Today is the 83rd anniversary of The New Yorker. Its first issue was dated February 21, 1925, though it hit the newsstands February 17. It has been my favorite magazine for 50 years. I can remember buying copies of it as a high school kid in the late 1950s. What was the cover price then? Twenty-five cents? I surely did not understand most of the contents, but I was awed by its sophistication and the famous names that it published. And the cartoons, of course. And the covers; I studied the covers. I liked the advertisements, too. I wanted to buy a walking stick that I saw in one of the little ads. It had a top that screwed off and inside was a little whiskey flask; something like that. It went for about $75.00, I think, and if I had somehow had $75.00, poor as I and my mother were, I would have ordered it. I imagined myself strutting around the gritty streets of the north side of Binghamton, New York, waggling it at the mystified shabby denizens of the shambling tenements and pretending to ward off stumbling drunks. “Out of my way, you varlet!” I also saw too many movies as a kid. I have subscribed to The New Yorker almost uninterruptedly since getting out of the Army nearly 40 years ago. I still like the magazine; I still think it is the best general magazine going—perhaps, as the TV commercial used to say several years ago, maybe “the best magazine that ever was.” One thing, though, I regret: the decline in humor content. The New Yorker used to be funnier while also being serious. This has just been brought home to me as I am rereading Leo Rosten’s The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, which was first published in installments in The New Yorker. Light material like that once was a staple of the magazine, and it was better off for it. I suppose we'll never see the likes of S.J. Perelman again.
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