario, and quit school after 10th grade. In 1977 he founded Playboar as a semi-serious annual for swine breeders, “about two-thirds information, like how to pick a good pig or what to do about nipple problems, and about one-third humor,” he told the Chicago Tribune. A switch to quarterly publication in 1980 didn’t work out, so he closed the mag and moved to Toronto. There he and editor Chris Lowry rendered Playboar’s six issues into a 56-page greatest-hits collection, which was issued simultaneously or thereabouts in Canada and the U.S. in 1984.

“Playboar’s” contents page and Littermate Taffy Lovely.

Disappointingly, “The Best of Playboar” bears little resemblance to Hefner’s vision — and not just because its cover girl/Littermate’s measurements are 24-26-22. In fact, the pictorial on fetching Taffy Lovely is one of the few features that follows Playboy’s format closely. Most other pages would look just at home in Self or Us or any other ’80s title with colorful text blocks and off-kilter photos. In contrast, Hagey and Lowry’s full-page ads for “Benson & Hedgehogs,” “Mudweiser” and other accoutrements of fine swine living are accurate to the last detail. Maybe, not having sought the Big Bunny’s approval, they decided to steer wide of trespassing on any trademarks.

And maybe more readers are into pigs than parody: When first published, “The Best of Playboar” sold some 300,000 copies. Reprints pushed total sales over a million, making “BoP” the best-selling Playboy parody ever. This past June, Hagey published an enlarged edition in Canada, “The Very Best of Playboar,” bringing swinish behavior into the Age of Weinstein and Trump.

The following census is divided into two categories: issue-length newsstand specials (all at least 40 pages long), and shorter features in other publications. Cover-only and single-article parodies are so marked; as are the dates on parodies of back issues. Each listing contains the work’s title (in quotes), publisher or publication, date and page count (in parentheses). Stand-alone parodies that don’t count covers as pages are marked “+ 4.”

Playboy Parodies II: On U.S. Newsstands, 1957-2018

A. Stand-alone Parodies:

“Plowboy.” Bannister Publications, Spring 1957 (48 + 4)
“Punch Goes Playboy.” [reprint of 1971 U.K. parody with new ads]. Punch, 1972 (44 + 4)
“Playbore.” American Travesty and Parody, Fall 1983 (98)
“Playboy: The Parody.” Taylor-Shain Media, Winter 1984 (102 + 4)
—–. partly reprinted in What a Pair, Taylor-Shain Media, 1985 (40 + 38 pages of TSM’s “Cosmoparody”)
“The Best of Playboar,” by Thomas Hagey. Day Dream Publishing, Santa Barbara, Cal., 1984 (56 + 4)
—–. Firefly Books (U.S.) Inc., Buffalo, N.Y., 1996 (56 + 4)
“The Very Best of Playboar: Special Hardcover Edition,” by Thomas Hagey. Playboar Publishing, 2018 (84) [available in the U.S. on Kindle]

Four parodies from Esquire and National Lampoon

Single-feature spoofs from Esquire (1965, 1969) and National Lampoon (both 1982)

B. Parodies in Magazines:

“Playkid,” Mad #61, March 1961 (7)
“Laffboy,” KMR Publications, Feb. 1965 (COVER ONLY)
“Laffboy,”KMR Publications, Apr. 1965 (COVER ONLY)
“Playbore,” Sick, June 1965 (12)
“I, Playboy, take thee, Reader’s Digest…,” Esquire, Aug. 1965 (1)
“73,” 73 Magazine, April 1966 (5 + 1)
“Boysplay,” Biggest, Greatest Cracked #4, 1968 (16)
“Liberated Front,” National Lampoon [article], April 1970 (8)
“Esquire Interview: Hugh M. Hefner” [article], Esquire, Dec. 1970 (3+)
“Gamma Hutch: The Playboy Fallout Shelter” (Dec. 1958) [article], National Lampoon, April 1972 (4)
“Playdead,” National Lampoon, Jan. 1973 (14)
“Bleep,” Bleep Publications, 1974 (COVER ONLY)
“Playboy” [obscured], Crazy #10, April 1975 (COVER ONLY)
“Playboy [in Cyrillic]: New Soviet Edition,” Playboy, Jan. 1977 (7)
“Playwings,” Wings, March/April 1979 (20? + 1)
“Playboy: New Chinese Edition,” Playboy, Sept. 1979 (7)
“Playduck,” Howard the Duck magazine #4, March 1980 (8 + 1)
“Parents of the Girls of the Eastwest Conference” [article], National Lampoon, Feb. 1982 (2)
“The Playboy Advisor” [article], National Lampoon, Feb. 1982 (1)
“Dear Playmates” [article], National Lampoon, June 1983 (1)
“Playboy” (November 1963), in “Playboy: The Parody,” Winter 1984 (15 + 1-page intro)
“Prayboy: Entertainment for Far-Righteous Men,” Playboy, Dec. 1984 (8)
“Slayboy,” National Lampoon, Dec. 1985 (8)
“Playbyte,” National Lampoon, Feb. 1988 (10)
“Feminist Party Jokes” [article], National Lampoon, March 1986 (1)
“Interview: Steven Spielberg” [article], National Lampoon, Aug. 1986 (3+)
“Playboy” (Jan. 1000 A.D.), Playboy, Jan. 2000 (4)
“Girls & Corpses,” issue # 5, Spring 2011 (COVER ONLY)

— VCR (updated 12/11/18)

Playboy Parodies 1: College, 1955-1989

Posted on October 24, 2018 by Cullum Rogers

Parodies by Penn State Froth, Harvard Lampoon, Clemson Chronicle, NYU Vulture, MIT Voo Doo, Purdue Engineer, Purdue Rivet, Cal Pelican, Annapolis Log, Tulane Urchin, Amherst Sabrina, West Point Pointer.

Parodies of Playboy fall roughly into two groups and two eras: those created by college students, mostly in the 1950s and ’60s, and those done by commercial publishers, mostly in the ’70s and ’80s. The catalyst for the shift was the Harvard Lampoon’s “Pl*yb*y,” a glossy, 102-page spoof that sold more than half a million copies in the fall of 1966. Its production values — including a full-color centerfold of a real, live naked lady — were impressive enough to discourage most amateurs, while its success on newsstands showed the pros there were Big Bucks to be had from this parody thing. This post deals with ersatz Playboys produced at U.S. colleges and universities; the next will tackle commercial and foreign specimens.

Illinois Chaff, 1958.

In its 20th Anniversary issue, Playboy boasted of being “parodied more often than any other magazine in the world.” I’m not sure that’s true (see here), but there’s no question it was the most parodied magazine on campus from its birth in 1953 until the Lampoon shattered the backboard in ’66. “Every year college publications across the nation issue one best issue, … usually a parody of a national magazine,” the Illinois Chaff said in 1958. “When the artists and writers of Chaff looked around for a publication to parody, they didn’t have to look far. Leading the newsstand derby by miles was a publication which college men use as a yardstick of sophistication and urban living.”

The attraction ran both ways: Playboy founder Hugh Hefner had edited Chaff’s predecessor Shaft in the late ’40s, and his new magazine — with its cartoons, girls of the month, and focus on liquor, love and laughs — was in many ways a college humor mag writ large. Not too large, however: A typical Playboy from the mid-’50s had fewer than 80 pages, used color sparingly and carried little advertising. A talented college staff could produce a pretty good likeness on the cheap, which wasn’t the case with Esquire or Life or the Ladies’ Home Journal — or Playboy itself a few years later.

Arizona Kitty Kat, 1955.

From the start, Playboy had a soft spot for parodies. The Arizona Kitty Kat’s April 1955 “Playgirl,” which may have been the first, opened by thanking Playboy for permission to copy its format and style, a favor later extended to dozens of campus copycats. Playboy gave the Lampoon so much help with “Pl*yb*y” it was practically a co-publisher: “We cold-called Hefner to ask his permission,” the Lampoon’s Henry Beard recalled. “Not only does he say he’d love to have it parodied, but he says, ‘I’ll arrange for you to use my printing plant. I will tell them that you’re solid citizens. And all you guys have to do is make sure you get signatures from some of your rich graduates on the bill to make sure we don’t get stiffed.’”

Such help carried a few strings: “We must be afforded the opportunity to review the layout and art work of the cover in final form so that we can be certain that the parody will not be confused with the real McCoy,” Playboy’s William M. Klein wrote the Lampoon, adding that the parody should “maintain the standards heretofore evidenced by products of the Harvard Lampoon. It is only because of our high regard for your standards that the permission which you have requested is being granted. We would not wish material from the parody reprinted in non-prestigious or competitive publications.”

