Why Viz Is Still the Biz
I’m laughing while folding up the envelope it arrived in, just reading the coverlines: “Vance vs Salinger vs Sports: Which is the best JD?” It’s my subscriber’s copy of Viz, the adult-humour comic that’s celebrating its 45th anniversary in December, which I have been reading for 35 years.
For much of that time, one of the hundreds of jokes published in each issue was that Viz is not as funny as it used to be. I’ve never found that to be the case. I hardly ever listen to my favourite childhood bands and I don’t support the football team I did when I was younger (long story), but Viz has been an enduring touchstone for me, and it’s still funny after all these years.
The first copy I read was issue 39, the then-current issue, while in a hospital waiting room in Harrogate in December 1989. (God bless the NHS.) I can still recall now the powerful, illicit thrill of seeing swear words written down, the borderline shock that Viz’s brilliant parodies of classic British comic strips — The Beano, The Dandy — could mock something that I loved so much. Equally hilarious were the fake letters pages, photo stories and news articles that sent up the newspapers and magazines my parents took. There was also sex and (comic) violence in it. It was visceral, thrilling, world-class toilet humour. How could this thing be allowed to exist? It wasn’t illegal, but it felt wrong and subversive, and I was killing myself laughing. I imagine that’s what it must have felt like seeing Peter Cook in Beyond the Fringe in the mid-60s, doing his impressions of the Prime Minister and generals when that sort of thing was unheard of.
Well, I had to have that comic. To my shame, I pilfered it. At home, I read it over and over, keeping it separate from my other comics, in a hiding place later used to stash other adult publications. Too young and young-looking at 13 to buy the next issue, I bought back issues at my local comic shop and, a year later, at Christmas 1990, I asked for and received the Billy the Fish Football Yearbook, a spot-on mickey-take, in form and content, of Roy of the Rovers annuals and similar sporting derring-do from 20th-century boys’ papers. My love for Viz was out of the shadows now.
This was also about the time when Viz was entering its most mainstream phase. In 1990 and 1991, animated adaptations of its comic strips, including Billy the Fish, the story of half-man, half-fish Billy Thompson, the goalkeeper for football team Fulchester United, were shown on Channel 4, along with a spoof documentary about the making and history of Viz, starring its editorial team. Peter Cook himself was the voice of Roger Mellie, The Man on the Telly, a TV presenter who would swear inappropriately —typically dropping a “bollocks” during live broadcasts — and who was a chauvinist both on and off air. Soon, Viz, published every other month, was selling more than a million copies an issue; it was one of Britain’s bestselling magazines, just behind Radio Times, TV Times and Reader’s Digest. Quite the rise from the 150 photocopied pages of Viz number one, made in 1979 in Newcastle, mostly by Chris Donald, 19, who was helped by his brother Simon, 15. The free gift with each of the 500 copies of its follow-up was a balloon, stapled to the inside back cover.
With increased popularity and visibility came criticism, from the tabloids that Viz openly mocked and, more legitimately, from women who objected to characters such as the Fat Slags — two single Geordie women who enjoyed sex and drinking as much as the lads, using their sexuality to get exactly what they wanted — and Millie Tant, a caricature of a left-wing feminist. That latter strip made several jokes about woke, long before the debate and the problems on either side of it became common cultural currency.
By the end of the 1990s, things had calmed down — the sales and the controversy — and in1998, Viz’s true purpose emerged: the collection of slang, euphemism and entendre in what would become Roger’s Profanisaurus, a living dictionary of modern English usage that appears in every issue and as books: the 708-page eighth edition, Turtleshead Revisited, was published in September. The shorter, shareable bits of Viz — the ridiculous “reader” letters, the even more preposterous “TopTips” — have given the magazine a new life on X, Facebook and Instagram. With a million followers, they’re back where they were in the 1990s. And 10 times a year, when a new copy arrives, so am I.
Paul Wilson is an Esquire contributing editor. This piece appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Esquire, subscribe here.
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