In the opinion of GQ’s soon-to-be ex-editor in chief Art Cooper, Greg Gutfeld is “the boorish personification of Nietzsche's observation that ‘there is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action.’” He is also the editor of Stuff, a magazine that is as pointedly ludicrous and disposable as GQ is self-consciously serious and worldly. For a guy whose magazine is all set-ups and punchlines, however, Gutfeld has some surprisingly ardent views on what's wrong with most magazine journalism and how to fix it. Below, he shares some of those views with Media Life.

I know you feel too much has been made already of the feud between you and Art Cooper, so I’ll just ask one question: After you found out about that letter he sent to Felix Dennis recommending that he fire you, did you consider canceling your GQ subscription?

    No, I didn’t, because I enjoy “The Style Guy” too much. I read whatever’s in that column and I do the exact opposite.


It’s not just GQ. Stuff makes regular sport of other men’s magazines, and even non-men’s magazines. In this issue alone, you stick it to Men’s Journal, Gear, Details and O: The Oprah Magazine. What’s with this obsession? Are you trying to revive Brill’s Content?

     All I’m doing really is trying to prove a point, that Stuff isn’t like these other magazines. Our readers aren’t like their readers. Ours are smarter in the sense that they’ve seen all this stuff before in these other magazines. 
   By pointing out the stupidity and the pretentiousness of these other magazines, the readers are made to feel that they were right all along and that they aren’t missing anything. 
   They don’t read Details, they don’t read Esquire, they don’t read GQ, and they’re not missing anything because all of that stuff has been said before. It’s been said over and over again. 
   There’s like some kind of mine out in the middle of eastern Pennsylvania where they go and they dig out old, dead men’s magazine story ideas, and they just keep recycling them over and over again. 
  

Maxim and Stuff  do look alike, but Stuff is considerably more differentiated from Maxim than it was before you took over as editor in 2001. How would you characterize the difference?

    I said originally that I wanted to create a magazine that would be the next men’s magazine and not just another men’s magazine. 
   What that meant was getting rid of any of that clichéd men’s-style writing — any of that folksy service. ‘Hey, you’ve been there before. I’m a guy, you’re a guy.’ That kind of thing. I did that for years. I’m ashamed that it’s still around.
   I think we’re going to look back years from now at these magazines, these guy-type magazines that celebrate being a guy, as rather silly. 
   What I wanted to do was make a magazine that was entertaining without being condescending, a magazine that has absolutely no service other than perhaps making you smarter and making you laugh. 
   That’s why there's almost no service at all. It eschews all of the traditional men’s magazine ideas.
   Here’s a metaphor: Remember how as a little boy you wore little boy clothes? And as you got older, the clothes didn’t fit but your mom still made you wear them? That’s what men’s magazines are like to me—they’re all stuck in their little boy clothes. 
   We decided at Stuff that we were going to change the clothing and change the way we communicate these ideas as sharper, more visual, more brutally honest, and avoiding all these clichés that you find in other magazines. We’ve gotten rid of the little boy clothes. I look at Stuff as more like a TV show. It’s faster.
   Here's the biggest sin of these other magazines. They have the writer trying to impress other writers, the editor trying to impress other editors. 
   They have that pretentiously tasteful black and white photography, the kind of stuff that makes you go, 'Look, here’s an important article. Let’s nominate this one for a National Magazine Award because it’s about my father who’s dying, or my dog who’s being put to sleep.' 
   Those are calculated attempts to make writers feel superior and impress their peers and perhaps win an award. I have no patience for that.
   Every time I looked at Details, I went, 'I don’t understand this.'
   I remember as a kid falling in love with Mad magazine and going, 'My god, I didn’t know this existed.' And then National Lampoon and Spy, these magazines that come out and all of a sudden you go, 'Somebody’s saying what I’m thinking.'
   I could not get up and go to a traditional magazine and be happy or be proud of what I’m doing because I don’t believe there’s an audience out there for it, you know?
   I would feel dishonest. It seems like all you’re doing is sitting around producing stories that are made to impress the guy across the hall.