Cover and pages from Yale's 1958 Ployboy

Cover girl for “Ployboy” was Yale Drama student Carrie Nye, who also graced an inside feature.

Most of the early parodies are pure emulation, sometimes with a twist. Three are called “Playgirl” and display men dressed either scantily or to the nines. The former are usually hairy and unkempt and not at all sexy. (Sometimes the only way to get skin past a censor is to play it for laughs.) Elsewhere, centerfolds ranged from rag dolls to rabbits; those that featured actual women tended to display them either clothed or carefully cropped. The left third of Chaff’s “Payboy” foldout showed an attractive model’s legs; readers who opened it found a black rectangle blocking the rest of her. The Yale Record’s 1958 “Ployboy” replaced most of its centerfold with a (genuine?) letter from the printer explaining that plates for a three-page, full-color photo would cost a budget-busting $1,480.

Cover and three pages from Texas Ranger's 1963 Playbull

Gilbert Shelton spoofed Annie Fanny and Jules Feiffer in the Texas Ranger’s 1963 “Playbull.”

The Record was one of several college comics to spoof Playboy twice, but the most prolific parodist wasn’t a magazine but a yearbook. In 1959, the editors of La Ventana at Texas Tech split its contents into eight separately printed sections made up to resemble popular magazines and packaged them in a three-ring binder: “Tyme” focused on the year’s major events, “Mademoiselle” on sororities, and so on, with “Playboy” handling social life and fraternities. A few titles changed over the years, but “Playboy” was in the mix every year through 1973, when the format was dropped. La Ventana’s “Playboys” were about 10 percent parody and 90 percent standard yearbook, but what little spoofing they did, they did well, especially the covers and foldouts.

Covers and foldouts from three yearbooks.

Yearbook pinups from South Carolina (1974), Kansas Med School (1969) and Texas Tech (1969).

The same is true of the Garnet and Black at the University of South Carolina, which picked up the parody torch from Texas Tech. Its 1974 and ’75 editions spoofed eight mags including National Lampoon, Ms. and Southern Living. The G&B called its version of Playboy “Carolinamen,” possibly to avoid riling local bluenoses, but the resemblance was unmissable. The 1969 Jayhawker M.D., a.k.a. “Playdoc,” from the Kansas Med School is the only attempt I know of to extend a Playboy spoof through an entire yearbook. Its 200-plus pages featured two foldouts, one of which could almost pass for the real thing (above).

Addis apes Wilson in “Peelboy.”

The best of the collegiate parodies mocked the Playboy lifestyle even as they copied it. “We considered ourselves serious satirists with a sense of fun, not just naughty fellows,” recalled Frank Stack, who edited the Texas Ranger’s second parody in 1963. “[We] aspired to the kind of authoritative satire of the New Yorker and Punch, rather than the sophomoric tone of Playboy.” Stack (a.k.a. “Foolbert Sturgeon”) and Wonder Wart-Hog creator Gilbert Shelton gave the Ranger’s takeoff some of the sass and irreverence they brought to underground comics. Their “Playbull,” the UCLA Satyr’s 1964 “Preyboy” (edited by Harry Shearer) and the Lampoon’s “Pl*yb*y” are the most fun to reread today. Highlights elsewhere include Don Addis’s cartoons in the Florida Orange Peel’s “Peelboy,” the photobombed fashion spread in the Cal Pelican’s “Peliboy,” and the backtalk to the Playboy Advisor in the Amherst Sabrina’s “Playboy” — which somehow got away with not altering the name.

Not everyone appreciated these homages. Administrators found the Wisconsin Octopus’s 1959 “Blayboy” so offensive they made it Octy’s last issue. The Stanford Chaparral and its grad-student editor Bradley Efron were both suspended over 1961’s “Layboy,” the editor for two quarters, the mag indefinitely. “They got me on sacrilege,” Efron said then. “The thing that did it was a Ribald Classic version of the Nativity. The University was flooded with protests from the local clergy. … It was my first issue. It was a little dirty, but no dirtier than previous issues. We sold about twice as many issues as usual, though. You can’t get anybody to part with his copy now.” Fortunately, both magazine and editor were back by the end of the year; Efron eventually became Professor of Statistics at Stanford and in 1983 was awarded a MacArthur Foundation genius grant.

The most recent kerfuffle came in 1989, when the Log at the U.S. Naval Academy put out a “Playmid” that featured midshipmen’s girlfriends in bathing suits. Decrying “sexual stereotyping,” Academy superintendent Virgil Hill Jr. ordered all 5,000 copies destroyed. About a hundred weren’t, and one made its way to Playboy, which reprinted excerpts in September 1989. “Destroy 5,000 copies, end up with 18,000,000 readers,” Playboy wrote. “That’s the lesson in censorship.” The Log may have learned a different lesson: There had been at least three previous parodies of Playboy at Annapolis, but there hasn’t been one since.

Nor has there been one anywhere else, as far as I’ve found. Apart from the Lampoon, few current college mags have the money or resources to parody slick national magazines. Even if they did, they wouldn’t target Playboy, which now has one-tenth its 1970s circulation and hasn’t been a yardstick of sophistication for decades.

Pseudo Playboys from Texas (1956), Florida (1959), Wisconsin (1959); Stanford (1961), U. Mass-Amherst (1964) and UCLA (1964); at right, the covers they copied.

This inventory is surely incomplete, but it contains all the college parodies of Playboy I know of. (For some, their existence is all I know of.) I’ve tried to include school name, parody-issuing publication (in italics), parody title (in quotes), date and page count (in parentheses) in each listing. Parodies that don’t include front and back covers in their page numbering are marked “+ 4.” (FYI, the “+ 8” for the 1958 “Ployboy” isn’t a typo; it was distributed behind a second cover with the Yale Record nameplate to pacify the Post Office.) The word “in” before a date means the issue’s front cover wasn’t part of the parody; “no cover” and “article” denote parodies that don’t begin with fake covers. As always, I’d welcome additions and corrections.

Playboy Parodies I: College, 1955-1989

A. By Magazines

Princeton Tiger, 1955.

1950s:
Princeton Tiger: “Placebo,” 1955
Arizona Kitty Kat: “Playgirl,” April 1955 (36 pages)
Oregon State Beaver Dam: “Beaver Dam,” Dec. 1955 (28)
Indiana Crimson Bull: “Playbull,” March 1956 (28)
Texas Ranger: “Playgirl,” March 1956 (36 + 4)
Penn State Froth: “Playgirl,” April 1956 (64)
Purdue Rivet: “Playbouy,” May 1956 (32 + 4c)
Michigan Gargoyle: “Plowboy,” Nov. 1956
Tulane Urchin: “Gayboy,” c. 1956-57
Babson Inst. Beaver: “Playbeaver,” c. 1956-58
Cornell Widow: “Play Boy,” Dec. 1957 (36)
Yale Record: “Ployboy,” Feb. 1958 (86 + 8)
Ohio U. Green Goat: “Pla_boy,” March 1958 (40)
Illinois Chaff: “Payboy,” May 1958 (32 + 4)
NYU Vulture: “Payboy,” [spring] 1959
Annapolis LogSplinter: “Playbouy,” April 10, 1959
Florida Orange Peel: “Peelboy,” May 1959 (44 + 4)
Wisconsin Octopus: “Blayboy,” May 1959

1960s:
Penn State Froth: “Playboy,” April 1961 (38 + 4)
Amherst Sabrina: “Playboy,” May 1961 (24 + 4)
Stanford Chaparral: “Layboy,” June 1961 (60 + 4)
Cornell Widow: “Gayboy,” March 1962
Texas Ranger: “Playbull,” March 1963 (40 + 4)
California Pelican: “Parody,” in May 1963 (13, no cover)
Yale Record: “Pwayboy,” Feb. 1964 (52 + 4)
UCLA Satyr: “Preyboy,” June 1964 (38 + 4)
U. Mass-Amherst Yahoo: “Preyboy,” June 1964 (40 + 4)
MIT Voo Doo: “Gayboy,” Feb. 1965 (36 + 4)
West Point Pointer: “Prayboy,” March 26, 1965 (32 + 4)
California Pelican: “Playgoy’s Handy Guide to Successful Summer Seduction” (article), in May 1965 (5)
Clemson Chronicle: “Plowboy,” May 1965 (36 + 4)
Stanford Chaparral: “Layboy,” June 1965 (56 + 4)
California Pelican: “Peliboy,” May 1966 (56 + 4)
Princeton Tiger“Placebo”, May 1966
Harvard Lampoon: “Pl*yb*y,” Fall 1966 (102 + 4)
Annapolis Log: “Log,” April 18, 1969

1970s on:
Purdue Engineer: “Playboy Engineer,” March 1970 (34 + 4)
Emory Spoke: “Playbod,” March 1979
Northwestern Rubber Teeth: “The Girls of the Midwestern Schools With Ridiculously High Tuition and Habitually Defeated Football Teams” (article), in Spring 1980 (2)
Annapolis Log: “Playmid,” March 1984
Hofstra Nonsense: “Playdoh,” in Nov. 1988 (5)
Emory Spoke: “Playspoke,” Dec. 1988
Annapolis Log: “Playmid,” March 1989

B. In Yearbooks

Texas Tech La Ventana, “Playboy,” 1959-1973
Kansas Med. School Jayhawker, “Playdoc,” 1969
U. of South Carolina Garnet and Black, “Carolinamen,” 1974-75

— VCR (updated 11/13/19)

National Lampoon Parodies, A to Z

Posted on January 28, 2018 by Cullum Rogers

Spoofs from the Sunday Newspaper Parody (“Pomade,” 1978) and National Lampoon (1971-78).

