The UK’s Punch folded in 1992 (after a run of almost 150 years). National Lampoon folded in 1998. Nothing comparable has emerged to replace them – we’ve got Mad and The Onion and that’s about it; and IMO, they just don’t fill the void. What is it about the time we’re living in that killed off the market for hard-hitting satire in magazine form?
Don’t forget the late, lamented Spy.
Today’s youth are being raised not to have sarcasm.
I blame Ritalyn.
The hip stance of Spy was briefly taken up to some extent by Radar Magazine, whose second issue featured a cover story about minor celebrities garnering more attention these days, called “B-List Nation”.
It also had a world map of cosmetic surgery practices. Sadly, the magazine disappeared after two issues, but is supposed to relaunch this spring
The UK still has Private Eye.
I miss Spy. I can never think of Donald Trump without hearing “short fingered vulgarian” in my mind.
VCNJ~
You’re not the only one who misses Spy. I regret throwing out my collection of it when I moved.
There are some local humor magazines and newspapers, like The Beast in WNY.
National Lampoon really declined in the early 1980s.
Cracked, Crazy and Sick magazines sucked hard,. I don’t know how Mad continues; I don’t know anyone that reads it.
I only flipped through SPY occassionally. I enjoyed it, though.
I’d like to see the entire SPY run get theTOTALLY MAD treatment.
The Onion is doing what it can to uphold the standard.
The Onion is great for what it is, but its format as a newspaper parody limits it quite a bit, IMO.
It’s never a good time for a humor magazine. The simple reason is that it’s really, really, really, really, really … really hard to write funny stuff. You have to be lucky enough to have a core of great and prolific funny writers, and that happens maybe once in a generation. And trying to put out funny stuff every single month grinds the humor out of them.
So it’s hard to start a humor magazine, difficult to keep a humor magazine going, and impossible to keep up with the pulse of changing humor. And you can’t get advertisers because you keep making fun of them.
And that was before the Internet. Now it’s a hundred times harder.
I know someone who writes for Private Eye occasionally. He’s a very funny, but very British, fellow.
In addition to the points raised which are specific to humor magazines, it helps to remember that the magazine industry, in general, has been declining for many years. More or less every genre of magazine has had declines in numbers published, and there’s no reason for humor magazines to be immune.
Cracked is still around, although I rarely see it on a magazine rack any more.
There never were that many humor magazines around in the first place. When Mad first gained some notoriety in comic book form, there was a spate of short-lived imitators. When it went to magazine format, there were some more imitators, Sick, Cracked, and Crazy being the most prominent. National Lampoon was never targeting the same audience as Mad, and anyway it eventually crashed and burned more from mismanagement than anything else.
(My apologies for my incomplete previous post. I hit submit instead of preview by accident.)
Cracked is still around, although I rarely see it on a magazine rack any more.
There never were that many humor magazines around in the first place. When Mad first gained some notoriety in comic book form, there was a spate of short-lived imitators. When it went to magazine format, there were some more imitators, Sick, Cracked, and Crazy being the most prominent. *National Lampoon * was never targeting the same audience as Mad, and anyway it eventually crashed and burned more from mismanagement than anything else. Spy didn’t last as long as any one of these four. I don’t know about Punch, though it obviously had a long and honorable run (more than a century, wasn’t it?).
I think it comes down to three reasons.
The magazine industry is generally in decline in the first place.
Humor is hard to do consistently well.
And competition from television and film comedy. Prior to 1975, bland pablum was pretty much all you got in both films and TV until *Saturday Night Live * came along. Edgy humor was pretty much confined to stand up comedy, recordings and print media. The visual media are now much freer to make us of “edgy” humor, so there’s simply less need of humor in the print media.
I doubt very seriously that it is “still” around, although it may well have been revived.
Well, according to this press release:
http://www.tcj.com/messboard/ubb/Forum2/HTML/003672.html
the magazine has been in continuous publication since 1958. This may be a moot point, though. They seem to be having trouble getting their latest issue out, and they’ve been acquired by a Mid-East company based in Kuwait. The magazine apparently is due for a re-launching, so I assume that for the time being they’ve suspended publication. One of my nephews did buy a copy on the newsrack at the grocery store only a few months ago.
But it ain’t lookin’ good for ol’ * Cracked. * I can’t imagine what a Kuwaiti company would want with them. I’m bettin’ they’re goin’ down the tubes soon.
A little more about * Cracked *'s situation:
Apparently they’ve only published 7 or 8 issues since June of 2001, and that’s maybe one issue every six or seven months. Current circulation is down to about 30,000 copies per issue. It seems there was a lapse of at least more than 8 months between #356 and #357 back in 2001, when the magazine was supposed to be on a bi-monthly schedule.
'Bye, * Cracked. * It was fun reading you when I was a kid and couldn’t wait for the next issue of * Mad. *
I used to read both Mad and Cracked on a monthly basis.
Threw them all away sometime in high school.
Even picked up the occasional Crazy.
When I got to college, I used to read National Lampoon in the dorm library.
Private Eye continues to be excellent. I do miss The Secret Diary of John Major Aged 47 3/4 though. 
The new improved Punch stank. I think it was vanity publishing for Mohammed Al Fayed and his drinking buddies.