My eagle-eyed friend John Connolly spotted this complimentary comment about Spy in, of all places, The Tube City Almanac
of McKeesport, Pennsylvania:
With My Little Eye: One of my purchases during the recent Book Country outing was a history of the late, lamented Spy magazine called Spy: The Funny Years. I started to page through it in the store, wound up reading part of it as I stood in the aisle, and then bought it and read it cover-to-cover in two long sittings.
It’s hard to describe Spy, which thrived from the late 1980s until roughly 1991 or 1992. I can remember discovering it in the supermarket when I was 13 or 14 — too old for Mad and not old, boring or pretentious enough for the New Yorker (I’m still not two out of the three). I
Spy was snotty and disrespectful to people in power (and these were the Reagan years, after all), dismissive of wealthy Wall Street tycoons during the height of the “greed-is-good” era (it mocked Donald Trump and Ivan Boesky long before their disgrace) and loved to pull down the pants of Hollywood’s best and brightest (Spy took on people like Bill Cosby and Arnold Schwarznegger when they were major stars). Even if I didn’t care about many of the people Spy went after (how many teen-age nerds from McKeesport knew who Mike Ovitz was?) I could appreciate that Spy spoke truth to power.
Yes, there was an annoying Ivy League preciousness to Spy — swanky New York cocktail parties were the center of the universe, Spy‘s writers were the smartest kids in the room, and people who lived in places like Dayton and Minneapolis and (by God) McKeesport were amusing bumpkins — but there was also fearlessness.
And Spy worked crazy hard: Its articles were meticulously reported. It was the first (and as far as I know, only) publication to expose Bohemian Grove, the notorious secretive California resort for conservative politicians and industrialists, and I can still remember its takedown of Wackenhut, a private security company who critics alleged had engaged in covert U.S. intelligence operations years before anyone heard of Blackwater.
I honestly hadn’t thought about Spy in about 15 years. . . .Reading Spy: The Funny Years was like reuniting with a long, lost (somewhat annoying) friend. A few reviews on the Internet suggest that Spy is now a hopelessly dated artifact of the 1980s, like Jams or K-cars. Yes, many of the subjects that Spy covered breathlessly (Ivana Trump, anyone?) are now trivia questions at best, but what stunned me was how fresh the magazine still looks, and how vibrant the writing remains. Websites like Wonkette have captured some of the tone of Spy, but they don’t do the digging, they’re snotty without being smart, and they just don’t look as good. In fact, I can’t think of a single magazine or website that combines that quality of reporting and attitude.