Here’s the alphabetical version of the chronology of National Lampoon magazine and newspaper parodies posted earlier (which see for the intro to this topic). Each entry begins with the name of the publication being parodied, in italics; followed by the fake title or article name, in parentheses; the NatLamp issue date; and the page count, in brackets. Parodies that appeared in special editions or (in one case) Print magazine are so noted, as are parodies of back issues: e.g., “Popular Workbench” for Aug. 1938.

I’ve moved Genre Parodies to Appendix A, where they’re listed by type of publication, and put two articles that spoof multiple titles in Appendix B, for lack of a better option. As before, I’m ignoring the “inventions” — fake magazines with no obvious real-world prototypes, like “Mondo Bizarro” in the very first issue (April 1970). — VCR

“American Bride” (with author Emily Praeger on cover) and “hy-Art” flank their inspirations.

Parodies in National Lampoon Magazine, A to Z:

A
After Dark (article: “Glitter Bums”), July 1975 [3]
Amazing Stories (“Amusing Stories” for Oct. 1926), Sept. 1977 [3]
ARTnews (“ARTynews”), Feb. 1976 [13]
The Atlantic (“The Hotlantic”), April 1983 [9]
Avant Garde (“Avant Gauche” ad: “Rockwall’s Erotic Engravings”), April 1970 [3]
Awake! (“Wise Up!”), Dec. 1974 [3 half-pages]

B
Better Homes and Gardens (“Better Homes and Closets”), May 1977 [11]
Boys’ Life (“Boys’ Real Life”), Oct. 1974 [10]

C
Cahiers du Cinema (“Cahiers du TV”), May 1976 [4]
The Canadian Magazine (“The Canadian Weakly,” June 8, 1969), June 1976 [6]
Cinefantastic (“Cinefantasterrifique”), Jan. 1982 [5]
Consumer Reports (“Consumed Reports”), nationallampoon.com, June 2004; in NL Magazine Rack, 2006 [4]
Cosmopolitan (“Cosmopolatin”), Jan. 1971 [15]

D
The Dial (“hy-Art: The Magazine of the Precious Broadcasting System”), Jan. 1983 [7]

E
Easyriders (“Equalriders”), March 1984 [11]
—– (“Easywriters”), Sept. 1985 [8]
Ebony (“Ivory”), April 1973 [7]
Esquire (article: “The Incredible Shrinking Magazine”), Nov. 1971 [3]
—– (“Exsquire”), Sept. 1975 [12]
—– (“Esquare”), Dec. 1981 [13]

F
Family Circle (“Famine Circle”), July 1974 [8]
Fortune (“Lucre”), Dec. 1975 [12]
—– (“Misfortune”), Feb. 1986 [13]
Forum (“Whorum”), Jan. 1985 [8]

G
Gourmet (“Goormay”), March 1982 [9]
GQ (“RQ: Regular Guy Quarterly”), Sept. 1978 [4]
Guns & Ammo (“Liquor & Ammo”), Aug. 1994 [10]

H
Harper’s Bazaar (“Bizarre”), June 1970 [5]
Harvard Lampoon (article: “The Ten Worst Movies of All Time”), July 1975 [1]
High Times (“Wasted Times”), Aug. 1977 [7]
The Hollywood Reporter (“The Hollywood Informer”), Oct. 1981 [5]
—– (“The Hollywood Retorter”), limited distribution, Dec. 2002; in NL Magazine Rack, 2006 [16]
Hot Rod (“Warm Rod”), April 1975 [7]
Hustler (“Gobbler”), Aug. 1976 [5]

I
Inc. (“stInc.”), 1998 [13]
Interview (“Interluude”), Dec. 1981 [11]

J
Jack and Jill (“Jack and Jill St. John”), Feb. 1982 [5]
JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association (“COMA: Circular of the Organization of Medical Associations”), May 1975 [8]
Jet (“Tar”), Feb. 1977 [6, digest-size]

K
Kiplinger Washington Letter (“The Hamilton Philadelphia Letter,” Sept. 18, 1787) in NL’s 199th Birthday Book, 1975 [2]
—– (“The Kremlinger Moscow Letter”), Jan. 1977 [2]

L
Ladies’ Home Journal (“Old Ladies’ Home Journal”), Sept. 1974 [8]
Life [old humor mag] (“National Lampoon,” May 1906), May 1971 [7]
Life [pictue mag] (article: “Our Threatened Nazis”), June 1970 [2]
—– (“Life,” Sept. 28, 1943), Sept. 1973 [13]
—– (“Lite”), April 1979 [8]
Look (“Kennedy”), Feb. 1977 [11]

M
Mad (“Mad”), Oct. 1971 [15]
—– (article: “You Know You’re Grown Up When…”), Sept. 1977 [2]
Martha Stewart Entertaining (“Martha Stewart’s Entertaining the K-Mart Way”), Dec. 1989 [3]
Men’s Health (“Man’s Health”), online, June 2002; in NL Magazine Rack, 2006 [4]
Modern Bride (“American Bride”), Feb. 1975 [10]
Money Matters (“Young Money Matters”), June 1977 [4]
Moneysworth (two subscription ads for “Nickleknows”), Dec. 1975 [1+1]
Muscle & Fitness (“Muscle & Fatness”), March 1994 [9]
My Weekly Reader (“My Weekly Reader: The Children’s Tabloid”), Sept. 1971 [4]

N
National Enquirer (“National Inspirer”), March 1973 [8]
—– (“The Washington Enquirer”), Aug. 1980 [4]
—– (“National Sexloid”), Sept. 1982 [5]
—–(“Roman Eqvirer”), 1996 [4]
National Geographic (“National Geographic”), Sept. 1972 [3]
—– (“National Southpacific”), May 1983 [13]
National Lampoon (“National Lampoof”), Feb. 1974 [11]
—– (article: “National Lampoon’s 1974 New Year’s Resolutions”), Jan. 1975 [5]
—– (article: “False Facts”), Sept. 1982 [1]
—– (“National Tampoon”), March 1986 [6]
National Midnight (“Almost Midnight”), Sept. 1974 [4]
National Review (“National Socialist Review”), Feb. 1978 [8]
National Star (“National Sore”), May 1975 [4]
New Times (“Nu? Times” cover only), Jan. 1976 [1]
New York (“Lifestyles”), Nov. 1977 [42 + front cover]
—– (“Jo’burg”), Sept. 1983 [9]
New York Review of Books (“The New York Review of Us”), Jan. 1976 [8]
New York Times (“The New York World”), May 1971 [2 broadsheet]
—— (“The New York Times”), Oct. 1972 [front page on 2]
—— (“The New York Time”), Oct. 1977 [front page on 2]
New York Times Book Review (article: “Would You Like Something to Read?”), Aug. 1981 [2+]
New York Times Magazine (article: “Talking Out Loud: College Slang of the Eighties,” by “William Zircon”), Sept. 1981 [1+]
—– (article: “Talking Out Loud: The Customers Always Write,” by “William Zircon”), Aug. 1982 [1+]
—– (“The New York Times Magazine”), June 1984 [19]
The New Yorker (“The New Y*rker”), March 1975 [13]
—– (article: “Coming Into the River,” by “John McPhoo”), June 1980 [6]
—– (“Ron Hague’s Year of Rejected New Yorker Covers”), Dec. 1983 [4]
—– (“The Hymie Towner” cover only), June 1984 [1]
Newsweek (cover + article: “Townville, Iowa”), Nov. 1976 [2]

