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Have you read the latest Neu Jorker? The issue with that great profile of a choral composer who hates the human voice? With the Talk of the Town about gentrification, and the middling review of the play within the movie Birdman? The one available inside the Red Box on 32nd and 4th?
No, we’re not talking about that high-brow magazine. We’re talking about its astonishingly thorough, beautifully rendered parody—the one so spot-on it's mind-boggling. Seriously, the new issue of The Neu Jorker has has everything: chagrined WASPs, millennial-directed scoffs, an ad for Acela: The Train for Nieces™, the signature Irvin typeface, praise of David Mamet, even elaborate, overwrought syntax.
The Neu Jorker is a satire---one meticulously modeled on its inspiration, from the Bieber 2020 campaign “Where Are Ü Now” cover to the back page's cartoon caption contest. "Our mantra was 'aim to pass,'" says James Folta, one of the two editors-in-chief. "My dream was that you could open it to a random page and not be able to tell until you started reading which one was real and which was fake."
Indeed, most of the pieces could have appeared in the original publication, from the a photo essay examining the current state of affairs at the US Postal Service to the ad for Malcolm Gladwell’s new book on guesstimates. "The piece on the history of knots could very well be a New Yorker piece," says Folta. "And I would be thrilled to read it."
To create the cover-to-cover satire, Folta and his co-editor, Andrew Lipstein, made a list of every single item in a December issue, and started offering them to their network of comedians and writers. "Reaching out to comedy writers in New York, we’re all so steeped in this magazine we love to cast aspersions at, but also all have a stack in our apartment waiting to be read," says Folta, who also penned the books review, of a political novel "hailed as the Lolita for a post-Citizens United world." The contributor’s page lists impressive achievements: many alumni of the Upright Citizens Brigade and contributors to The Onion, at least two humble voices of a generation, and one brave contributor to NewYorker.com.
The meticulous effort to hew closely to the signature form is what makes the satire so apt: it's an exacting, absurdist replica. "The goal was to take what makes it unique, and exploit those quirks," says Lipstein. "The New Yorker is fundamentally a collection of set pieces for a comedy writer to do that."
And the writers certainly did exploit those quirks, from an umlaut-ed “coöperate” to self-absorbed, myopic narratives---like “Finding My Gallop,” a nine-page personal history of a woman who transitions into a horse, an off-kilter account in a canon of squash narratives and the tribulations of growing up with an inheritance. “Oh, she definitely subscribes to The New Yorker,” says Nicole Silverberg, author and comedian, about her alternate identity with equine aspirations. “She’s the type of person who subscribes and keeps it in a stack on her coffee table, which is a completely appropriate way to do The New Yorker.” Or The Neu Jorker.
Neu Jorker, Singles, High-res by Andrew Lipstein
