Customer Reviews

Spy: The Funny Years

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

While it's (marginally) interesting to me to learn about the backstage goings-on that went into creating this magazine that I used to love, what I really wanted was lots of reprints of articles that defined Spy. While a few of them are reprinted here (such as the wonderful piece on "yuppie porn") others are inexplicably printed in extremely small type ("A Spy Guide to Postmodern Everything") that literally require a magnifying glass to read! What a disappointment. I gave it an extra star because it's bound very nicely and obviously took a lot of effort to put together.

How glorious to revisit the magnificent "Checks to Cheapskates" caper! Whereby Spy sent checks for 13 cents to Adnan Koshoggi and Donald Trump, who cashed them. (Cher, Bill Blass, Faye Dunaway, Rupert Murdoch, Mort Zuckerman and others cashed $1.11 checks.)

Most huge fans of Spy will want more reprints of classic articles (and in bigger, more readable type) than appear here. Still, it's wonderful to revisit the definitive article, "It's Yuppie Porn, and we can't help ourselves," as well as pieces on washed-up celebrities after-hours wanderings through the Big Apple, "Separated at Birth," "Logrolling in our Time," "Blurb-o-Matic" and "Celebrity Math."

We also have oddball gems such as "Meet the Nobelists: This month's question: What's the best way to eat an Oreo cookie?"

"Spy: The Funny Years" is a 50-50 split between being a narrative about the founding and history of the 1980s' funniest magazine and excerpts from the more infamous articles.

This book will leave you wanting to rush to eBay for some back issues, or wanting to beg Miramax, the publisher of "The Funny Years," to also bring out a "Best of Spy" compilation of the original articles.

I found myself enjoying the narrative of how Spy came to be, a narrative which may create envy in many a journalist in the stuffy mainstream media, reading about the vastly underpaid minions working at Spy to create its hilarious, information-rich visuals that presaged the Web. Spy also presaged "South Park's" evisceration of pompous celebrities (and Saturday Night Live's "Hollywood Minute").

Spy's founders managed to create articles that were hilarious, visually inspired, tough yet accurate, requiring top-notch lawyering. Will we ever see something comparable for our era?

"SPY: The Funny Years" is the next best thing to an announcement that the magazine is resuming publication. This book is more than just a "greatest hits" collection. Indeed, it discusses in detail how the remarkably vicious and intelligent publication came to be. Reading the book, one gets nostalgic and then angry that it didn't survive to chronicle the W years. Just imagine what SPY could have done to the likes of Ann Coulter.

Why do I miss "Spy"?

Because it started out as a satire on all things New York (Trump, rats, Supermodels, Giuliani, etc.) at a time when every other magazine was busy brown-nosing their profilees. Because it expanded to include Washington and Hollywood, too. Because Graydon Carter was still a brilliant, funny, fearless writer/editor, and not the celebrity wannabe, Bush-obsessed, environmentalist hack he has become while at the helm of "Vanity Fair".

Back in the day when "Spy" was still around, there were no sacred cows,
and everyone's persona, no matter what side of the political spectrum they occupied, was fodder for Carter, Anderson, et al's comic touch. The only reason it lacks a fifth star is because it's not a compilation of every single issue.

Relive the glory days of social/political satire in this brilliant book!

I have several piles of old SPY magazine back issues around my house, so I suppose I am part of the ideal audience for this book, "SPY: The Funny Years." It contains a generous sampling of classic SPY articles that I recognized, as well as a few that I missed from the first few issues when I guess it wasn't very available outside New York City. The book also features a detailed history of the magazine written by former editor George Kalogerakis with notes and commentary by co-founders Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen.

You ask, "why should I buy a big, sort of expensive book about a magazine from twenty years ago?" Well, first because this book is funny as hell. Two of the first pitches of SPY were "The New Yorker crossed with the National Enquirer and David Letterman", or "MAD Magazine for grown-ups", and those are pretty good descriptions. The famous article about the Bohemian Grove is reprinted here in full, as well as Paul Rudnick and Kurt Andersen's "The Irony Epidemic" (perhaps the quintessential SPY piece), and Joe Eszterhas' flame-thrower letter to Mike Ovitz (with annotations.) The best SPY articles produced belly-laughs and cool investigative journalism at the same time.

The history of the magazine included in this volume might seem a little inside to those who aren't already fans, but if you read it you will learn why SPY was probably the most influential magazine of the last twenty years, certainly since the heyday of the National Lampoon. SPY was reviewing other reviewers before blogs were even thought of, and its brand of radical skepticism towards all things media has been ripped off by VH1, E!, and every other pop culture outfit you can name. Only SPY was smart. I think I got a post-graduate education of sorts from my reading of erudite pieces like the satiric explanation of post-modernism reprinted here. (SPY was the first place I had ever heard of post-modernism, which tells you either how smart it was or how sheltered I was at the time.) Each issue demanded a lot from the reader, which is probably why it wasn't long for this world. (In a just universe, SPY would still be going strong and be universally recognized for inventing "reality" entertainment, for good and ill.)