O
Oui (“Peut-etre” article: “Taffy”), Oct. 1973 [4]
Outside (“OutSSide” subscription ad), Feb. 1978 [3]

P-Q
Parade (“Pomade”) in NL’s Sunday Newspaper Parody, 1978 [16]
Penthouse (“Pethouse”), Jan. 1974 [9]
—– (article: “The Resister’s Revenge”), Sept. 1975 [6]
—– (“Repenthouse”), July 1977 [5]
People (“Objects”), Dec. 1976 [5, no cover]
—– (article: “Douglas Waterman Caps a Big Year”), May 1981 [4]
—– (“PLO” article: “Nor More Mr. Bad Guy For Yassir Arafat”), July 1984 [4]
Playboy (foldout: “Liberated Front” + “Party Jokes”), April 1970 [6]
—– (article: “Gamma Hutch: The Playboy Fallout Shelter,” Dec. 1959), April 1972 [4]
—– (“Playdead”), Jan. 1973 [14]
—– (ad: “What Sort of Man Reads Pl*yb*y?”), Oct. 1974 [1]
—– (article: “Parents of the Girls of the Eastwest Conference”), Feb. 1982 [2]
—– (article: “The Playboy Advisor”), Feb. 1982 [1]
—– (article: “Dear Playmates”), June 1983 [1]
—– (“Slayboy”), Dec. 1985 [8]
—– (article: “Feminist Party Jokes”), March 1986 [1]
—– (article: “Interview: Steven Spielberg”), Aug. 1986 [3+]
—– (“Playbyte”), Feb. 1988 [10]
—– (article: “Girls of the Community Colleges”), Oct. 1989 [4]
Popular Mechanics (“Popular Workbench,” Aug. 1938), July 1973 [14]
—– (“Tomorrow’s Future Homebody,” June 1946) in NL’s 199th Birthday Book, 1975 [3]
Popular Science (“Popular Evolution”), Jan. 1974 [11]
Print (“National Lampoon Graphics Parody Section”), in Print, July-Aug. 1974 [8 + cover]
Psychology Today (“Psychology Ptoday”), Aug. 1973 [15]

R
Reader’s Digest (article: “Martial Mirth”), Sept. 1973 [1]
—– (“Digester’s Reader” front & back covers only), June 1974 [1]
—– (article: “Rumpus Room Rib-Ticklers”), May 1978 [2]
—– (“Reader Digest”), Jan.-Feb. 1995 [10]
Road & Track (“Food & Track”), March 1982 [5]
Rolling Stone (“Rolling Stein” for Dec. 9, 1791), Feb. 1971 [3]
—– (“Rolling Tombstone”), Nov. 1982 [9]
—– (“Rollin’ Home”), Oct. 1985 [6]
—– (“Rolling Stone”), Feb. 1989 [7]
—– (“Perception/Reality” ad), Feb. 1990 [2]
—– (article: “Have War, Will Travel,” by “P.J. O’Drunke”), Aug. 1991 [2]

S
Scientific American (“Scienterrific American”), Jan. 1977 [10]
Screw (“Third Base” for April 1956), April 1972
—– (“Piddle: The Adult Publication for Children”), Feb. 1973 [8]
—– (“Seed”), Aug. 1974 [8]
Self (“Self-Destruct”), April 1982 [5]
Seventeen (“Savvyteen”), Aug. 1978 [8]
—– (“Deadteen”), July 1985 [7]
The Sporting News (“The Sportbiz News”), April 1976 [6]
—– (“The Sporting Muse”), Oct. 1988 [10]
Sports Illustrated (“Sports Illustrated”), Nov. 1973 [13]
—– (“Sports Hallucinated”), May 1986 [7]

T
Tiger Beat (“Poon Beat”), Dec. 1973 [10]
Time (article: “Partly Sane, Raspberries, and Time”), March 1975 [3]
—– (“Xmas Time”), Dec. 1977 [5]
—– (Special Section: “Let’s Get It Up, America”), Aug. 1981 [27]
—– (article: Henry Kissenger’s “Years of Arousal”), Sept. 1982 [6]
—– (“Time”), Jan. 1984 [35]
The Times of India (“The Times of Indira”), May 1976 [3]
Travel & Leisure (“Postage & Handling”), Feb. 1983 [7]
TV Guide (“The New York Review of TV”), March 1971 [5 pages on 3]
—– (“TV”), Apr. 1977 [16, digest-size]
—– (“Al-Jazeera TV Guide”), nationallampoon.com, Nov. 2004; in NL Magazine Rack, 2006 [4]

U
U.S. News & World Report (“Stupid News & World Report”), March 1974 [7]

V
Vanity Fair (“Vanity Fair”), June 1990 [10]
Variety (“Varietsky” front page), Sept. 1970 [1]
—– (“Movies”), Oct. 1978 [4]
The Village Voice (“The Global Village Voice”), Feb. 1977 [8]

W-X-Y-Z
Wall Street Journal (“The Gall Street Journal”), May 1970 [2 broadsheet]
Weight Watchers (“Weighty Waddlers”), June 1974 [7]
Wet (“Moist”), Dec. 1981 [9]
The Whole Earth Catalog (“The Last, Really, No Shit, Really, the Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog”), Jan. 1972 [7]
Working Woman (“Working Girl”), Nov. 1983 [11]

Appendix A: Genre Parodies, by Type:

Alumni: (“Skidmark: The Alumni Magazine of Skidmark College”), Sept. 1983 [11]
Art studies: (“Modes d’Art Magazine” for June 1926), Feb. 1976 [6]
Boys’ magazines: (“Cap’n Jasper’s Boy O Boy,” May 1935), June 1975 [8]
College humor: (“The Spitoon,” for 1877), 199th Birthday Book, 1975 [2]
Confession: (“True Finance”), May 1970 [4]
—–: (“True Politics”), Aug. 1972 [10]
Crime: (“Citizen’s Arrest”), Aug. 1975 [7]
Fan & gossip mags: (“Screen Slime”), Sept. 1970 [10]
—–: (“Myth & Legend Mirror” for Oct. IV B.C.), Oct. 1975 [5]
—–: (“Silver Jock: The Demi-Decadent Sports Magazine), April 1976 [7]
—–: (“Mersey Moptop Faverave Fabgearbeat” for Oct. 1964), Oct. 1977 [8]
—–: (“Mitch Springer: A Loving Tribute”), April 1982 [5]
—–: (“Big Screen”), June 1991 [36]
Fashion: (“Guerre: The New Magazine for the New Army”), Sept. 1973 [7]
Fitness: (“Muscle Mind”), Sept. 1984 [7]
—–: (“Peppy: The High-Potency Magazine of Fitness and Health”), Jan. 1987 [12]
Golf: (“Duffer’s Digest”), 1996 [9]
Guns: (“Gun Lust”), June 1973 [11]
—–: (“Guns & Sandwiches”), July 1974 [6]
High school: (“Leaf & Squib” for Spring 1964), 1964 High School Yearbook Parody, 1974 [14]
Homemaker: (“Negligent Mother”), Jan. 1975) [6]
Inflight: (“Stampede: Prairie Central/Panhandle Airlines Magazine”), April 1974 [8]
Men’s: (“Real Balls Adventure”), April 1971 [11)
—–: (“Knuckle: A Real Man’s Magazine”), June 1973 [5]
—–: (“Real-Life Adventure”), June 1980 [4]
Newspaper: (“The Dacron-Republican-Democrat”) Sunday Newspaper Parody, 1978 [104]
Newspaper, college: (“The Daily Klaxon”), Sept. 1975 [4]
Newspaper, high school: (“The Prism,” May 11, 1964), 1964 High School Yearbook Parody, 1974 [8]
Newspaper, tabloid: (“Stranger Than Fact”), Nov. 1986 [7]
Newspaper, underground: (“The Daily Roach Holder”), August 1970 [6]
Newspaper magazine section: (“Sunday Week”), Sunday Newspaper Parody, 1978 [16]
Pulp mags: (“Unexciting Stories,” undated but 1930s), Sept. 1974 [4+]
Trade paper: (“Hollywood Briefs”), July 1975 [4]
TV listings: (“American Home Movie Box Program Guide”), Oct. 1981 [4]
—– (“Unofficial 1984 Olympic TV Watcher’s Guide”), Aug. 1984 [16 digest-size]
UFOs: (“Real Business Jet”), March 1980 [5]
Visitor guides: (“Why Leave This Room?”) Aug. 1982 [5]

Appendix B: Parodies of Multiple Titles:

* “The Hot New Lineup for 1986 from Condom-Nasty Publications” (covers of STD-focused versions of Harper’s Bazaar, Reader’s Digest, New Age Journal), Sept. 1985 [2].
* “The Real Story of Rock ‘n’ Roll” (told in fake clips from the New York Post, People, Jet, etc.), Oct. 1985 [7].

