Spy (magazine)

Spy (magazine)

Spy was a satirical monthly magazine founded in 1986 by Kurt Andersen and E. Graydon Carter, who served as its first editors, and Thomas L. Phillips, Jr., its first publisher. After one folding and a rebirth, it ceased publication in 1998. Spy was named after the fictitious magazine that employed James Stewart's character, Macaulay "Mike" Connor, in the movie The Philadelphia Story.

Primarily a magazine of satirical reporting and humor, but also featuring some more serious investigative journalism, the New York–based Spy traced its influences to "H. L. Mencken and A. J. Liebling and Wolcott Gibbs from the '20s, '30s, and '40s; parody-Time-ese of the '40s and '50s; New Journalism of the '60s and '70s; Private Eye, the scabrous (and much jokier) British fortnightly; and the ways we just happened to write," as Andersen and Carter would later write in Spy: The Funny Years. On April 12, 2011, during a live interview on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Kurt Anderson stated that Mad magazine also had a strong influence on their humor by creating examples of satirical and cold analysis of government and prominent figures read in their youth.

It specialized in intelligent, thoroughly researched, irreverent pieces targeting the American media and entertainment industries. Many issues often featured brief photographs of nudity relevant to a story. Some of its features attempted to present the darker side of celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Martha Stewart, and especially, the real-estate tycoon Donald Trump and his then-wife Ivana Trump. Pejorative epithets of celebrities, e.g. "Abe 'I'm Writing As Bad As I Can' Rosenthal" and "former fat girl Diane Brill" became a Spy trademark.