Co-founders Carter and Andersen have gone on to become solid members of the media establishment (and some would say that "Vanity Fair" editor Carter has become what he once mocked.) Old issues of SPY are avidly sought after on eBay. And "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" try to emulate SPY, not realizing that the old magazine didn't have a political agenda: it made fun of everybody. This book is a valuable keepsake for admirers of the magazine and a good introduction for those who are yet unfamiliar but are curious about the legend. Man, I sure do miss it.

It was really great when one day my wife & I were at the Jersey shore on a rainy summer afternoon and lo & behold what did appear before my very eyes??? SPY: The funny years! I had to flip through this book and see if any of my contributions (although minor) did appear here (I was an intern in the design dept. during the heyday of SPY) WOW! did that book bring back some really great memories for me. I was even impressed by the fact that every person who ever worked there was listed in the book! I was able to use this to have a little fun with my wife, I called her over and said to her "hey babe, look they published my name in this book!" my wife not realizing I was serious replied "oh wow! Theres a guy with the exact same name as yours!" I laughed and explained that it was really me and told her all about my long internship at SPY. I really miss my friends from SPY and was really saddened to hear about B.W. Honeycutt whom I worked for and held a great respect & admiration (he passed in 1994) but I think I will have to look up a few of my old aquaintances and see "where are they now?"

Magazine publishing is all about timing -- having whatever your audience wants, just a moment before they want it. The best magazines, of course, strive not to think about their audience -- to run off in the direction they've chosen and hope that they have enough followers to keep the lights on.

Spy was a great magazine in the late '80s, a fine magazine in the early '90s, and a shambling wreck of itself in the late '90s -- when it started, it was one of the earliest manifestation of the modern media self-fascination (and self-loathing, and endless self-reflexivity) and of the snarky, iconoclastic tone that later became the default mode of the Internet. And SPY: THE FUNNY YEARS tells the story of that magazine, through those good years, interspersed with a lot of examples of what Spy did well.

Although, since Spy was so much of its time -- picking on Trump and Leona and Ovitz and the rest of the late-80s vintage crew of unpleasant New Yorkers -- reading it now is an exercise in quaintness and nostalgia, full of "remember that?!" moments that leech the honest bile of its original power. That's inevitable, of course -- last year's short-fingered vulgarian is this year's TV superstar -- but it does tend to make Spy seem cuter and less cutting than it really was.

This book is written by George Kalogerakis, one of the original Spy crew, with regular kibitzing and oversight by the original editorial duumvirate, Kurt Anderson and Graydon Carter. The balance between old and new is skewed towards the old -- Spy was so crowded with what we now call "content" that a snippet from those pages has as many words as a page or two of the coffee-table-book prose of the main narrative. And so SPY: THE FUNNY YEARS has "pictures" with more words than the pages they sit on, and a number of full articles, all of which take longer to read than two or three chapters put together. It's good stuff, sure, but SPY: THE FUNNY YEARS feels more like an anthology of the Best of Spy, with historical notes, than like a history of Spy with illustrations. But what can you expect when you let such word-struck folks have their heads?

If you were there at the time -- or soon afterward; I only graduated college and started working in New York in 1990, around or just after the peak of Spy -- then this will remind you of the things we were all disgusted by then, and how we found out about them. If not, it's an interesting snapshot of a time that seemed the height of bad taste and the self-indulgence of wealth then...only because we didn't realize how much worse things could get.

If there was a hip, satirical sensibility that came out of the New York of the 1980s, Spy magazine embodied it. Spy: The Funny Years, tells the story of how Spy was created, who ran it, what it did, and all its ups and downs during its years (far too short) of existence.

The greatest magazine of my youth is reprised here in book form! Anyone familiar with how wonderful and fascinating Spy magazine was back in the late 1980's should read this one. Spy broke new ground in "funny" and "ballsy" in the pre-internet age of media. Quite funny and well worth the time, though anyone not familiar with Spy probably won't get much out of it.

Highly recommended for former Spy readers!

I loved Spy. I remember one issue that had autopsy reports on Jim Croce and someone else, in tiny print, in the margins. This was an outstanding magazine, too far ahead of its time to succeed. Hell, it wouldn't succeed now; way too much narcissism today for anyone to find humor in it. This book is a great tribute to a great magazine.

Did anyone ever win the prize for the errors on the cover?