Jamie Malanowski

SALUTING SPY

A self-proclaimed actor and writer named Will Hines has written about Spy on a website called splitsider.com.

“Maybe you’ve heard of Spy Magazine, the satirical magazine that was one of the funniest things ever in the late ’80s and early ’90s, but never read it. Now that Google Books has put much of the Spy archive online, you can see what the fuss was about. For me, it was the magazine that redeemed American culture while everything else sucked.

“Put simply, Spy Magazine (1986–1998) made fun of famous people. But that’s like saying Pixar likes to draw. Spy‘s issues were symphonies of attacks. They mocked pop stars, politicians, authors and Kato Kaelin with equal enthusiasm. They had a ruthless disrespect for celebrity that you usually only see in British tabloids. It mixed lowbrow silliness with highbrow investigation, but editors definitely preferred the smart stuff. Frankly, Spy could be annoyingly difficult to read: pages were unapologetically dense, and stories seemed careful to show off how brainy the staff was. But for fans like me and my snobby high school friends, Spy was a club for funny people too smart to be scared off by small type. And with every snarky inside obscure reference, I loved Spy more. I wanted to be those people, who seemed as they described themselves “smart, funny, fearless.” Yeah, and coolly above it all. . . .

“Unfortunately for Spy, its legacy is slash-and-burn bitchfests like Gawker or Perez Hilton, which have the same enthusiasm for tearing down the beautiful people, but none of the precision or creativity. To make fun of rich people, Spy would anonymously send checks for twenty-five cents to billionaires just to see if someone like Rupert Murdoch would cash it (he did, personally). Perez Hilton finds an unflattering photo of Charlie Sheen and draws a dick on his face.”

Hines says Spy was better than its rather lame progeny, among other reasons, because “it was run by actual journalists”; “was born in a cultural desert”; and “was beautiful to look at.”

Hines also says “Spy, especially in its early years, was filled with references to blueblood New York. I went to UConn, a college so rural we didn’t have a movie theater. But with each issue of Spy, I felt immersed in a rareified Big Apple, glamorized even as its editors made fun of it. They made inside jokes about novelists Jay McInerny and Tama Janowitz staying out too late at some TriBeCa club I’d never heard of. I’d never heard of TriBeCa. They mocked up an issue of Vanity Fair as if it were edited by Norman Mailer. They had so many unflattering photos of Donald Trump I’d assumed he’d once evicted them. They had a tiny drawing of The Puck Building in their masthead. Spy was so proud of its New York pedigree that it made The New Yorker look like Guns & Ammo.”

Concludes Hines, “When Spy worked, it was very good. It redeemed two separate half-decades. And for all its aloof, withering imitators, there isn’t anything as cool and smart and fun out there right now.”

Very nice, laddie. Thank you.

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