National Lampoon Parodies, 1970-2006

Posted on January 28, 2018 by Cullum Rogers

Clockwise from Mozart: Early parodies of Rolling Stone (1970), Playboy (1973) and Life (1973), a special for Print (1974); late parodies of the Times Magazine (1984) and Vanity Fair (1990).

This week’s debut on Netflix of another movie about the early years of National Lampoon — not a documentary this time, a biopic of Doug Kenny — provides all the excuse I need to catalog its magazine and newspaper parodies. Founders Kenney, Henry Beard and Rob Hoffman honed their chops aping Playboy, Life and Time at the Harvard Lampoon , so it’s no surprise magazine parodies were highlights of NatLamp’s Golden Age (roughly 1971-75) and bright spots in the silver-plated years that followed (roughly 1976-84; the mag’s post-1984 content is mostly lead).

The contract licensing the “Lampoon” name to Twenty-First Century Communications explicitly barred the national version from milking Harvard’s cash cow. The closest National Lampoon ever came to producing a full-length, stand-alone magazine parody was the November 1977 “Lifestyles” issue, which aped New York from cover lines to crossword puzzle without quite admitting what it was up to. Fortunately, the contract said nothing about parodies of generic high-school yearbooks and small-city Sunday papers, leaving the door open for NatLamp’s masterpieces.

Top: NL’s “Lifestyles” issue (Nov. 1977); bottom: New York pages from 1976-77.

National Lampoon’s fake publications fall into four types: inventions, genre spoofs, mutations and plain ol’ parodies. Like Mad’s fake mags for protesters, schoolteachers and what-have-you, the inventions were vessels for satire aimed at some other target. And as with the earlier Mad index, they’re not listed here. Genre spoofs imitated types of publications — often fan magazines or gossip tabloids — without cloning any one title. Examples include “Real Balls Adventure” for men (April 1971) and the inflight magazine “Stampede” (April 1974). I suspect some items I’ve put in this category have specific models I’m not familiar with, and I’d welcome additional info.

The mutations spoofed specific titles but tinkered with their DNA, making My Weekly Reader a scandal sheet (Sept. 1971) or switching Hot Rod’s focus from gearheads to tree-huggers (“Warm Rod,” April 1975). A few were relatively straight counterfactuals: e.g., the parodies of Look, Jet and the Village Voice in the JFK Fifth Inaugural issue (Jan. 1977). Others put familiar mags in Bizarro worlds where plants crave porn (“Seed,” Aug. 1974) and military service is a fashion statement (“Guerre,” Sept. 1973). This approach reached perfection in “Playdead” ( Jan. 1973), which exposed the airbrushed unreality of Playboy simply by redirecting its covetous ogle from skin to bones.

Four kinds of fakes: Invented, genre, mutated, and plain ol’ parody.

The plain ol’ parodies dispensed with what-ifs and tackled publications just as they were. This group includes many NatLamp’s classics, including “Mad” (Oct. 1971), the 1943 “Life” (Sept. 1973) and what I consider its last first-rate feature of any kind, a 19-page sendup of The New York Times Magazine in June 1984. Also included are a few items that aren’t strictly parodies but capture the essence of a publication, such as “Ron Hague’s Year of Rejected New Yorker Covers” (Dec. 1983) and “National Lampoon’s 1974 New Year’s Resolutions” (Jan. 1975).

This list is divided into three unequal parts: parodies in regular issues, those in books and specials containing new material, and those in non-NL publications. (The last section contains only one item, but it’s a hoot if you’re into graphic design.) Each entry in Section 1 begins with the name of the publication being parodied, in italics; followed by the fake title or article name, in parentheses; the NatLamp issue date; and the page count, in brackets.

A phrase like “5 pages on 3” means each magazine page contained two or more digest-size parody pages; the word “broadsheet” describes a few newspaper parodies that folded out to 17″ by 22″. Parodies of old magazines have their cover dates noted inside the parentheses: e.g., “Popular Workbench” for Aug. 1938.

A version of this list in alphabetical instead of chronological order will appear in my very next post. —VCR

Section 1: Parodies in National Lampoon Magazine, 1970-98:

1970
Avant Garde (“Avant Gauche” ad: “Rockwall’s Erotic Engravings”), April 1970 [3]
Playboy (foldout: “Liberated Front” + “Party Jokes”), April 1970 [6]
Genre: confession (“True Finance”), May 1970 [4]
Wall Street Journal (“The Gall Street Journal”), May 1970 [2 broadsheet]
Harper’s Bazaar (“Bizarre”), June 1970 [5]
Life [pictue mag] (article: “Our Threatened Nazis”), June 1970 [2]
Genre: underground newspaper (“The Daily Roach Holder”), August 1970 [6]
Genre: movies (“Screen Slime”), Sept. 1970 [10]
Variety (“Varietsky” front page), Sept. 1970 [1]

1971
Cosmopolitan (“Cosmopolatin”), Jan. 1971 [15]
Rolling Stone (“Rolling Stein,” Dec. 9, 1791), Feb. 1971 [3]
TV Guide (“The New York Review of TV”), March 1971 [5 pages on 3]
Genre: men’s (“Real Balls Adventure”), April 1971 [11)
Life [humor mag] (“National Lampoon,” May 1906), May 1971 [7]
New York Times (“The New York World”), May 1971 [2 broadsheet]
My Weekly Reader (“My Weekly Reader: The Children’s Tabloid”), Sept. 1971 [4]
Mad (“Mad”), Oct. 1971 [15]
Esquire (article: “The Incredible Shrinking Magazine”), Nov. 1971 [3]

1972
The Whole Earth Catalog (“The Last, Really, No Shit, Really, the Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog”), Jan. 1972 [7]
Screw (“Third Base: The Dating Newspaper,” April 1956), April 1972 [8]
Playboy (article: “Gamma Hutch: The Playboy Fallout Shelter,” Dec. 1959), April 1972 [4]
Genre: true story (“True Politics”), Aug. 1972 [10]
National Geographic (“National Geographic”), Sept. 1972 [3]
New York Times (“The New York Times”), Oct. 1972 [1 page on 2]

1973
Playboy (“Playdead”), Jan. 1973 [14]
Screw (“Piddle: The Adult Publication for Children”), Feb. 1973 [8]
National Enquirer (“National Inspirer”), March 1973 [8]
Ebony (“Ivory”), April 1973 [7]
Genre: guns (“Gun Lust”), June 1973 [11]
Genre: men’s (“Knuckle: A Real Man’s Magazine”), June 1973 [5]
Popular Mechanics (“Popular Workbench,” Aug. 1938), July 1973 [14]
Psychology Today (“Psychology Ptoday”), Aug. 1973 [15]
Genre: fashion (“Guerre: The New Magazine for the New Army”), Sept. 1973 [7]
Life (“Life,” Sept. 28, 1943), Sept. 1973 [13]
Reader’s Digest (article: “Martial Mirth”), Sept. 1973 [1]
Oui (“Peut-etre” article: “Taffy”), Oct. 1973 [4]
Sports Illustrated (“Sports Illustrated”), Nov. 1973 [13]
Tiger Beat (“Poon Beat”), Dec. 1973 [10]

1974
Penthouse (“Pethouse”), Jan. 1974 [9]
Popular Science (“Popular Evolution”), Jan. 1974 [11]
National Lampoon (“National Lampoof”), Feb. 1974 [11]
U.S. News & World Report (“Stupid News & World Report”), March 1974 [7]
Genre: inflight (“Stampede: Prairie Central/Panhandle Airlines Magazine”), April 1974 [8]
Reader’s Digest (“Digester’s Reader” front & back covers only), June 1974 [1]
Weight Watchers (“Weighty Waddlers”), June 1974 [7]
Genre: guns (“Guns & Sandwiches”), July 1974 [6]
Family Circle (“Famine Circle”), July 1974 [8]
Screw (“Seed”), Aug. 1974 [8]
Genre: pulps (“Unexciting Stories,” undated but 1930s), Sept. 1974 [4+]
Ladies’ Home Journal (“Old Ladies’ Home Journal”), Sept. 1974 [8]
National Midnight (“Almost Midnight”), Sept. 1974 [4]
Playboy (ad: What Sort of Man Reads Pl*yb*y?”), Oct. 1974 [1]
Boys’ Life (“Boys’ Real Life”), Oct. 1974 [10]
Awake! (“Wise Up!”), Dec. 1974 [3 half-pages]

