Ah, The New Yorker. The paragon of redoubtable journalism and prestige culture for any good upper-crust liberal intellectual who turns down their nose at those guttersnipes publishing Time. Actually, it really is pretty awesome, from the political editorials to the lengthy writer-at-large pieces to the criticism. Some of us might have more than one copy of it sitting on our desk at this very minute. And some of us may further tend to average about three issues read a month, because there’s always that one you never quite find the time to get around to. Until you realize it contains that profile of Lena Dunham everyone’s talking about, and then you have to go dig it out from under the pile of papers to recycle. But we digress.
The point is, you can’t do a great parody of something you don’t know very well, which is why the talents who put together The Neu Jorker, a full-length, start-to-finish satire issue of the magazine, must be devotees, because their mockery is flawless. From the splashy cultural flash-point cover, to the note-perfect imitations of the Goings On About Town section, on through to the poetry and reviews, the entire thing is gobsmackingly good. (The creators know enough to identify just when to drop a fake word like “gobsmackingly” into their mordant spoofing.) There’s a brutal takedown of the magazine’s Shouts & Murmurs humor feature. There’s a full profile piece written by a horse. And there’s an excellent burn in the form of an ad for a fake new Malcolm Gladwell book (Ballpark: The Counterintuitive History Of The Power Of Guesstimates) that just drips with “fuck you” joy.
Seriously, we can’t say enough good things about this parody. (And in the interest of full disclosure, we should point out that the long list of people responsible includes contributors for The Onion and Clickhole.) It’s rare to see such a lovingly detailed, long-form commitment to making fun of something with such note-perfect tone, and next year’s Pulitzer committee should take notice.