It’s time once again to crowd-source my confusion! In Nathan Heller’s New Yorker review of the new memoir by Graydon Carter (archived), he writes:
Spy, which Carter launched, in 1986, with his former Time colleague Kurt Andersen, strove for a tone he calls “bemused detachment, but witheringly judgmental,” and was almost instantly a hit. Comic magazines like Mad and National Lampoon were zany, gag-filled, world-inside-your-head parodies, but Spy was a reported fact-and-trend magazine—closer, in some ways, to Time or Life. It had columns, features, sidebars, spreads, and crosswords, but in mischievously ironized forms.
Try as I might, I can’t grasp what’s meant by “world-inside-your-head parodies,” and I’m hoping someone can enlighten me.
Incidentally, I’m gobsmacked by the lifestyle of Timesters back in the day:
In the late seventies, when Carter arrived at Time, in a mid-level writing job, he was pleased to find that he never had to use his oven. Staffers charged restaurant dinners and even some family vacations to the magazine, often at their superiors’ urging. Time had a reputation as an apiary for buzzing young Ivy League types. “The general feeling was that everybody else could be making more elsewhere—a theory I did not subscribe to—but the expense account life made up for some of the shortage,” Carter writes. Every Friday, as the upcoming issue was put to bed, carts rolled through the hallways with hot dinner and wine, after which company cars took staffers home—or, in the summer, out to Long Island, where they rented houses in Sag Harbor. For Carter, who had his first Savile Row suit made during those years, Time was where the good going began.
Also, “bemused detachment, but witheringly judgmental,” is an puzzling juxtaposition
Yes, I was bothered by that too.
The meaning of world-inside-your-head parodies could perhaps be reverse-engineered by someone familiar with the magazines in question, which I am not. I nevertheless offer a guess: such publications often have a complex ecosystem of inside running jokes, fictional and fictionalised characters, etc; “world-inside-your-head” is a not-great label for such an ecosystem; perhaps there is an apter technical term ending in -cosm. Such a foocosm might be adapted repeatedly to parody a wide range of current events and trends.
The “world-inside-your-head” thing just seems like a complicated way of saying “fictional” while trying to make the claim (I can’t say how accurately, it’s been a long time …) that much of what _Spy_ published was technically non-fiction, just non-fiction written in a style very different from “straight” magazine journalism of the day.
In terms of lavish lifestyle enjoyed by writers, once Carter was subsequently running a magazine of his own, he gave as good as he had gotten, although this is all memories of a now-lost world where it is frankly difficult to reconstruct how it ever made financial sense even before the internet destroyed the advertising revenues of print magazines. Consider this fellow who was paid by the Carter-run _Vanity Fair_) $500K a year to produce only 30,000 words per year of publishable copy.
https://nypost.com/2025/03/21/media/ex-vanity-fair-writer-bryan-burrough-was-paid-500k-for-3-stories/
I think “world-inside-your-head” is supposed to be an antonym of “reported fact”; pure fantasy versus real-world stuff (albeit treated satirically.) What confuses the issue is “parodies”, which Heller seems not to intend in its proper sense (a parody has to be a parody of something that was intended as serious, after all, or it’s not a parody.)
It’s a pretty dubious antithesis in any case. Private Eye, for example, has always featured extremely silly jokes, parody, satire and dead-serious investigative reporting.
[Ninja’d by JWB.]
I think it’s probably fair to say that the originators of _Spy_ were at a minimum not unaware of the existence and approach of _Private Eye_, which did not really previously have a close analogue in the U.S. magazine world, thus perhaps suggesting an opportunity for whoever started publishing something along potentially similar lines.
I just now remembered one of the best features of the early _Spy_. In those days _The New Yorker_ famously did not run a letters-to-the-editor feature, which was one of its many eccentricities. So _Spy_ kindly ran a “Letters to the Editor of the New Yorker” feature on, as it were, the New Yorker’s behalf. I don’t *think* they were made up – I think they just got the word out to a subset of New Yorker readers that hey if you were going to respond to a New Yorker story in a letter-to-the-editor sort of way, send your letter to us instead and we’ll publish it if it’s one of the better ones we receive before our next issue’s deadline.
Perhaps Heller’s “bemused detachment, but witheringly judgmental” words were intended to mean condescending?