1975
National Lampoon (article: “NL’s 1974 New Year’s Resolutions”), Jan. 1975 [5]
Genre: homemaker (“Negligent Mother”), Jan. 1975 [6]
Modern Bride (“American Bride”), Feb. 1975 [10)
The New Yorker (“The New Y*rker”), March 1975 [13]
Time (article: “Partly Sane, Raspberries, and Time”), March 1975 [3]
Hot Rod (“Warm Rod”), April 1975 [7]
JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association (“COMA: Circular of the Organization of Medical Associations”), May 1975 [8]
National Star (“National Sore”), May 1975 [4]
Genre: boys’ magazines (“Cap’n Jasper’s Boy O Boy,” May 1935), June 1975 [8]
Genre: show-biz trade paper (“Hollywood Briefs”), July 1975 [4]
After Dark (article: “Glitter Bums”), July 1975 [3]
Harvard Lampoon (article: “The Ten Worst Movies of All Time”), July 1975 [1]
Genre: true crime (“Citizen’s Arrest”), Aug. 1975 [7]
Esquire (“Exsquire”), Sept. 1975 [12]
Genre: college newpapers (“The Daily Klaxon”), Sept. 1975 [4]
Penthouse (article: “The Resister’s Revenge”), Sept. 1975 [6]
Genre: gossip (“Myth & Legend Mirror” for Oct. IV B.C.), Oct. 1975 [5]
Fortune (“Lucre”), Dec. 1975 [12]
Moneysworth (two subscription ads for “Nickleknows”), Dec. 1975 [1+1]

1976
New Times (“Nu? Times” cover only), Jan. 1976 [1]
New York Review of Books (“The New York Review of Us”), Jan. 1976 [8]
ARTnews (“ARTynews”), Feb. 1976 [13]
Genre: art studies (“Modes d’Art Magazine” for June 1926), Feb. 1976 [6]
The Sporting News (“The Sportbiz News”), April 1976 [6]
Genre: fan & gossip (“Silver Jock: The Demi-Decadent Sports Magazine), April 1976 [7]
Cahiers du Cinema (“Cahiers du TV”), May 1976 [4]
The Times of India (“The Times of Indira”), May 1976 [3]
The Canadian Magazine (“The Canadian Weakly,” June 8, 1969), June 1976 [6]
Hustler (“Gobbler”), Aug. 1976 [5]
Newsweek (cover + article: “Townville, Iowa”), Nov. 1976 [2]
People (“Objects”), Dec. 1976 [5, no cover]

1977
The Kiplinger Washington Letter (“The Kremlinger Moscow Letter”), Jan. 1977 [2]
Scientific American (“Scienterrific American”), Jan. 1977 [10]
Look (“Kennedy”), Feb. 1977 [11]
Jet (“Tar”), Feb. 1977 [6, digest-size]
The Village Voice (“The Global Village Voice”), Feb. 1977 [8]
TV Guide (“TV”), Apr. 1977 [16, digest-size]
Better Homes and Gardens (“Better Homes and Closets”), May 1977 [11]
Money Matters (“Young Money Matters”), June 1977 [4]
Penthouse (“Repenthouse”), July 1977 [5]
High Times (“Wasted Times”), Aug. 1977 [7]
Amazing Stories (“Amusing Stories” for Oct. 1926), Sept. 1977 [3]
Mad (article: “You Know You’re Grown Up When…”), Sept. 1977 [2]
Genre: fan & gossip (“Mersey Moptop Faverave Fabgearbeat” for Oct. 1964), Oct. 1977 [8]
The New York Times (“The New York Time”), Oct. 1977 [front page on 2]
New York (“Lifestyles”), Nov. 1977 [42 + front cover]
Time (“Xmas Time”), Dec. 1977 [5]

1978
National Review (“National Socialist Review”), Feb. 1978 [8]
Outside (“OutSSide” subscription ad), Feb. 1978 [3]
Reader’s Digest (article: “Rumpus Room Rib-Ticklers”), May 1978 [2]
Seventeen (“Savvyteen”), Aug. 1978 [8]
GQ (“RQ: Regular Guy Quarterly”), Sept. 1978 [4]
Variety (“Movies”), Oct. 1978 [4]

1979
Life (“Lite”), April 1979 [8]

1980
Genre: UFOs (“Real Business Jet”), March 1980 [5]
Genre: men’s (“Real-Life Adventure”), June 1980 [4]
The New Yorker (article: “Coming Into the River,” by “John McPhoo”), June 1980 [6]
National Enquirer (“The Washington Enquirer”), Aug. 1980 [4]

1981
People (article: “Douglas Waterman Caps a Big Year”), May 1981 [4]
New York Times Book Review (article: “Would You Like Something to Read?”), Aug. 1981 [2+]
Time (Special Section: “Let’s Get It Up, America”), Aug. 1981 [27]
New York Times Magazine (article: “Talking Out Loud: College Slang of the Eighties,” by “William Zircon”), Sept. 1981 [1+]
Genre: TV listings (“American Home Movie Box Program Guide”), Oct. 1981 [4]
The Hollywood Reporter (“The Hollywood Informer”), Oct. 1981 [5]
Esquire (“Esquare”), Dec. 1981 [13]
Interview (“Interluude”), Dec. 1981 [11]
Wet (“Moist”), Dec. 1981 [9]

1982
Heavy Metal (“Semi Mental” art portfolio), Jan. 1982 [6]
Cinefantastic (“Cinefantasterrifique”), Jan. 1982 [5]
Jack and Jill (“Jack and Jill St. John”), Feb. 1982 [5]
Playboy (article: “Parents of the Girls of the Eastwest Conference”), Feb. 1982 [2]
Playboy (article: “The Playboy Advisor”), Feb. 1982 [1]
Gourmet (“Goormay”), March 1982 [9]
Road & Track (“Food & Track”), March 1982 [5]
Genre: fan & gossip mags (“Mitch Springer: A Loving Tribute”), April 1982 [5]
Self (“Self-Destruct”), April 1982 [5]
Genre: visitor guides (“Why Leave This Room?”) Aug. 1982 [5]
New York Times Magazine (article: “Talking Out Loud: The Customers Always Write,” by “William Zircon”), Aug. 1982 [1+]
National Enquirer (“National Sexloid”), Sept. 1982 [5]
National Lampoon (article: “False Facts”), Sept. 1982 [1]
Time (article: Henry Kissenger’s “Years of Arousal”), Sept. 1982 [6]
Rolling Stone (“Rolling Tombstone”), Nov. 1982 [9]

1983
The Dial (“hy-Art: The Magazine of the Precious Broadcasting System”), Jan. 1983 [7]
Travel & Leisure (“Postage & Handling”), Feb. 1983 [7]
The Atlantic (“The Hotlantic”), April 1983 [9]
National Geographic (“National Southpacific”, May 1983 [13]
Playboy (article: “Dear Playmates”), June 1983 [1]
Genre: alumni (“Skidmark: The Alumni Magazine of Skidmark College”), Sept. 1983 [11]
New York (“Jo’burg”), Sept. 1983 [9]
Working Woman (“Working Girl”), Nov. 1983 [11]
The New Yorker (article: “Ron Hauge’s Year of Rejected New Yorker Covers”), Dec. 1983 [4]

1984
Time (“Time”), Jan. 1984 [35]
Easyriders (“Equalriders”), March 1984 [11]
New York Times Magazine (“The New York Times Magazine”), June 1984 [19]
The New Yorker (“The Hymie Towner” cover only), June 1984 [1]
People (“PLO” article: “Nor More Mr. Bad Guy For Yassir Arafat”), July 1984 [4]
Genre: TV listings (“Unofficial 1984 Olympic TV Watcher’s Guide”), Aug. 1984 [16 digest-size]
Genre: fitness (“Muscle Mind”), Sept. 1984 [7]

1985
Forum (“Whorum”), Jan. 1985 [8]
Seventeen (“Deadteen”), July 1985 [7]
Easyriders (“Easywriters”), Sept. 1985 [8]
Multiple titles (article: “The Hot New Lineup for 1986 from Condom-Nasty Publications,” with covers of STD-focused versions of Harper’s Bazaar, Reader’s Digest and New Age Journal), Sept. 1985 [2].
Rolling Stone (“Rollin’ Home” for Itinerant Bluesmen), Oct. 1985 [6]
Multiple titles (article: “The Real Story of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” told in fake clips from the New York Post, People, Jet, etc.), Oct. 1985 [7].
Playboy (“Slayboy”), Dec. 1985 [8]

