New Yorker humor — and I’m out

[From an e-mail promoting the August 30 issue of The New Yorker.]

I’ve been wavering about whether to let our subscription to The New Yorker lapse. I think this comedy bit has decided it for me. No wavering from Elaine: she’s already said we should let it go.

Now that we’re supposed to listen compassionately to disaffected rural folk opposed to vaccination, older people might be the only group still safe to target for comic purposes. A sample from this New Yorker piece:

Right now, your mom could be holding up the grocery-store checkout line with a long, boring monologue about how much she loves “that Billy Eyelash — such a talented young man.”

I’m old enough — but also young enough — to find this kind of stuff painfully dumb.

[The average age of a New Yorker reader, according to Wikipedia: forty-three in 1980; forty-six in 1990, forty-seven in 2009. A more recent (?) estimate: fifty-four. I’d say the magazine is pitching not to the readers they have but to the readers they hope to acquire, which is one way to lose readers they have, or had.]