The Birth of the Snark

Spy certainly had enough of them to warrant this 304-page self-slurp, but for a quicker explanation of why a title that never even achieved the circulation of, say, Yoga Journal, continues to inspire overheated eulogies eight years after its demise—and 13 years, by its editors' estimation, after it stopped being funny—simply turn to Page 154 of the book. There, you'll see a full-page portrait of Spy's two founders. On the left is Carter. Impeccably packaged in a dark double-breasted suit and polka-dot tie, he simultaneously projects patrician cool and matronly warmth—George Hamilton as plump soccer mom—and is there any better template for a magazine editor than that combination of child-wrangling sophistication? Next we have Andersen in his petulant, poufy-haired prime, bleary-eyed from excessive media consumption, arms folded across his chest in omnivorous disapproval. The pair stand in an elegant, empty ballroom; they're clearly living above their means, but they're about to throw a hell of a party.

Spy was the perfect name for their enterprise. Noun and verb, it conveyed, in a single word, their editorial pose (outsiders as insiders) and their purpose (gathering intelligence, cracking cultural codes, subverting the enemy). When Carter and Andersen served up their first poison cocktail, in October 1986, gossip was the domain of gummy star-fluffers like Liz Smith. Mainstream news prose was piquant as plain oatmeal. The Gray Lady was proud to be dowdy, not Dowdy. Info-graphics, sidebars, photos of celebrities in their natural habitats? All that was for dolts who read USA Today and People.

And then Spy appeared. It took dumb magazine tricks and configured them for smartasses with fast-forward attention spans. Its pages were as thick with text as The New Yorker's, but in the latter magazine, information flowed in a standard pattern, down the page, then up, left to right. Spy offered a matrix of spot illustrations, sidebars, pull quotes, call-outs, cutlines, icons, screen tints, vertical rules, horizontal rules. You could consume a page in countless ways—you could channel-surf it.

It was also Cliffs Notes for the chattering classes, service journalism for affluent (or at least striving) urbanites who had no interest in helpful hints from Heloise. Every issue was packed with lists, maps, charts and feature stories thatinfiltrated the power-brokers' inner sanctums and taught you who agent-terrible Michael Ovitz was feuding with; how you should think about charmingly playful $100 teapots and the "yuppie-pornography emporiums" that sold them; why every other glossy magazine on the news rack (aka all those owned by Condé Nast) was devoting major space to some book you'd never heard of. (It was written by Condé Nast's editorial director, Alexander Liberman.)

Like every great magazine, Spy wasn't just selling information; it was selling a worldview, and that worldview—relentlessly self-conscious ironic detachment that let you have your charmingly playful teapot and deconstruct it, too—was one that every upscale 1980s hipster wanted.

Spy could reduce eminences grises to rubble with a single cruel phrase, and the candid, high-contrast, black-and-white photos in its "Party Poop" pages made models, socialites and moguls look like sleazy, bumbling felons caught in some sting. But despite the magazine's facility for superficial malice, its real passion was for in-depth, investigative, painstakingly reported malice. Even its pranks—like the time it sent out successively smaller checks to millionaires to see who would cash the least amount of money—took months of work to perpetrate!

The world of the late 1980s was awash in a rising tide of facts, faxes, statistics, photocopies, found texts, credit histories, public records. Information could be distilled from it all—there were patterns to match, surveillance to conduct, stories and charts to extract from all that unexploited data! Sometimes the results were instantly disposable (a list, say, of every man who had been described in one magazine or another as a "Robert Redford look-alike"). Sometimes the results were, well, not completely unimportant (a list, say, that revealed, for the first time ever, every client represented by Michael Ovitz's pathologically secretive Creative Artists Agency). Info-fetishists didn't care so much about utility, however. It was more the thrill of the hunt—there was stuff out there that was knowable; Spy was making it known.

Along with Harper's (which introduced its very Spy-ish Index, Readings and Annotation sections two years before Spy's first issue), it foresaw the huge growth market in coverage of the coverage—especially rimshot coverage of the coverage. It also recognized that if we truly intended to amuse ourselves to death via media overload, as doomsday cuckoo clock Neil Postman feared, clumsy, ad-libbed wrap-ups from our local TV news team were not sufficiently lethal—the news itself would need a knockout dose of humor.

The funny serious piece was just one of the many concepts Spy pioneered or popularized. Except perhaps for Papa Wayans, Spy was the great cultural sperm donor of the late 20th century, and today, its stylistic heirs are everywhere. Spy: The Funny Years cites a few—The Onion, The Daily Show, Entertainment Weekly, Maxim, VH1, Punk'd—but it's being modest. The inside-baseball look at the media elite as practiced by Matt Drudge, Gawker.com and a million other websites? The dense, annotative aesthetics that characterize Dave Eggers' McSweeney's empire, David Foster Wallace novels and Chris Ware comics? The icon-pocked, user-manual approach to life employed by the For Dummies books? They all carry some of Spy's chromosomes.

"There's no magazine I know of that's so continually referenced, held up as a benchmark, and whose demise is so lamented," Eggers blurbs on the back of the new Spy book. This seems like a paradox—Spy's influence is everywhere, and yet its absence is palpable? But of course it's not just Spy that one misses; it's an entire bygone era, one that was buzzing with the possibilities of desktop publishing, VCRs, remote controls, electronic databases and online services, and yet also a calmer, quieter, simpler time, when there weren't yet quite so many tiny famous floating heads colonizing our consciousness. Now there's simply too much information cluttering the mediasphere, too much to read, too much to watch, too much to listen to—too much stuff that, even when alchemized by a touch as deft as Spy's, is simply not worth tracking. Then, however, things were different. With the help of Spy's once-monthly hollow-point bulletins, you could presume to know it all.