COMMENTARY : A Beloved Spy Says Goodby, Its Comic Mission Just Begun : Frivolous, sophomoric or downright vicious, at its best Spy Magazine was the funniest thing on the newsstand. And now--<i> pfffft!</i> --it’s gone.

I’m going to miss Spy Magazine.

With this simple statement, I’m sure I’ve just made some new enemies, but I don’t care. I know that the magazine, which announced last weekend that it would fold after the next issue, was sometimes frivolous, sophomoric--even downright vicious.

Many of my friends were bludgeoned by Spy at one time or another and I’ve taken a punch or two myself in the dreaded “Review of Reviewers” section.

Still, at its best, Spy was probably the funniest magazine around. Not since before the National Lampoon stopped being both tasteless and hilarious and became merely tasteless has there been such a consistently engaging humor magazine in America. (I would except the political pages of the Village Voice, but I sometimes have the horrible suspicion we’re supposed to take them seriously.)

Moreover, at the start of its run at least, Spy took on the right targets. Back in the mid-’80s, pre-crash, when every other magazine on the stands seemed determined to outdo its competitors in sycophantic hymns to the financial and social genius of Donald Trump, Spy presented him as a preening, narcissistic, publicity-addled fool. For that alone, the magazine deserves its wings.

A column devoted to the New York Times--while sometimes needlessly cruel to the poor souls who, through force of circumstances, have been impelled to work there--was often uncannily accurate in its chronicle of the paper’s internal politics. In the late ‘80s, photocopies of each column were gleefully smuggled around the Times newsroom like samizdat.

Windy critics, corrupt politicians, overrated brat-pack novelists, overpaid Hollywood moguls--Spy dispatched them all gleefully, with extreme prejudice.

Some of the best articles: a wonderful devastation of the man who personified all that was ossified and boring about the pre-Tina Brown New Yorker, Ved Mehta; a case-by-case study of the “Alive With Pleasure” advertisements created for Newport cigarettes that demonstrated, quite convincingly, a subtext of sexual cruelty that would have shocked Vance Packard; the time Spy asked a host of politicos what they would do about the situation in Fredonia (the mythical country in the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup”) and received typical politico answers (“Take action,” “I’ll have to look into it” and “It’s a different situation from the Middle East”).

And I recall some great throwaways, as when Spy noted that Upper Volta had changed its name to Burkina Faso. “Please,” the editors begged, “celebrate in moderation.”

There was much about Spy that always made me uncomfortable: straw targets, glib denunciations, New York provincialism, specious innuendo. Some people were able to fight back (New York magazine, a regular target, returned fire with a cover story that slammed Spy as brutally and idiomatically as Spy had slammed its victims). Others suffered in silence.

And there was no doubt that the magazine had lost some of its edge. The Times column was effectively finished when one staffer who had been unusually willing to share state secrets left the newspaper.

But as recently as the January issue, there was a riotous, letter-perfect parody of the Conde Nast magazine Details, titled Retails, complete with stupefyingly banal ersatz-verbatim interviews with inarticulate “celebrities” nobody will ever hear of (Retails: “Does America belong in Bosnia?” Janeane Garofalo: “People belong . . . I think . . . it’s important, really, you know?”) and the prediction that Harrisburg, Pa., will be “the new Seattle.” (“So what should I see tomorrow night?” asks the breathless young journalist. “Uh, you could catch a movie,” suggests the hometown boy.)

For all of its faults, I’m going to miss Spy. I found something in every issue that made me laugh--and I’m willing to forgive a lot for that.