The roast of the town

“Magazines are launched every day, but it is not every day that a young boy becomes a man,” said Richard Rushfield, dressed in a tuxedo and addressing the 300 people assembled (mostly around the cash bars) in the second-floor ballroom of the Friars Club in Beverly Hills. They were gathered there Wednesday night, according to the e-vite, for a twofold purpose: to celebrate the launch of L.A. Innuendo, a new humor magazine that Rushfield founded and edited with Stacey Grenrock-Woods, and to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a 13-year-old named Nick Borenstein.

Although Rushfield was standing on a small stage and holding a microphone, almost nobody was listening to him. Nobody stopped talking when Rabbi Kramer (actually a comedian named Jeremy Kramer) took the stage, saying: “Shalom, I ask you to lower your voices, shalom, please stop talking.” Nobody stopped talking during comedian Andy Kindler’s set, which followed. They did stop talking, however, when Borenstein, in a dark suit, a white tallit draped over his shoulders, announced that he was going to sing “Shadowland,” a song from “The Lion King.”

“They wanted me to sing my Torah portion, but I was like, ‘I’m going to do ‘Shadowland,’ ” he had said earlier.

After Borenstein’s impressive rendition, the crowd went back to its conversations and continued to ignore the rest of the night’s performers: a terrible hypnotist/magician named Mesmerizo, a beer-bellied male exotic dance duo called Sashay and a trashy Christian-music performer named Crystal.

All in all, the low-budget extravaganza seemed a fitting introduction to L.A. Innuendo, a low-budget, free magazine devoted entirely to making fun of Los Angeles. Out this week, the first issue of what the editors hope will be a bimonthly starts with a satirical bang, skewering the annual “best of” issues of Los Angeles magazine and the L.A. Weekly with its “Worst of L.A. Awards.” The cover features a photo of Kevin Spacey, named “Worst Person (Actor)” by the magazine’s staff.

“It is a niche that begged to be filled,” says Michael Sonnenschein, a television writer and L.A. Innuendo contributor. “Everyone has ideas about what Los Angeles is, and everybody who lives here and outside of here makes fun of it in all these cliched ways, but nobody is making fun of it in a sort of close and pointed way.”

Rushfield and Grenrock-Woods, both natives (he’s from the Palisades, she’s from Sherman Oaks), are friends through the comedy and music scene that revolves around the club Largo on Fairfax Avenue. He co-writes the Intelligence Report column for Vanity Fair; she’s a correspondent on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and a sex columnist for Esquire. In the mid-’90s, they collaborated on the e-mail newsletter the Barricade (“The Journal of Internet Liberation”), which made fun of pop-culture sources from the men’s magazine Maxim to book reviews on Amazon. After three years, the Barricade’s circulation was up to 1,000, but they decided to stop it right after Sept. 11.

“The Barricade sort of had this guerrilla warfare theme,” says Grenrock-Woods. “Our assumed names were General Ciao and Commandante X, and we thought maybe that’s not such a good idea right now.”

Ever since, they had talked about starting a magazine. “This year, we started telling everyone we were going to do it, and if you shoot your mouth off about something too much, eventually you have no choice but to actually do it,” says Rushfield.

They rounded up a staff of comedians (Rushfield’s close friend Margaret Cho has promised to contribute, and Largo regulars Kindler and Paul F. Tompkins each has a column), young unemployed or underemployed television writers, and some veteran local journalists who wanted to help out.

“I consider Richard to be the social director of Los Angeles journalists,” says Mark Ebner, a former Spy magazine writer. “So nobody is saying, ‘Oh no, not another start-up, and I’m going to have to write for free.’ Everybody showed up at these meetings with an altruistic spirit.”

As they had with the Barricade, Rushfield and Grenrock-Woods envisioned a magazine that would carefully study and mock all aspects of the city, especially the entertainment industry. They also had clear ideas of what the magazine would not be. Contributors are warned not to pitch first-person narratives of the type featured on NPR’s “This American Life,” or stories that could appear in Los Angeles magazine or the L.A. Weekly. National fads don’t count. And there are no sacred cows. The tag line of the magazine is “Your enemy’s enemy is your friend.”

“We wanted to put the mean back in journalism,” says Rushfield.

The editors make no secret that the now-legendary Spy magazine provided a lot of inspiration for L.A. Innuendo. Like Spy, it’s a mix of bile and reportage. The “front of the book” section titled Rat’s Alley (from a line in T.S. Elliot’s “The Waste Land”) is filled with smart one-liners and quippy insults. A column called Overheards is just that, and one called Diary of a D-Girl is a casual retelling of industry gossip of the type that low-level movie execs pick up on (watch for an especially funny bit about rapper-turned-actor DMX). The Free Is Too Much column that will appear in each issue is devoted to making fun of the L.A. Weekly. The editors describe it as “our tribute to the best of everyone’s favorite weekly collection of smugness, self-satisfaction and obliviousness.”

Features in the first issue include an essay by Winnie Holzman, creator of “My So-Called Life,” about relaxing her hair, and a profile by Sonnenschein of Johnny G, who started the Spinning craze. The four-page spread on the “Worst of L.A. Awards” subverts the usual “best of” categories. While there is a Worst Restaurant (Cha Cha Cha), there is also a Worst Driver Award (Dustin Hoffman) and Worst Mascot (Sergeant Jury).

The “Last Word” column, on the back page, is by John Travis, L.A. Innuendo’s in-house heckler, who flipped through the issue and made fun of all the stories.

“We wanted to keep ourselves honest,” says Rushfield.

The magazine was designed by Eric Almendral, who was art director at New Times before it folded last fall. He says the editors asked for a scrappy, almost mimeographed, look. “I actually thought about buying a mimeograph machine from EBay, but then I figured I would have to learn to fix it,” he says. Instead, the straightforward black-and-white newsprint magazine looks like it was designed by someone who just learned to use Quark.

Targeting the “tens of thousands of entertainment and artistic professionals, ages 21 to 45, living in the corridor between Fairfax Boulevard and the Silver Lake community,” Rushfield and Grenrock-Woods will distribute the magazine themselves to coffee shops, clothing stores, nightclubs and restaurants, and will mail copies to film studios, production companies and agents. According to their advertising materials, they expect to distribute 30,000 copies.

Los Angeles has never had a humor magazine before. Back in 1996, the Onion considered distributing hard copies here, but ultimately decided against it. “We had some investors interested, but with a free weekly you really need a strong, concentrated merchant base for the advertising, and there just didn’t seem to be a ground zero at that point,” says Mark Banker, a former advertising manager for the revered weekly humor newspaper. “What you need is a university or a surrounding campus or something.

“But to make the decision not to do the Onion was strictly business. I definitely think there is room out here for something funny.”

In the end, it comes down to how one defines success, and what the L.A. Innuendo has that the Onion doesn’t is editors, writers, photographers and designers who will work for free. It also has no plans to become profitable in the foreseeable future.

“As of Tuesday, we were unsure if the printer was going to have the magazine ready for us to pick up by our Wednesday party,” says Rushfield. “I was worried we were going to have a very avant-garde launch party with no magazines.”