1986
Fortune (“Misfortune”), Feb. 1986 [13]
National Lampoon (“National Tampoon”), March 1986 [6]
Playboy (article: “Feminist Party Jokes”), March 1986 [1]
Sports Illustrated (“Sports Hallucinated”), May 1986 [7]
Playboy (article: “Interview: Steven Spielberg”), Aug. 1986 [3+]
Genre: tabloid (“Stranger Than Fact”), Nov. 1986 [7]

1987
Genre: fitness (“Peppy: The High-Potency Magazine of Fitness and Health”), Jan. 1987 [12]

1988
Playboy (“Playbyte”), Feb. 1988 [10]
Sporting News (“The Sporting Muse”), Oct. 1988 [10]

1989
Rolling Stone (“Rolling Stone”), Feb. 1989 [7]
Playboy (article: “Girls of the Community Colleges”), Oct. 1989 [4]
Martha Stewart Entertaining (“Martha Stewart’s Entertaining the K-Mart Way”), Dec. 1989 [3]

1990-1998
Rollling Stone (“Perception/Reality” ad), Feb. 1990
Vanity Fair (“Vanity Fair”), June 1990 [10]
Genre: movies (“Big Screen”), June 1991 [36]
Rolling Stone (article: “Have War, Will Travel,” by “P.J. O’Drunke”), Aug. 1991 [2]
Muscle & Fitness (“Muscle & Fatness”), March 1994 [9]
Guns & Ammo (“Liquor & Ammo”), Aug. 1994 [10]
Reader’s Digest (“Reader Digest”), Jan.-Feb. 1995 [10]
Genre: golf (“Duffer’s Digest”), 1996 [9]
National Enquirer (“Roman Eqvirer”), 1996 [4]
Inc. (“stInc.”), 1998 [13]

Section 2: Parodies in Special Editions and Books, 1974-2006:

In the 1964 High School Yearbook Parody, special edition, Summer 1974:
Genre: high school newspaper (“The Prism” for May 11, 1964) [8]
Genre: high school literary magazine (“Leaf & Squib” for Spring 1964) [14]

In NL’s 199th Birthday Book, special edition, 1975:
Genre: college humor (“The Spitoon,” for 1877) [2]
Kiplinger Washington Letter (“The Hamilton Philadelphia Letter,” Sept. 18, 1787) [2]
Popular Mechanics (“Tomorrow’s Future Homebody” for June 1946) [3]

In NL’s Sunday Newspaper Parody, special edition, Feb. 1978:
Genre: newspaper (“The Dacron-Republican-Democrat”) [104, in 8 sections]
Genre: newspaper magazine section (“Sunday Week”) [16]
Parade (“Pomade”) [16]

In NL Magazine Rack (New York: National Lampoon Press, 2006):
Consumer Reports (“Consumed Reports”), from nationallampoon.com, June 2004 [4]
The Hollywood Reporter (“The Hollywood Retorter”), limited distribution, Dec. 2002 [16]
Men’s Health (“Man’s Health”), from nationallampoon.com, June 2002 [4]
TV Guide (“Al-Jazeera TV Guide”), from nationallampoon.com, Nov. 2004 [4]

Section 3: Parodies in Non-National Lampoon Publications:

Print (“National Lampoon Graphics Parody Section”), in Print, July-Aug. 1974 [8 + cover]

Parodies in Mad, 1954-2017

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Cullum Rogers

Wikipedia helpfully lists all of Mad’s movie and TV-show spoofs, but I believe this is the first attempt to catalog parodies of publications. Real, identifiable publications, that is: I’m not counting the fake lifestyle mags for groups like beatniks and hippies and mobsters Mad has perpetrated over the years. I’m also ignoring articles that show a bunch of different titles pulling the same gag: e.g., “Jack and Jill as Retold by Various Magazines (June 1959), “Magazines for Senior Citizens” (June 1961), etc. Everything listed here had at least one full page devoted to it.

“The Bunion,” 2002.

Unlike TV and movie spoofs, magazine parodies never became a staple of Mad’s editorial mix, and they’ve grown rarer as its target audience drifts away from boring old print. More than half the longer parodies appeared in the 1950s and ’60s, with the most recent in 2001. Many were designed by John Putnam, Mad’s art director from 1954 to 1980, whose fascination with the details of layout and typography was rivaled only by National Lampoon’s Michael Gross. Significantly, when Mad took a poke at The Onion in 2002, it targeted theonion.com, not the print edition. Since then there have been similar digs at The Huffington Post (2014) and Cracked (2016).

The list has two sections: multi-page parodies – usually consisting of a front page or cover and three or more inside pages — and cover-only parodies. Section 1.B lists parodies done as bonuses in Mad annuals, which tended to be longer and more colorful that those in the magazine, with pages the same size and paper stock as their targets’. The biggest parody in a regular issue was a 16-page spoof of Entertainment Weekly in April 1998 that doubled as a test-run for Mad’s switch to inside color and slick paper (and the real ads that would pay for them). “Entertain-Me Weakly” generated a flurry of media coverage, but nothing as ambitious has been done since.

“Sik-teen” in issue #121 (1968) was the only Mad parody to begin on the back cover and continue inside. Frank Frazetta’s Ringo first appeared in the “Blecch” Shampoo ad in issue #90 (1965).

Section 2 deals with cover-only parodies. Such brief spoofs usually leave me wanting more, but some of Mad’s are priceless. Basil Wolverton’s Life-like “Beautiful Girl of the Month” on the front of Mad comics #11 (May 1954) may be the most famous, but for my money the funniest is Mark Fredrickson’s version of Vanity Fair’s kiss-up to Tom Cruise and family in issue #472 (Dec. 2006). Both appeared on Mad’s front cover, but most fake covers have run on the back, where they’re subject to mutilation by Fold-In fanatics. Since the late ’90s, Mad has done most of its magazine spoofing in the annual “20 Dumbest People, Places and Things” survey.

Making 1 + 1 (pages of Mad) = 3 (pages of parody) in issue #34 (1957).

Each listing begins with the name of the publication being parodied, in italics; followed by the fake title or article name, in parentheses; the Mad issue date and number; the length of the parody (if more than one page); and the names of the writer(s) and artist(s), in that order, separated by a slash (/). A phrase like “9 pages (on 5)” means one page of Mad contained two or more digest-size parody pages; the phrase “no cover” flags a couple of early parodies that didn’t have one; and “(p)” indicates a photographer. The writer and artist credits are from Doug Gilford’s Mad Cover Site, to whom all thanks. — VCR

1. Multi-page parodies …
A. … in Mad regular issues, 1954-2001:

The Daily News (“Newspapers!”), Oct. 1954 (#16). Front cover + 7 pages. Harvey Kurtzman/Jack Davis.
Confidential (“Confidential Information”), Aug.-Sept. 1955 (#25). 6 pages (no cover). Kurtzman/Will Elder.
Field & Stream (“Field & Scream”), Jan.-Feb. 1957 (#31). 5 pages (no cover). Kurtzman/Davis.
TV Guide (“TV Guise”), July-Aug. 1957 (#34). 9 pages (on 5). Paul Laikin/Bob Clarke.
Better Homes and Gardens (“Bitter Homes and Gardens”), Mar.-Apr. 1958 (#38). 5 pages. Tom Koch/Wallace Wood.
The Saturday Evening Post (“… Pest”), May-June 1958 (#39). 6 pages. Koch/Clarke.
Pravda, July 1958 (#40). 4 pages. Frank Jacobs/Wood.
National Geographic (“National Osographic”), Sept.-Oct. 1958 (#41). 5 pages. Koch/Wood.
Look (“Gook”), Mar. 1959 (#45). 7 pages. Koch/Wood.
True Confessions (“Blue Confessions”), Oct. 1959 (#50). 9 pages (on 3) Laikin/Wood.
Modern Screen[?] (“Movie Land”), Apr. 1960 (#54). 5 pages. Larry Siegel/Joe Orlando.
The Wall Street Journal (“… Jungle”), Mar. 1961 (#61). 4 pages. Phil Hahn/.
Playboy (“Playkid”), Mar. 1961 (#61). 7 pages. Siegel/Clarke.
Ladies’ Home Journal (“… Journey”), Apr. 1961 (#62). 6 pages. Koch/Orlando.
Reader’s Digest (“Reader’s Digress”), Dec. 1961 (#67). 9 pages (on 5). Siegel/Orlando.
Popular Mechanics/Popular Science (“Popular Scientific Mechanics”), Sept. 1963 (#81). 7 pages. Al Jaffee/Clarke.
Hair Do (“Hair Goo”), June 1965 (#95). 6 pages. Jaffee/Jack Rickard.
Road & Track (“Load & Crash”), Sept. 1965 (#97). 6 pages. Koch/George Woodbridge.
National Enquirer (“National Perspirer”), Apr. 1966 (#102). 5 pages. Siegel/Jaffee.
16 (“Sik-Teen”), Sept. 1968 (#121), Back & inside-back covers + 6 pages. Siegel/Rickard, Davis.
Consumer Reports (“Condemner Reports”), Jan. 1970 (#132). 6 pages. Dick DeBartolo/Clarke, Irving Schild (p).
Popular Photography (“Popular Photomonotony”), June 1975 (#175). 6 pages. DeBartolo/Schild (p).
Consumer Reports (“Consumer Reports for Government Agencies”), March 1979. 4 pages. DeBartolo/.
TV Guide (“Mad’s ‘TV Guide’ Textbook”), June 1980 (#215). 7 pages (on 5). Lou Silverstone/Woodbridge.
Mad (“The Book of Mad” [Biblical Parody]), Dec. 1983 (#243). 5 pages. Silverstone/Paul Coker, Dave Berg, Don Martin, Rickard, Davis, Clarke, Woodbridge.
Parade (“Charade”), Sept. 1993 (#321). 4 pages. Charlie Kadau, Joe Raiola/Sam Viviano.
Entertainment Weekly (“Entertain Me Weakly”), Apr. 1998 (#368). 16 pages. Scott Brooks/Drew Friedman, Joe Favarotta.
Generic muscle magazine (“Bulging Man”), Aug. 1999 (#384). 8 pages. Scott Maiko/Scott Bricher, Schild (p), Sean Kahlil (p)
Generic tattoo mag (“Maimed Flesh”), Sept. 2001 (#409). 8 pages. Maiko/Hermann Mejia.