You brought up Mad and National Lampoon. Is Stuff more of a humor magazine than a men’s magazine?

   I don’t like to think of Stuff as a men’s magazine. You will not find men’s humor in it. There’s no body-oriented humor, there’s no beer-and-babes humor. It’s very 'Simpson'-esque, very ironic. It’s not about how great it is to be a guy. That kind of humor makes me sick.
   But if you characterize it as a humor magazine, I would rather say that it’s a non-fiction magazine that’s funnier than hell. If you open up Stuff, there’s no parodies. We don’t do stories like “What if women ruled the world?” or “What if guys ran shopping malls?” These are tired humor ideas.
   All of our humor comes from truth. Every photo that’s in the magazine is a real photo of something and the captions reflect on some kind of truth. Even if the caption seems odd or strange or dark, there’s a truth to everything that’s in there. There’s nothing made up about the humor, so it’s not like Mad or National Lampoon in that sense.
   You’ve got three readers: You’ve got the guy who gets it immediately. Then you’ve got the guy who finds it impenetrable, and they feel like they’re overwhelmed. They read Stuff and they go, 'I don’t understand what’s going on. The design is crazy. The writing is sick.' 
   The third person is the one who started at that point and then became the person who got it, which is what happens when you start watching 'The Simpsons' and all of a sudden you get the rhythm, or you listen to punk rock the first time and you can’t hear the melodies of the Ramones or the Sex Pistols and you go, 'I can never listen to Fleetwood Mac again.' 'The Simpsons' ruined television for every sitcom. You couldn’t go back and watch 'Full House.'
   

You say there’s no audience for serious magazine journalism, but The Atlantic and Harper’s are more than 100 years old and Esquire’s 70. Are frivolity and insubstantiality a recipe for long-term sustainability, in your view?

   Those magazines aren’t interested in building a readership, though. We already have a larger readership than those types of self-important magazines. 
   The substance-versus-insubstantial argument is almost a false one because I believe humor is substantial. People think being funny is easy, but you know when you watch a 'Simpsons' episode or read Stuff that it’s labor intensive. 
   I believe that it’s far easier to write a 6,000-word piece on your dog dying than it is to load up a magazine with 350 hilarious comments or jokes. That is harder than writing an essay on the evils of war, like this horrible piece in the latest Rolling Stone which just made me ill where they just ... I don’t even want to get into it because I get angry.
   I believe that Stuff is extremely substantial, but it’s substantial in a way that conventional editors don’t get yet. They look at it and they go, 'There’s nothing here. It’s so light.'
   Ours is not the kind of substance that idiotic editors have come to believe is substance. 
   Like 'It’s gotta be a serious topic. It’s gotta have serious photography. We’ve gotta get an expensive writer.'
   That’s bullshit. That’s not substance. That’s laziness, because any editor can do that. Any editor can make these phone calls and throw money out the window and get no readers interested. None of that is engaging. Good substance engages on any page. 
   In order for humor to work it has to be smart. In order to be smart it has to be substantial. I just talked in an elaborate circle.
   When they replaced Bob Love with Ed Needham at Rolling Stone there was an article, maybe it was in USA Today, by some longtime editor -- it might’ve been Hunter S. Thompson or some ass like that -- but it was basically lamenting the passing of journalism because they hired somebody from a lad magazine. 
   That’s the equivalent of lamenting the loss of hair metal when Kurt Cobain came along. Basically, right now Esquire is the literary equivalent of Whitesnake. It’s kind of like, what are you lamenting the loss of, really? The fact that you’re not going to get paid four dollars a word for crap?

Last question: Do you ever get nostalgic for your days at Men’s Health and say, I think I’ll stick a greased-up hunk on the cover of Stuff this month? 

   You know, that thought has never crossed my mind, but now that it has that would make a perfect back page. 
    You know how quickly I would be fired?

March 10, 2003© 2003 Media Life

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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