Not that the original Mad magazine needs any more praise, but you really do appreciate how special it was when you look at the level of its imitators.Fooey was published in 1961 when Mad was ripping up the cultural landscape and I guess Scoff Publishing figured they could do a knock-off half as well and still make a few bucks. Unfortunately, Fooey isn't quite half as good as Mad is. More like twenty-fifths.
Not that Mad was always the Algonquin Round Table all the time(or even most of it), but Fooey has a really cheap, thrown-together look to it(as you can partly see from the cover; they couldn't have sprung for a color photo for the cover of their first issue?).
Most of the humor pieces are done with photographs, but there are some drawings here, and with this piece on the inside cover, you can see the level of art and wit that you're in store for:
After this, there's an ad for "Helene Hurtuss Shamfoo", a text piece called "I Struggled For $uccess", "Advice to the Loveworn" (featuring Sylvia Stern, a guy in drag), an ad for "Mrs. Wigoil" featuring another man in drag, a section about funny horoscopes where I couldn't tell where the jokes actually were; "Over the Tea, Bags" with Ambrosia Gallstones, yet another man in drag(man + women's clothes = funny!).
There's also a section with funny greeting cards, featuring a typical sentiment on the front and the kicker on the back; this being the closest Fooey gets to a Mad-style bit; a long piece starring Floradora Lovelard, who looks like Jonathan Winters in drag...ok, what the hell is with all the guys in drag??
Next is "Sporto, the Talking Dog"(another text piece), "Fooey's Underbridged Illustrated Dictionary", "Great Art Monsterpieces", which went either completely over my head or doesn't actually contain any jokes; another text piece called "My Sister Stole My Loverboy"(which features photos of guess what), "Choice Cuts", which features jokes set to old-style stock art(hey, at least its not guys in drag), some fake ads, and then it all wraps up with a back inside/back outside cover gag aimed at the world of advertising, a frequent Mad target:
I tried to do some research on Fooey, but as you might've imagined, there isn't exactly a large fan following out there("See you all at FooeyCon 2008!"), so the best info I could find was via eBay.
Fooey lasted at least three issues, multiple copies of which I found for sale, some helpfully including cover scans:
Even though I gave the creators of Fooey a hard time, credit must be given for the attempt by a couple of small fry to try and put out their own humor magazine. I wish we had more of that nowadays!
1 comment:
Along a similar line of quality as "Fooey" is a late 50's mag called "Thimk." Much like "Fooey," the gap between it and Harvey Kurtzman's successors is vast. The art in "Fooey" looks every bit as bad as "Thimk," probably the same guys, I'd think. The art looks about the same grade as you'd find in gag panels in the 'gentlemen's magazines' of the period -- see Lileks.com's 'Stagworld' if you don't believe me.
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