Spy vs. Spy

As the (so far) short life of Radar reminds us, everyone is Spy magazine now.

"As everyone knows, we've been working hard to complete Radar's funding," the unsinkable Maer Roshan told Keith Kelly last week, "and while it's taken longer than expected in this environment, things are now looking good." Of course, it's looking so good that the third issue has been delayed for a second time, and, as Kelly was quick to point out, the magazine's staff, furloughed since June, remains on hiatus. But the real source of Radar's problems can be found not in the New York Post but in The Wall Street Journal, where the serious economic calculus is doled out: Investors are wary, money is tight. That Roshan has found even this much funding in a dismal environment is quite a feat, and it's therefore easy to dismiss the tiny sneer detected in Kelly's report, as if karma—and not a weak economy—was catching up to the heavily hyped launch.

Still, the squib was enough to make you wonder: After 18 months of Radar's buzz, how would you feel if it went away?

None of what we heard about the mag before it launched in May—"Us without the kiss-ass," "Talk without the Tina," "Vanity Fair meets The National Enquirer"—turned out to be true. After the fog-of-launch had cleared and the long-anticipated start-up was in our hands, we found ourselves holding something far more welcome: what looked for all the world like a copy of the old Spy magazine.

There was the garish jumble of small type making acid fun of pols, celebs, and foreigners—their hair, their dietary requirements, their backfilling and backstabbing. There were photos to catch them looking bleary and blowsy at best, off-meds at worst. Radar, like Spy, turns out a mean charticle.

It's all great stuff, if sometimes not exactly the "fresh intelligence" promised on the mag's banner. (If there's any real complaint about Radar, it's that some of its stories could have run anytime in the past few years.) In Spy's heyday, which the purest purists say lasted a spare 10 months from launch in 1986, it was the funniest, most compelling magazine in memory. It was for a generation of adults what Mad and National Lampoon had been for them as kids. What is surprising is not how closely Radar imitates Spy, but that no one has done so before Roshan.

And, problem is, now that Roshan got around to it, it may well be too late—not because the Spy sensibility is out of date, but because we're all Spy now.

Consider: Is there a general-interest magazine today that couldn't find a place for Spy's signatures, like "Separated at Birth," or "Logrolling in Our Time"? Is there a magazine whose opening pages don't use flippant icons and mismatched type to catch the eye? It's hard to prowl the newsstand today without seeing the influence of Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter's stinging tone or Alex Isley's highly layered page designs, or both. The women's magazine Jane, from its bumptious attitude to its checkerboard of typefaces, often comes off as a feminized version of Spy. Carter, now ruling Vanity Fair, continues to employ Isley's photo chips of stars mid-laugh that make them look like drunken hyenas, and even the celeb-besotted Us Weekly has a rakish feature called "Fashion Police," in which comedians and designers rip on celebs' red-carpet attire. Corporate annual reports have even adopted chunks of frenetic text in place of columns of staid type.

This doesn't count Spy imitators that have come and gone. Might, the San Francisco-based Gen X mag that gave us Dave Eggers, openly operated under Spy's rules of engagement. Joel Stein's Q&As in Time, specifically designed to embarrass their subjects, were indebted to Spy's fake interview techniques (reprised in the most recent Radar as a contest between Melissa Rivers and Gwyneth Paltrow for who commanded the best freebies when Radar staffers rang establishments and posed as their assistants).

When Jonathan Alter and Mickey Kaus dreamed up Newsweek's "Conventional Wisdom Watch"—likely today's most widely read charticle—to cover the horse race of the 1988 election, Alter was told, "There's no room for irony in a newsweekly," he rememebrs. Today, there's no room for a magazine without it.

Andersen and Carter didn't create this situation. Spy's most direct inspiration was Britain's satirical Private Eye, but on this side of the Atlantic, Esquire had been doing its part to pull back the veil on politics and celebrity since at least the early '70s. (That magazine also ran an early and still-unparalled charticle, dividing the known world into Assholes and Creeps, complete with Spy-like category jumpers: "Frank Zappa: a creep dying to be an asshole."). New York magazine, The New Republic, and Harper's also have a line in this same ironic pedigree.

But Spy was meaner, more reactionary, and more far-reaching than any of its predecessors, and it has cast a proportionally longer shadow. Its elitism laid the ground for The New York Observer's scouring Upper East Side style of sarcasm. And, at the same time, its burlesque of scantily clad starlets and aging sex symbols heralded the 1990s lad-mag boom. Radar seems to be working to bring these two strands back together.

Still, it will have to work a little harder if it wants to be the Spy of our time. Other than a self-fulfilling piece about Bill Clinton becoming a bold-faced name instead of a Jimmy Carter-style statesman, Radar has yet to take on the serious work of satire. The class of luminaries Spy held up for public humiliation—Henry Kravis from the financial sector, "war criminal" Henry Kissinger, New York City Ballet director Peter Martins—were true big shots, and required some sophistication from its audience if it was going to get the gags. So far Radar has been satisfied to lampoon the usual suspects we see in Us and Vanity Fair. To go after this bunch only focuses attention on folks Radar seems to think aren't worth our time in the first place.

It's tough to out-Spy all the other neo-Spys when you're playing to the heartland. But Radar's got the right style and a smart staff. They need some time, and I wouldn't bet against Roshan or the venture. Plus, with a conservative in the White House and the economy limping out of a recession—the same conditions that nurtured Spy—Radar at the very least has deja vu on its side.

Paul O'Donnell is a producer at Beliefnetand a former Newsweek writer and reporter.