It’s thin gruel indeed, unless you count comic books. If you count comic books then there have been thousands of reasonably successful titles, many with decades long runs. The entirety of the underground Comix movement was essentially humor. Excluding comic-oriented titles, you have Punch and its imitators, Captain Billy’s Whiz-Bang and its imitators, the National Lampoon and Spy Magazine. And neither the National Lampoon or Spy were very long lived.
No matter how you cut it, the genre’s two most influential magazines have been Punch and Mad Magazine. Only the formulas deployed by these two publications have proven successful in the long run.
The history of American humor magazines starts with the English magazine Punch, which first appeared in July 1841 and quickly found traction here in the states, either as an imported item, a reprinted one or simply as a model to be knocked off. Most of the early American humor magazines were either reprints of Punch, or like Puck, very inspired by it.
To actually separate a comic book such as Mad from other humor magazines is to make a distinction where there really isn’t one. Almost all humor magazines have comics in them. Punch itself was responsible for popularizing the gag cartoon as a form. The idea behind having spot cartoons in magazines and newspapers was essentially borrowed from Punch. (Excluding the editorial cartoon form, which was a feature of publications of various types since the first presses.) A magazine completely dominated by cartoon was an idea that didn’t arise until after the creation of nationwide newspaper syndicates; which happened shortly after the close of the American Civil War.
Nothing much original emerged from this first era of humor magazines. In fact, it’s something of a dubious proposition to say that there even were any strictly humor magazines at all prior to the Civil War. Magazines in the form we know them today did not diverge from newspapers until the advent of photographic paper stock, again happening right after the war between the states. What magazine-like newspapers there were would fall under the broad category of Story Papers. To be short, a Story Paper is a newspaper which does not have “news” as its main draw. They are the grandfathers of magazines in general and the direct parents of Dime Novels, Pulp Magazines and Scandal Tabloids.
A Scandal Magazine, such as the National Enquirer, is a type of Story Paper: a non-daily newspaper with a not-local focus. Today the Scandal Tabloid is the only type of Story Paper still in existence. Prior to the Civil War, all magazines were somewhat like this. From what can be told, no strictly humor magazine ever sustained itself long in tabloid format. Instead they seem to have been introduced in Dime Novel form.
(A full sized newspaper, such as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, are in a format known as “bedsheet.” This refers to the size of the unfolded four pages of any given sheet of a newspaper. As originally construed, a tabloid was a “Half Bedsheet”: a bedsheet cut in the middle and then folded length wise. A Dime Novel is in “quarto” form, a size not seen much today: it was supposed to be one half of a tabloid page folded in two to make a booklet or digest. )
Most Dime Novels made up for their lack of size by placing a drawn illustration with spot color on the cover. The louder the colors, the better. At one time it was common for novice comic book collectors to mistake Dime Novels as coverless comic books. They are that similar. This is the form that Punch eventually adopted in England before becoming a magazine with a slick cover. The popularity of Punch and its kin in England probably had a lot to do with the creation of the Dime Novel in America.
Beyond being a form of its own, the Dime Novel format stood in for paperbacks, almanacs… and smut. The Dime Novel form became so crowded with sensationalistic fiction and smut that other genres soon fled it. And this is how things fairly much stayed until about WWI. The swamp of ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ and naughty picture books pretty much crowded out humor magazines like Punch.
Punch moved on, eventually adopting a full blown magazine format.
The most successful American humor magazine of the early era was Puck, an illustrated Story Paper which started in 1871 and actually became one of the first slick paper magazines. Puck carried advertisements, which belies the idea that the genre carried any stigma initially. In the Dime Novels, the first successful humor magazine of note did not get its start until after WWI and the publication of Captain Billy’s Whiz-Bang. It could be said that the Whiz-Bang was a part of the subset of tawdry Dime Novels called ‘Joke Books’. The Whiz-Bang didn’t come out of Dime Novels, although it did eventually take on that format for a time. The success of this publication prompted some smut publications like Smokehouse to drop the smudgy pictures of girls for gags. This led to a revival of the Dime Novel form, which had been in decline since the advent of the Pulp Magazine in the 1880s. Once the Joke Books got going sales-wise, all of the better ones jumped to Pulp Magazine format.
A Pulp Magazine physically resembles the modern crossword puzzle magazine. They have slick covers and dubious interior stock. Up until the 1990s there were dozens of them. At one time there were thousands of them. The humor magazines were somewhat late entries into the Pulp format. Whiz-Bang had done so well in Dime Novels that it was moving up the food chain. Its better competitors followed suit.
Of course nothing in history is ever really all that orderly. The Pulp format allowed for a mass re-convergence with smut. A format I have dubbed the ‘Zinger’ came about, wherein pulp pages were used to sandwich a center spread of smutty pictures. (See Slingers, Zingers and Real Thingers on the Hil-Gle website.) At about the same time the more staid humor magazines became infected with the Flapper Fiction trend. Pulp magazines were a lot more expensive to produce than Dime Novels had been. Profit margins were tight and the field was crowded. For publishers not plying a proven genre, there was a tendency to do a little bit of whatever it was that was selling best at the time. For most humor magazines the jump to Pulp meant fusing the humor genre with Flapper Fiction or whatever was the flavor of the month.
Or you could take a chance at importing Punch again, which is what one publisher did. The imported version of Punch did fairly well, but there was starting to be a difference between the sensibilities of the English and the American reading publics. Punch was really about stupid things which happen in England and not much of it translated very well. It got to the point that the American publisher had to rework about half of the material. And the license to reprint wasn’t cheap. So he re-titled the American Punch and changed it into a funny magazine about movies. (By one account, the publisher was reprinting Judge Magazine, another English Punch knock off.)
