At Last, a New Magazine Idea--Oh Shut Up!

Claiming that talk is not only cheap but also pernicious, with runaway media gossipfroth/stargazing/sociobabble lowering America’s IQ level by 75 points in the past month alone, the anonymous editor in chief (“Who needs to know who I am?”) of the new celebrity monthly Oh Shut Up! vows that the publication will offer readers a revolutionary editorial concept.

“We’ll be a major force for taciturnity,” she predicted at the magazine’s launch party in a booth at the Seven Brothers Coffee Shop on style-free Upper Broadway in Manhattan, which attracted no attendees after none were invited. How so? “Simple! By allotting editorial space on the strict basis of how much will be remembered 10 minutes after reading.” Oh Shut Up! foresees running mostly blank pages, thereby creating a rare “blither-free zone” allowing people to read about issues of substance or simply think about the important things in their lives.

“It’s a magazine of firsts,” the voluntarily nameless editor in chief observed. “For example, first to admit that 99% of all the celebrities that magazines traffic in Bruce McCall is a regular contributor to the New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

today have the intellectual depth of a muskmelon, the moral consciousness of a parking meter and the enduring social value of pocket lint. Liz Taylor never said anything interesting in her life. The entire cast of ‘Friends’ couldn’t concoct a decent English sentence among them. Prince Charles’ only distinction is he’s a cuckold.

“Accordingly, Oh Shut Up!’s average star-director-politico-Brit royal-supermodel piece will run two or three sentences, max, before it ends with our standard ‘Oh Shut Up.’ The violent deaths of the famous--special-issue material for others--we’ll give, maybe, a 10-line obit. In posterity’s long view, after all, so what; sooner or later everybody dies.

“We’re also the first magazine to act on the fact that most movies turn out to be bombs, most new TV shows flop, most celebrity marriages fizzle. So why burn up valuable pages shilling for an endless treadmill of quickly forgotten duds? And Oh Shut Up! will be the first magazine to admit that the average American never has and never will meet a Kennedy, a movie star or Hillary Rodham Clinton, and if they did, neither one would have anything to say,” she continued. “So why bring them together in print? Instead, we’ll give our readers the soothing blank space they need in their lives.

“Besides, talk really is cheap when you buy a magazine with upward of 100,000 words for $3.95. That means every 300 of their words is worth a penny. At that price, how valuable could they be?

“In short, the American public is ready for a magazine that spares them all the mind-junk they’ve forgotten anyway by the time it goes into the wastebasket,” the editor in chief drones. “We want our readers to think of Oh Shut Up! not as a perky cocktail-party blabbermouth full of showbiz tripe and two-bit gossip but as somebody who won’t suffer fools, and when some airhead starts talking Gwyneth Paltrow’s latest boyfriend, just draws back and says, ‘Oh shut up.’ ”

Oh Shut Up! will be printed on cheap paper, sans photographs, since readers have already seen and memorized the faces of everyone famous. First-issue cover blurbs like “Tom and Nicole--Who Cares?,” “Are You as Sick of DreamWorks as We Are?,” “Brainless Prince Weds Drug-Addled Princess,” help define the magazine’s editorial stance.

But Oh Shut Up!’s true publishing coup may be its distribution and circulation plan. “It won’t be on the newsstands,” explains the dowdily garbed editor in chief, “or available by subscription or even placed in sidewalk vending boxes. In fact, Oh Shut Up! won’t be available at all! With this we’re once again way out in front of the industry: the first to recognize that with more and more magazines blathering about less and less, we’ve finally reached the point where nobody needs any of them. Least of all ours.”

“Oh shut up,” chimes in the equally anonymous managing editor, signaling that the launch party was over. *