Bonus parodies in or from More Trash # 6 (1962) and Specials #8 (1972) and #19 (1976).

B. … in Mad Annuals, 1961-1976:

Puck: The Comic Weekly (“A Sunday Comics Section We’d Like t0 See”), in The Worst From Mad #4, 1961. 8 broadsheet pages. /Wood, Orlando, Clarke, Woodbridge.
TV Guide (“TV Guise”), in More Trash from Mad #6, 1963. 16 digest-size pages. Aron Mayer Larkin/Lester Kraus (p).
TV Guide (“TV Guise” Fall Preview Issue), in Mad Special # 8, Fall 1972. 16 digest-size pages. Koch/Schild (p).
Mad (“Madde”), in Mad Special #19, Fall 1976. 24 pages. All the regulars.

2. Cover-only parodies …
A. …on Mad front covers, 1954-2006:

Life (“Mad”), May 1954 (#11). “Beautiful Girl.” /Basil Wolverton.
Time (“Mad”), Sept. 1982 (#233). Pac Man: Man of the Year. /Clarke.
Time (“Mad”), March 1987 (#269). Alfred E. Neuman as Max Headroom. /Richard Williams.
People (“Mad”), Jan. 1991 (#300). Alfred as “Sexiest Schmuck Alive!” /Norman Mingo.
Vanity Fair (“Mad”), Dec. 2006 (#472). Alfred as Suri Cruise. /Mark Fredrickson.

Real and parody covers of SatEvePost and Vanity Fair.

Mad on the Post’s redesign (back cover #62) and VF’s Suri Cruise hoopla (front cover #472).

B. …on back covers, 1958-2000:

Reader’s Digest (“Reader’s Disgust”). Jan.-Feb. 1958 (#37). /Orlando.
Saturday Evening Post. March 1962 (#69). /Mingo.
Newsweek (“Newsweak”), Dec. 1963 (#83). /Kraus (p).
The New Yorker. March 1977 (#189). Bill Johnson Jr./Clarke.
WWF Magazine (“WWWF: Witless Windbag Wrestlers Federation Magazine”), July 1987 (#272). /Schild (p).
Sports Illustrated (“Sports Titillated”), April 1988 (#278). /Schild (p).
Metal Edge (“Metal Sludge”), July 1989 (#288). Kadau, Raiola/Schild (p).
Typical teen mag (“StupidTeen”), Sept. 1991 (#305). Kadau, Raiola/.
GQ (“Geek’s Quarterly”), March 1992 (#309). William T. Rachendorfer, Andrew J. Schwartzberg/.
Sassy (“Sasssy”), Jan. 1993 (#316). Kadau, Raiola/Jacques Chenet (p)
Martha Stewart Living (“…Dying”), May 1997. Meredith Anthony, Larry Light, Alison Power/Schild (p).
Maxim (“Maximum”), July 2000. Jeff Kruse/AP, Wide World (p).

C. …in the annual “20 Dumbest” list, 2000-2017:

People, Jan. 2000 (#389). “JFK Jr. crash coverage.” David Shayne, Raiola/.
Playboy, Jan. 2001 (#401). “Darva Conger.” Dave Croatto/.
Time, Jan. 2002 (#413). “Anne Heche.” Greg Leitman/.
Martha Stewart Living (“Martha Stewart Lying”), Jan. 2003 (#425). “Martha Stewart.” /Scott Bricher.
Teen People (“Dumb Teen People”), Jan. 2004 (#437). “Jessica Simpson.” Frank Santopadre/Schild (p).
Modern Bride (“Drunken Bride”), Jan. 2005 (#449). “Britney Spears.” Raiola, Kadau/Schild (p).
Modern Bride (“Runaway Bride”), Jan. 2006 (#461). “Jennifer Willibanks.” Kadau, Raiola/Bricher.
Sports Illustrated (“Sports Inebriated”), Jan. 2007 (#473). “Bode Miller.” Kadau, Raiola/Bricher.
Sporting News (“Snorting News”), Jan. 2008 (#485). “Keith Richards.” Jacob Lambert/Fredrickson.
Parenting (“Bad Parenting”), Jan. 2009 (#497). “Celebrity parents.” /Schild (p).
High Times, Jan. 2010 (#502). “Michael Phelps.” Uncredited.
Women’s Wear Daily (“…Deli”), Jan. 2011 (#507). “Lady Gaga.” Barry Liebman/Bricher.
Scientific American (“Unscientific American”), Jan. 2013 (#519). “Todd Akin.” Scott Nichol/.
Money (“Fake Money”), Feb. 2014 (#525).”The Winklevoss twins” /Mike Lowe.
Better Homes and Gardens (“Better Homes unGuarded”), Feb. 2015 (#531). “White House security.” Uncredited.
Sports Illustrated (“Sports Segregated”), Feb. 2015 (#531). “Donald Sterling.” /Friedman.
People (“Deplorable People”), Feb. 2017 (#543). “Donald Trump.” Uncredited.

Online: National Lampoon’s “Mad,” 1971

Posted on August 25, 2016 by Cullum Rogers

Parody Of: Mad. Title: “Mad.” Parody In: National Lampoon.
Date: October 1971. Length: 15 pages. Contributors: John Boni, Sean Kelly, Henry Beard (writers); John Romita, Joe Orlando, Ernie Colon, Al Weiss, Babi Jeri, John Lewis, Stuart Schwartzberg, Ralph Reese. Availability: Online here. Reprinted in National Lampoon Comics (1974) and National Lampoon’s Magazine Rack (2006).

“Mad” is one of National Lampoon’s best and best remembered parodies. Like Mad itself, it goes after its target with very little subtlety and a great deal of skill, piling up visual and verbal gags to drive home the message that even iconoclasts can have clay feet. You’ll find the whole thing on John Glenn Taylor’s blog “Easily Mused.” where it’s been sitting since 2009. I only discovered it the other day, by way of an essay by Matt Keeley at Kittysneezes.com.

Keeley’s “What, Me Funny?” is such a thorough, page-by-page examination of “Mad” that there’s little to add, but I want to echo his observation that it “seems to come from a place of love.” Disappointed love, of course. NatLamp’s fiercest parodies were of magazines its writers’ younger selves had considered the height of sophistication and then outgrown, or at least come to see as formulaic: Playboy, Esquire, The New Yorker. Mad was the NatLamp gang’s first crush and first disillusionment, and the combination of hurt feelings and intimate knowledge in articles like “Citizen Gaines” and “You Know You’ve Really Outgrown Mad When…” is so intense it’s almost painful. Too many magazine parodies aren’t actually about the publications they resemble; they’re just random jokes stuffed into a conveniently familiar format. “Mad” is about Mad and nothing but Mad, and its narrow focus is what gives it such a sharp point. — VCR

Jack Rickard aped by John Lewis.

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