I miss the old SPY magazine-they had pretty good writers. I remember they pulled an interesting stunt-they printed up rebate checks for ridiculously small amounts of money-sums like $3.67, and sent them with official-looking letters, to movie stars and celebrities. The object was to see how many of these checks would actually be endorsed and cashed.
As I recall, quite a few of these very wealthy people were not adverse to cashing a check for a few bucks.
Anybody know who would up cashing the most?
Don’t recall this one, but it was only one of many features that appeared under the subhead, *“A SPY Prank.” *
Perhaps the most elaborate was the Bunny Burger operation of Easter 1992. Several PR firms were roped in to help promote a fast food venture based on ground rabbit meat. They even started a pilot location in a mall in northern NJ. The burger boxes even had spring loaded ears that popped up when opened. North Jersey not being a big rabbit-eating area, people were mostly outraged.
I vaguely remember the OP’s prank, but it would have been more effective to see the celeb’s reaction to “I love you so much, but I’m really poor so all I can send is this $3.67 money order.” Actors, songwriters, etc. receive residual checks all the time for even smaller amounts.
Spy Magazine, July 1990, “Every Man has his Price: In Some Cases, 13 Cents”, by Julius Lowenthal. And the first checks in the series were for $1.11 while the were for $0.13. The article is reproduced on page 252 of the book Spy: The Funny Years. Only Adnan Khashoggi and Donald Trump cashed the last checks.
Seems like a pretty lame stunt. The famous person himself probably never even saw the check, it likely just got tossed into a pile of other checks from various income sources and handled by a junior member of the person’s accounting service.
Exactly what I thought when I read the original article way back when.
Either that, or it gets deposited into their illegal offshore Cayman Islands account.
Their secret illegal account.
Oh crap, I shouldn’t have mentioned it was secret.
Oh crap, I shouldn’t have mentioned it was illegal.
Oh crap, I certainly shouldn’t have mentioned he was a customer
It sure is hot today…
And my thought was, why wouldn’t Trump cash the check? He didn’t get to be The Donald by throwing away money – even if he is a short-fingered vulgarian.
ETA: I remember reading Spy and often wishing I found it more amusing than I did because it seemed like it ought to be funny. I wonder if I’d actually enjoy Spy: The Funny Years. The staff at my local B&N hadn’t heard of it and tried to sell me Spy vs. Spy.
What was nice about Spy, aside from the humor, was its apparent fearlessness. It was the only place that discussed George H.W. Bush’s possible affair with Jennifer Fitzgerald and they ran an article about Arnold Schwarzenegger, including a naked photo of him.
But the magazine was so centered on New York City and Los Angeles that I wondered why it would appeal to people anywhere else.
Probably their bravest article was Mark Ebner’s “Do You Want To Buy A Bridge?”
I enjoyed it. It was very New York-centric - more than the New Yorker but less than Vanity Fair. Their Separated At Birth feature is probably their greatest legacy, but the feature on various actor’s first head shots had me laughing myself sick.
My favorite prank of theirs was their researcher standing on a street corner 2 blocks from Carnegie Hall and asking people "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?"and collecting data on what percentages gave directions, what gave the punchline, and what gave both the punchline and directions.
My favorite was when they asked freshmen Congressional Representatives questions like “What should the US do about the ethnic cleansing in Freedonia?”
They also sent a fake catalogue of congressional stuff to freshman congressmen. At least one tried to buy a congressional high school class jacket.
Would the SPY stunt be a good way to get autographs of famous people? I bet a lot of movie stars would endorse a $5.00 check!
I’ve heard of people doing that. Nowadays, you’d probably just get a rubber stamped “for deposit only.”
Bart Simpson tried this out on Krusty but instead he just got a rubber stamped check in return.
Marc
From his aforementioned secret illegal Cayman Islands account, which led to him being arrested for tax avoision. (You say evasion, I say avosion.)
That one was brilliant. I remember one guy actually got the joke and gave a great tongue in cheek response about the “Marxist” regime there.
God, I LOVED Spy, even though I didn’t know who half the people they were making fun of even were. I wish I hadn’t finally thrown out my back issues to make room.
AFAIK, they pioneered the Twinkee stress test (leaving Twinkees on the windowsill of N.Y. buildings in the elements, blowing up Twinkees, etc.).