6 Reasons the 'Police Gazette' is the Craziest Magazine Ever
Despite its insanity, the National Police Gazette stayed in publication for 132 years. How? Well, I went through hundreds of issues and I found 20 reasons for its success. Here are the six that had nothing to do with boners.
They Hated Women
"Her heavy-lidded eyes resemble an owl's and her thick lips suggest she plays the trumpet."-- actual quote from The National Police Gazette's feature on Barbra Streisand's stupid monster face.
This was an article from 1970 about how married women hate sex. Like all National Police Gazette articles, the writer was baffled by his own topic. After all, the birth control pill was specifically invented so girls wouldn't be so fussy about what scientists now call "the penis." The article does make one interesting point about frigidity in regard to how it's totally your fault, ladies. Though I'm not sure how women were expected to get this information, since it's my understanding that any lady holding a National Police Gazette had better damn well be using it to wash the windows.
They Knew That the Only Good Part of Sports is the Fighting
The National Police Gazette sort of covered athletics, but all their articles about sports were about how to start a fight while playing them. Shooting a jump shot is like telling a defender that your foot is afraid to kick him in the cock. A field goal is only something you attempt when you're being attacked by owls. Even their horse racing coverage is mostly about how to spectacularly kill horses:
What did that horse even trip over? Was it dropped from a balloon? Was this picture taken at the world's most fun but least ethical glue factory?
A-and I think this article is just pictures of jockeys internally bleeding to death? Jesus Christ. How did these people have time to put together a magazine while they were slaying hitchhikers?
This article is about how to win a fight during a basketball game and why you have a financial and moral obligation to do so. I know I've been making fun of the National Police Gazette for its sociopathic editorial direction, but I want to make it very clear that a lot of this magazine truly rules.
No Really, They Hated Women
Full caption: "A CRAZY PHYSICIAN MARRIES AN ATLANTA, GA., BELLE, AND PROFESSIONALLY OFFICIATES IN A SCENE OF HORROR IN THE BRIDAL CHAMBER."
In the early days of photography, the National Police Gazette's nutbag articles had to be illustrated by hand. This was a suicidal career path for artists because by the time they left, 90 percent of their portfolio was drawings of women being caned or dismembered. For a job interview, all the NPG did was hand you a pencil and ask you to draw something culturally important. If you drew a bear biting a lady in half, you were hired. If you drew the same bear screaming as it passed her overbust corset and face bones, you were hired as editor-in-chief.
When most publications report on an all-lady riot, they lead with the number of casualties. In the National Police Gazette, they lead with how close the dames were to ripping each other's clothes off (ALMOST) and leave out virtually every other detail. In 1896, a story of a near titty sighting was far more newsworthy than human lives or property damage. You know, all this female violence is depressing me. Let's check out some of NPG's cartoons ...
As offensive as this is, I think she should be more concerned about how he struck a match on her when she's built like a squid stuffed with bread crumbs. This comic really illustrates the Catch-22 of our grandparents' generation -- a husband only liked his wife when she had an ass you could strike a match on, and a wife only liked her husband when he wasn't striking a match on her.
It must take forever to get FDA approval for this stuff, because this was written 40 years ago and I still can't buy over-the-counter sodium pentothal. Or maybe in the last 40 years one researcher suddenly gasped, "Stop your centrifuges, fellas! Do we really want to distribute a drug that makes women shut up less? Waitress! A round of Bud Dry for all the scientists!"
They Understood Different Cultures
What a cute way to describe a hate crime, National Police Gazette! In 1882, a journalist's idea of cultural sensitivity was spelling the word "Chinaman" with vowels instead of little devil faces.
The lack of African Americans in ice hockey may be an issue best left to stand-up comedians. As it was explained to me, it has something to do with either ice being too cold for a brother or how when police see a black man strapping blades to his feet, they open fire long before he can land a toe-loop jump. Science, on the other hand, has no explanation. The best the writer of this 1970 article could come up with is this: All hockey players are Canadian, so Canadians must be racist. This struck me as strange. Not because it was inaccurate -- Canadians really are the worst. It's strange because it showed that the writer, Dick Bacon, knew that there was a concept called "racism" and that it was bad, yet he still sat down and wrote an article called "Why NEGROES Can't Break into HOCKEY."
Every time the National Police Gazette printed an issue, they lost two to five staff members to Satan reaching through their office floor and pulling their tainted souls into hell. If this racist magazine still existed, this is what they would be producing today:
Their Readers Were Always About to Die
The National Police Gazette is a great example of how our society has evolved. It's almost like a coursebook for how civilized people should not behave. And yet there is one thing the National Police Gazette invented that we still use today: alarmist sensationalism. Every single one of its hundreds of issues told readers how their water, horse, food or appliance was going to kill them. To make matters worse, the government knew the whole time and just didn't care. Think about that. These childish scare tactics were developed by the same primitive 19th century journalists who thought strapping an innocent Chinese man to a bull was light comedy, and every single media outlet still uses them today. If a time-traveler from 1940 landed here, he'd say, "Wait, your society is so civilized that you stopped lighting matches on your wives, but you still try to scare the shit out of each other for attention? How do you make babies here in the future when everyone is too stupid to find their dick and too fancy to put it in a woman?"
H-Hitler!? How to avoi -- ack! These headlines! L-listed in ... the wrong! Order! Hrk!
Sometimes it was faster for the National Police Gazette to just show you how you were going to die.
The advertisements didn't exactly help enhance the National Police Gazette reader's sense of security. There were public service announcements in the magazine to WASH to stop skin disease. Mail-order gonorrhea cures ran on most pages for almost six decades, presumably for a consumer market that didn't mind dripping and screaming by their mailbox for six to eight weeks. Every fourth classified ad was for something called BLOOD POISON, and I don't know even know if it was a cure or a weapon. My point is -- our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were totally filthy and disgusting.
It Was the First Magazine to Pick Fights with the Reader
Carl Pons was featured several times in the I WILL KICK YOUR FUCKING ASS section. As you can see, he eventually got married to a person named "HIS WIFE" and began including her in his photo. I'm not sure why. Either she was the prize for beating him or she was there as a reminder that the last person to challenge Carl Pons wasn't simply defeated -- he was squeezed down into a womanlike shape and married.
Dear the National Police Gazette,
I've enjoyed your magazine for so many years that I've undressed my boys and taken pictures of them. Could you ask your readers to come by Trenton, Ohio, and fight them? Thanks!
-- C.B. Ward
P.S. Your feature on bag materials that won't suffocate a wife saved my fourth marriage!
