Why Doesnt America Have Its Own Charlie Hebdo
Correction appended, Jan. 15, 2015, 915 a.m. After last week's terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper, the U.S. media had to publish several articles explaining to Americans what kind of paper Charlie is, and why it's so controversial. It wasn't just a matter of readers being unfamiliar with the title of a foreign-language newspaper. Rather, the whole idea of Charlie Hebdo is foreign to American readers, because no real equivalent exists. Topical, political humor is popular in the U.S. but in recent years it has been more common on television programs  like South Park, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report  than on the printed page. This was not always the case. In fact, print satire flourished in the U.S. between the 1950s and the 1970s, with the creation of humor magazines like MAD, Monocle, The Realist and The National Lampoon  but a combination of timing and tradition has meant that the medium is, for most American readers, a matter of history. A half-century ago, those publications featured parody articles, jokes, cartoons, comic strips and colorful, sometimes explicit cover images, as contributors experimented with boundary-pushing content. There was a sense, during the social upheavals of the 1960s, that satire was transforming along with the country. As a 1964 essay from TIME put it, American humor had "shed its inhibitions" in terms of addressing once-taboo topics like sex and death, since contemporary audiences were "largely unshockable.", Correction The original version of this story misstated the year National Lampoon stopped publishing. It was 1998.