(a parody has to be a parody of something that was intended as serious, after all, or it’s not a parody.)
Not sure that “parody” must be directed at something serious.
The Barbie film is a parody of Barbie doll stuff, which is already a (perhaps unintentional) parody of suburban life values. Young girls may have taken the dolls “seriously” in some sense, but I doubt that adults did. Mattel executives took Barbie dolls seriously, I assume, primarily because they wanted to make money with them.
There have even been parodies of Alice in Wonderland, I seem to remember.
At a magazine where I worked in the 1990s, we would get free bagels on Tuesday mornings. And cream cheese too!
very much a side-note, but i don’t think the barbie movie was in any way a parody. it was a feature-length advertisement, not just for the dolls, but for a specific understanding of the dolls authorized by their manufacturer. chavisa woods’ essay says it all much better than i could, but the movie uses a certain kind of Thou Shalt Not Take This Seriously gloss as a deliberate defense against criticism (of the film, of the dolls, of the Mattel-Authorized understanding of them) – and that is, i’d hazard, the opposite of parody, which is all about taking something seriously enough to criticize it.
The “world-inside-your-head” thing just seems like a complicated way of saying “fictional”
Yes, I think those of you who said things like this must be right. Too convoluted by far!
In terms of lavish lifestyle enjoyed by writers, once Carter was subsequently running a magazine of his own, he gave as good as he had gotten
This is amply confirmed later in the review.
Perhaps Heller’s “bemused detachment, but witheringly judgmental” words were intended to mean condescending?
It wasn’t the meaning that bothered me but the grammatical mismatch: it should surely have been “bemusedly detached but witheringly judgmental.”
Also, I agree with rozele about Barbie.
I barely remember the Barbie movie. I paid a lot to see it, but the price included a long-distance flight, so that’s OK.
Oh, I read it as some kind of detached adjective – not just a bemusedly detached tone, but a witheringly judgmental bemusedly detached tone. But don’t trust me on grammar!
On “grammatical mismatch.”
Long ago I wrote a book review on an account of a 1950’s escape to India by some Tibetan monks, evading the Red Army.
After I wrote that one of them was “sheltered in a hollow tree trunk and hiding,” I was told that was a mismatch and must be changed. Must it?
(I pictured sheltered as accomplished and hiding as on-going.)
****
On “bemused detachment, but witheringly judgmental.”
I wondered how those detached ones were bothered to exercise such judgement.
***
On Mad.
In the mid 1950s I was scolded for buying a Mad magazine. Probably after Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency and comic books.
@David E.
(a parody has to be a parody of something that was intended as serious, after all, or it’s not a parody)
Hm. Wikipedia justifies my faith in it by including
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_spoofs_in_Mad
I’m not sure what you mean by “intended as serious”—I doubt you were ruling out all comedy, for instance—but I still suggest that some of Mad‘s targets, such as Porky’s Revenge!, were intended as serious only as far as making money was concerned.
a parody of something that was intended as serious
Are James Bond movies intended as serious? I can only watch them as parody. (Possibly the early Fleming novels were intended as serious, but the movie franchise is by now well beyond that.)
Then does Johnny English count as parody of parody? And Austin Powers? Leslie Nielsen’s Spy Hard?
You just might have confused the film with the song (which Mattel hates, and which is accordingly a glaring omission from the film).
I suspect it was originally “a tone of bemused detachment but witheringly judgemental”, but got slightly mangled in the quoting.
I agree that “world inside your head” means “fictional”, but it’s a much more expansive, all-encompassing, and zany (descriptions fail me) than “fictional” could ever be.
Like Jurassic Park, all Bond novels were dead serious and were saved by the movies. (Read the comments, too.)
I am more of a fan of the original Bond novels, than the movies, but maybe I’m weird that way. (When I would visit my maternal grandparents’ house as a boy in the Seventies, I would typically sleep in the former bedroom of my youngest – born 1948 – uncle, which had a substantial collection of paperbacks including Ian Fleming titles that he had not taken with him into his adult life.)
After I wrote that one of them was “sheltered in a hollow tree trunk and hiding,” I was told that was a mismatch and must be changed. Must it?
(I pictured sheltered as accomplished and hiding as on-going.)
