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Spy: The Funny Years By Graydon CarterGeorge KalogerakisKurt Andersen ( Miramax )
Release Date: 2006-10-25
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $39.95
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Nice walk down memory lane ( mikefish2 )
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?"
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 Run Away!
I thoroughly enjoyed this magazine when it was published. I assumed I would enjoy this book! No. I expected a recap of witty stories, fun articles, and the mirth and humor I used to enjoy.
This book is primarily behind the scenes information. I really was not interested in the goings on of people I did not know, and do not care to meet. I suppose if you were a fanatic 'Spy' fan this book might be for you.
On the plus side, it looks nice in it's hardbound cover.
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Please follow up with a "Best of Spy" book! ( jeannie1132 )
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?
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 Spy this!
If you ever read one or more of the great ol' Spy magazines - and miss them passionately - like me . . . getting, perusing & drooling delightfully over this book is a gotta! It's a tasty treat!
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SPY: More Influential Than Ever ( gimpel_the_fool )
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.
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