On the face of it, it wasn’t a bad idea. He was double genre dipping. Movie magazines were popular. The most popular films of the day were comedies. Why not a funny magazine about movies and movie people?
Because movie people are overly serious drop dead stiffs, that’s why. The concept lasted under a year, after which it reverted to a humor magazine with a particularly dippy presentation and a title which bore little or no resemblance to its contents.
It was a huge hit. From what can be told, it seems to have inspired the entire nonsense title craze which swept the pulps. Film Fun had nothing to do with movies at all. It was a magazine with long and short form humor. All of this was capped by a cover illustration featuring a pretty girl doing something silly. Other publishers copied the format of Film Fun wholesale. Within a short time even the overly serious sex imbued Flapper Fiction magazines were adding elements resembling Film Fun to their mix. This follow the leader trend lasted 20 years.
In 1931, as the trend was at its height, another publisher jumped in with the first truly new take on a humor magazine. It was called Ballyhoo.
Ballyhoo is Mad Magazine, if Mad came out in 1931. William Gaines, the founder of Mad Magazine, had Ballyhoo in mind when he started his publication. Unlike Mad in its early days, Ballyhoo was a full sized slick publication. It was the first slick humor magazine attempted after the demise of Puck in 1917. Mad started as a comic book and then eventually became a magazine. At the time Ballyhoo was launched, there really were no comic books at all. (More about this in our next installment.)
Ballyhoo had been launched by a very unlikely publisher. George Delacorte had made his fortune in pulp magazines, primarily ones in proven genres. His was a portfolio of true crime, confessions, westerns and detective magazines. His only slick was a movie magazine and it wasn’t exactly a winner. The reasons why he went slick with Ballyhoo are complex and based more on a gut instinct than any market calculation.
The words ‘market calculation’ and George Delacorte do not belong in the same sentence together. Delacorte’s line, Dell Publishing, always went its own damn way, usually successfully. Doubling the odds against Ballyhoo’s success was Dell Publication’s adamant policy to NEVER TAKE ANY ADVERTISING. As I will explain in the next installment, it wasn’t a purely moral issue. That Alex Hillman, covered on our website, also had the same policy is more of an accident than it is evidence of any sort of movement against publishers selling out to the man.
That Ballyhoo wound up reading like it was anti-establishment was more about making a virtue out of what was an impediment than it was any sort of deliberate statement. Sort of.
There are two basic ideas behind Ballyhoo. The first is “doing more of a good thing.” George Delacorte’s general tactic in magazines was to take a popular element and homogenize it. This was a fairly common tactic in the pulp field. Most anthologies stuck to a specific genre such as western, detective, romance or science fiction. Delecorte took the idea a step further by applying it to popular newspaper features. The most popular sections of the newspaper were the funnies, the astrology section, the advice column and the daily puzzle. Delecorte was successful in launching magazines chock filled with nothing but these features. Ballyhoo represented his first swipe at comics.
The basic problem with comics, specifically comics strips, was that the newspapers had first dibs on all of the good ones. Comics artists were also amongst the highest paid people in America at the time. If you wanted to feature a comic strip that would draw an audience, it was going to cost you a right nut. Spot comics, such as those used in magazines, were also fairly expensive if you wanted first dibs on them, but they weren’t locked up by newspaper syndicates. Given that comics were also the most popular items in magazines, making a magazine which featured them front and center would have an appeal to the general non-pulp reader. Not to overthink it, part of the idea behind Ballyhoo was to make it like the New Yorker, only without all those sections no one really reads.
The second idea was to make Ballyhoo an actual parody of the entire magazine medium. A serial publication featuring parody had not been done before. Ballyhoo is where Mad got the idea from.
Ballyhoo was an extremely expensive magazine to put out. It was a tabloid sized slick, with a spot color cover and an interior done in sepia tone. Unlike other magazines which bedded the comics inside columns of type, Ballyhoo used its broad pages to showcase the compositions. Whether this helped Ballyhoo attract better material is unclear.
Caption Top: “Get a load of this!”
Caption Left (Child at the door of a speakeasy): “Mother, dear mother, come home with me now!”
Caption Right (Business office of a sausage company : “Ya’ll have to think up another slogan. The world ain’t so big!”
It was somewhat rare that the magazine did anything special with the lay-out of the individual cartoons on a page. It would take the advent of comic books before scenes on a page were somehow tied together. Most of Ballyhoo’s comics weren’t sequential strips, but rather stand alone pictures.
Spot cartoons are kind of a mixed bag, running from sight gags, to the curious, to the topical to the oh so sophisticated, to the purely decorative. Here Ballyhoo is mocking a New Yorker style cartoon on its splash page. The caption on this reads "Dinner's ready--what will we do with it?"
Ballyhood wasn't beyond mocking its own offerings. The cartoon above is described as: STARTLING RESULTS OF CROSSING A "PUNCH" JOKE WITH A "NEW YORKER" JOKE. Caption: Lady Zilchington (who has just returned from a fortnight at Wappington Downs)--"Oh, you bon vivants!"
Ballyhoo caused quite a bit of stir for running this cartoon. Reaction was so intense that the magazine made it a policy to run some version of this gag in every issue. The caption reads "Hello, desk clerk? Am I or am I not paying for a private bath?"
Next: Ballyhoo on it own times.
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