Penthouse Magazine

Anniversary 2003

Modern Drunkard Magazine

by Gil Reavill

The journey of a thousand miles begins with Twelve Steps, but who’s in any hurry to hit the road? Not the amiable folks behind
Modern Drunkard Magazine, a bottle-bitten glossy that celebrates mankind’s oldest avocation: drinking until the linoleum comes up and smacks you right in the face.

Modern Drunkard is that rare bird, a humor magazine that’s actually funny. Or. perhaps closer to the truth, it’s an anti-humorlessness magazine. These days the gaseous bubble of our p.c. orthodoxy is so ripe for bursting that even a fairly blunt instrument can do the job. Modern Drunkard knows to keep the wit just sharp enough, somewhere in the neighborhood of apres-three-martinis but well before the lam pshades come off the lamps.

There’s a lesson here for special-interest publications everywhere: Pick the right topic. Sure, Modern Drunkard is one-note, but it’s a very tat note with a lot of reverb and echo. The magazine embodies a highly commendable paradox: If you’re sober enough to
read it, you aren’t a member of the target audience.

Suitable for immediate national syndication is a column called “Wino Wisdom,” billed as “Gold Nuggets of Wisdom Garnered by Barroom Prophets and Back Alley Philosophers.” A single sample shot gives the well-distilled flavor: “I once got so drunk I woke up in a tree. Which wasn’t so bad, except the tree was in a different state than I started in. I call that being ‘Cross-Country Tree-Climbin’ Drunk.’”

You have to love a magazine whose idea of a self-help column is “Astrology for Alcoholics” or, alternatively, “You Know You’re a Drunkard When the first thing you thought when you woke up yesterday was, ‘Wow, look at all that gum stuck under the barl’ “). Recent features include the inevitable mixology guides but also indispensable information you just won’t find in any other publication: “The Etiquette of Vomiting,” for example, or “How to Ace an Intervention.”

In among the humor and lifestyle, there’s a political element to Modern Drunkard that decries the current push to punish drunks.

“We’re supposed to be moving into a more free society,” says Frank Kelly Rich, the editor and founder of the mag, “but it’s not working out that way.”

He cites efforts to eliminate happy hours and outlaw shots.
Push a drunk hard enough, he’ll fall over. Keep on pushing him forcing prim neo-Prohibition values on him, and he’ll puke all over your shoes. Then he’ll cook up some-thing like Modern Drunkard, a manifesto of the right to be left alone to drink in peace. Every shot of whiskey is an argument, perfect in its simplicity and eloquence, against a sober reality that does not satisfy. Modern Drunkard buys a round of those shots for the house.—Gil Reavill