I think that’s fine — doesn’t bother me at all.
the song (which Mattel hates, and which is accordingly a glaring omission from the film)
Mattel lost a lawsuit against Aqua and subsequently used adapted versions of “Barbie Girl” in TV ads. It is sampled in the song “Barbie World” written for the movie.
In reference to Mad and National Lampoon, I would take “world-inside-your-head” to mean they present the absurdity and cynicism of the real world so that it resembles the way the presumed jaundiced reader sees things. Not just that they’re works of imagination, but that they more closely resemble the “world inside your head” compared to the serious magazines which don’t recognize the inmates are running the asylum.
Or at least I can’t see why someone would say it like that if all they meant by it was “fictional.”
You just might have confused the film with the song (which Mattel hates, and which is accordingly a glaring omission from the film).
They probably don’t approve of this song either, out of caution. And, oh, they do NOT approve of the Barbie Liberation Organization.
It’s amazing to me how many women I talked to or heard about who, as little girls, independently came up with blowing up, setting on fire, or shaving their Barbies.
@Y: I am certainly aware of the “how many women I talked to .. as little girls” phenomenon you mention, but I don’t find it at all amazing or surprising. Perhaps I’m jaundiced. Circa 1971-72 the girls who lived in one of the houses next door to mine (the one to the north if you were looking at a map) definitely possessed the most extensive collection of Barbie-related objects on the block, and indeed one of those girls grew up to become a museum curator. As if to compensate for his lack of sons, their father (now deceased) took me and another boy who lived on the block out into the woods to make holes in paper-plate targets with a .22 rifle. (I was either 6 or 7 years old at the time.) Good times!
I mean, they do feature things like… isn’t there one that starts with: “James Bond awoke from a man’s death scream.”
Ah. My tertiary sources have failed me again.
Plenty of boys have done very similar things.
It think it means something different, though, at least in the later telling. (Dissertation topic: “Gender-Mediated Reconstruction of Juvenile Toy Mutilation Semiotics”, or something like that. I’d read it.)
A relative is a doctor who at one time worked with Atul Gawande. She said something about his writing for the New Yorker, not dismissive, but maybe questioning why he did it. I suggested that writing for the New Yorker probably paid better than being a doctor. And then regretted since I really had no idea. But reading JWB’s link about Vanity Fair, maybe I was right after all.
Gawande was certainly a reason I kept getting the magazine, and he managed to package his articles into at least two books that sold well.
It seems to be largely forgotten now, but creative toy mutilation was a major part of the plot in the original Toy Story.
Re the seriousness of the object of parody, I immediately recalled Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s Candy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy_(Southern_and_Hoffenberg_novel)
“ In 2006, Playboy Magazine listed Candy among the “25 Sexiest Novels Ever Written”, and described the story as a “young heroine’s picaresque travels, a kind of sexual pinball machine that lights up academia, gardeners, the medical profession, mystics and bohemians.” “
That leaves the question: Was 1950s smut serious?
When I read Candy in 1965 I frequently laughed aloud.
When I read Candy in 1965 I frequently laughed aloud.
Same. That I remember, but nothing about the book itself.
Was 1950s smut serious?
Miller’s books were seen as smut. They did nothing for me, except instill a slight disgust at heteros and their transgressive shenanigans. I read only one, I think Tropic of Cancer.
That I remember, but nothing about the book itself.
Same here, except for “It’s Daddy!”
A Mason Hoffenberg quote from the Wikipedia page:
There’s no mismatch problem (in a portion of the New Yorker story not excerpted in hat’s OP) with the phrase “Carter’s aloof and sometimes chilly sybaritism,” although I don’t know if Carter enjoyed the description of him. Except that (maybe something had primed me for this?) I initially misread it as “aloof and sometimes chilly sycophantism,” which I guess could be intriguingly paradoxical-sounding.
I agree with Dusty about the meaning of “world-inside-your-head parodies.” While many Mad and Lampoon parodies were take-offs on fiction, others were based on real events. What they had in common was a general notion that these were the kinds of extrapolations that readers might be making on their own, taken to an extreme and with better artwork.
I would put this phrasing in the same league as “head canon,” the idea that audiences for, say, a TV series create in their own minds background material never made explicit in the show.