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| Humour (magazine) | |
|---|---|
| Title | Humour |
| Editor title | Editor-in-Chief |
| Frequency | Weekly |
| Circulation | Unknown |
| Firstdate | 20th century |
| Country | Published in multiple countries |
| Language | English |
Humour (magazine) was a weekly satirical periodical that addressed contemporary events through illustrated cartoons, essays, and parody. Its pages mixed political caricature, cultural critique, and social satire aimed at readers interested in topical commentary from capitals such as London, New York City, Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. The magazine engaged with figures and institutions across the spectrum, often juxtaposing coverage of Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Charles de Gaulle, and Mahatma Gandhi alongside references to Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce.
The magazine was founded in a milieu shared with other periodicals like Punch (magazine), The New Yorker, Private Eye, Le Canard enchaîné, and Sovetskii Satirikon, drawing inspiration from earlier satirists such as Honoré Daumier, James Gillray, Thomas Nast, George Grosz, and H. G. Wells. Early issues appeared during an era when debates involving League of Nations, United Nations, NATO, Warsaw Pact, and diplomatic conferences including the Yalta Conference and the Treaty of Versailles dominated headlines. Throughout its run the magazine reflected crises like the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Suez Crisis, and the Vietnam War, aligning satirical targets with personalities such as Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy. Editorial shifts followed cultural movements tied to figures like Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan, while the magazine navigated legal and censorship clashes reminiscent of cases involving D. H. Lawrence, Gustave Flaubert, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Salman Rushdie.
Each issue combined political cartoons, satirical essays, serialized comic strips, and spoof advertisements in formats similar to MAD (magazine), National Lampoon, The New Masses, Esquire, and Harper's Magazine. Regular features included caricatures of statesmen like Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Golda Meir, Anwar Sadat, and Indira Gandhi; cultural lampoons of artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Marina Abramović, Henri Matisse, and Frida Kahlo; and theatrical parodies referencing William Shakespeare, Molière, Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett, and Arthur Miller. The magazine also published investigative satire touching on institutions including Bank of England, Federal Reserve System, European Commission, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank, often framed through satirical interviews akin to those found in The Twilight Zone Magazine, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Time, and Newsweek.
Illustrators and writers who contributed mirrored the range of contemporaneous talent, including cartoonists inspired by Ralph Steadman, Al Hirschfeld, Ronald Searle, William Hogarth, and Graham Greene-era essayists. Regular contributors often referenced or caricatured politicians like Leon Trotsky, Josip Broz Tito, Fidel Castro, Lech Wałęsa, and Nelson Mandela; cultural figures like Miles Davis, Lucian Freud, T. S. Eliot, Bertolt Brecht, and Isadora Duncan; and scientists or public intellectuals such as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Noam Chomsky, Carl Sagan, and Stephen Hawking. Notable cartoons satirized events including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Watergate scandal, the Iranian Revolution, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Gulf War, often provoking commentary from organizations like Reporters Without Borders, Committee to Protect Journalists, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House.
Published on a weekly schedule with special issues comparable to anniversary editions from Punch (magazine), The New Yorker, Life, Paris Match, and Der Spiegel, the magazine reached readers through newsstands in cities such as Tokyo, Toronto, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and Rome. Its distribution partners and printers included firms with histories connected to Hearst Corporation, Condé Nast, Bertelsmann, Reed Exhibitions, and Pearson PLC, and it negotiated syndication deals with newspapers like The Times (London), The New York Times, Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and The Guardian. Circulation fluctuated in response to economic shifts associated with the Oil Crisis, the dot-com bubble, the 2008 financial crisis, and changes in media consumption driven by entities such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit.
Critical reception placed the magazine alongside satirical benchmarks such as Punch (magazine), Private Eye, MAD (magazine), Le Canard enchaîné, and The New Yorker, with scholarly analysis referencing commentators like Edward Said, Raymond Williams, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Harold Bloom. Its legacy persists in contemporary satire produced by programs and publications linked to Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Colbert Report, and online outlets associated with BuzzFeed, Vice Media, The Onion, and Cracked (website). Archival holdings and retrospectives have appeared in institutions such as the British Library, Library of Congress, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bundesarchiv, and State Historical Museum (Moscow), informing research by historians of media, legal scholars examining libel cases similar to those involving A. P. Smith Manufacturing Co. and New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, and cultural critics comparing it to the work of Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, Émile Zola, and Mark Twain.
Category:Satirical magazines