“Welcome to the new People’s Republic of The Bowery Review,” Tim Latterner, editor-in-chief of the humor magazine The Bowery Review, says to a crowd of around 200 people packed into KGB Bar, the East Village’s longtime literary hangout. The people (who now constitute this new republic) holler and whoop at this pronouncement. Issue 5 is 104 pages and costs $20. During the launch party held on Wednesday night, purchasing a copy also gets you one drink at the bar.
Before I am anything — a party reporter, a writer, a bartender, a friend, a daughter, a human — I am a reader. Before I even knew who I was, I knew who I wanted to be like. Reading was definitional, a way for me to understand myself in the context of lives already lived. (As James Baldwin writes in Giovanni’s Room, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”)
One thing that felt much harder to “learn” was humor. What does a kid, albeit a mildly antisocial one that had a major fixation on learning social cues through books, read to be funny?
The answer, over the decades, used to be magazines like Mad, or the National Lampoon, or the humor section of the Playboy stuffed under the mattress. Tim wrote for all of them. After studying comedy writing at NYU and a stint as junior writer on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, he served as managing editor of the Lampoon’s reboot. One by one, they folded. Or, a worse fate befell them — they stopped being funny.
The Bowery Review is most certainly not meant for child consumption, but part of me is still that outcast kid hunting for humor. I met with Tim on the Sunday before the magazine’s recent launch party for drinks at The Ear Inn, and he told me that The Bowery Review is “an island of misfit toys” for pieces institutional magazines passed on.
“The form of prose-y humor didn’t go away … The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs is fantastic,” he said. “But that’s one piece every two weeks. There’s just more demand for real estate in that world. So we made more real estate.”
Tim also did a year as a party reporter at Nylon (“I was never a great proper reporter, I just like people … and I like drinking”) and still writes freelance travel pieces. “The people that I know from my magazine life don’t think I’m funny, and then the people from comedy are like, ‘You do luxury travel writing? What?’”
The misfits toys, for their part, are thankful for The Bowery‘s existence. “The number-one thing I love about The Bowery Review is the launch parties,” Abe Shapiro, a stand-up comedian who’s written for a few issues, tells me at KGB. “I like reading for it and getting laughs. It’s an easy crowd. As you may have noticed, Tim didn’t let me read today. He said my piece was unpolished and hypersexual.” His story, “Lethal Rejection,” is about putting his dog down — and the dog getting an erection.
The Bowery Review is a print-only magazine. Tim is fairly settled on not wanting to pander to the algorithm. “When you start putting stuff online, you have to care about the algorithm, which means inevitably [you] start building things for the algorithm, which makes everything worse,” he said. The bio for the magazine’s empty Instagram account literally says it doesn’t use Instagram. “It feels so pretentious,” he admitted, “[but] it’s more art than journalism.”
The anti-online stance (and, by extension, anti-enshittification, but that’s a rant for another day) isn’t just for aesthetics. There’s no AI in it either — “especially none of that for art,” Tim said.
I have a soft spot for creators that reject the online attention economy for the sake of maintaining artistic integrity. I’ve always held tight to the belief that the alleged inevitability of something unwanted is just surrendering agency. The Bowery Review is, in its own way, protesting for real life — a one-magazine prohibition on the internet.
The popularity the print quarterly has gained in such a short time (it originally launched in November 2024) is only a testament to the desire of the general public to bring things back into our flesh-and-blood world. Not long ago, The Bowery Review was “a zine I made in my apartment on my one laptop,” Tim said. Now it’s stocked in L.A., Chicago, Austin, Tulsa and Portland, and bookstores are calling him. “My first thought is like, why?”
Each print run has increased in demand quarterly, and every past issue has sold out. There’s no distributor, no growth marketing team — just Tim and his phone. “I’m just calling these bookstores and being like, ‘Hey, it’s Tim. I run this magazine out of New York. Can we send five copies?’”
In NYC, you can find The Bowery at McNally Jackson and Iconic Magazines, but Tim’s proudest get is Casa Magazines, the West Village newsstand where respect is hard-won. “The guys at Casa think I’m — not cool — but they like me a little bit,” he said. “As an editor for a decade-plus, that’s church.”
While standing up front at KGB to get a better look at the readers of the night, I turn around to look into the crowd. There’s a body occupying nearly every inch of space in the joint. The writers perform their pieces, the crowd erupts at well-timed jokes and I can’t help but think that this is the reason artists flock to New York.
Jayne Baran, who founded the magazine Bikini Grad School, would agree. She found the party while scrolling Partiful and decided to pull up. “I think it’s great and has a lot of overlap in my life,” she tells me. “I run a magazine and my boyfriend is a stand-up comic.” For Jayne, print isn’t just playing on nostalgia. “Print media is alive in New York. I go to magazine launches every few weeks,” she says. “Feels like we’re living in the fucking ’80s. It’s beautiful.”
Aesthetically, sure, magazines are so back — at least on paper. The financials tell a different story. U.S. magazine ad revenue fell from $10 billion in 2017 to $4.3 billion in 2025, per Statista, and it’s projected to keep sliding. This year alone, Condé Nast shut down Self, Wired dropped its U.K. print edition and The Saturday Evening Post announced it would stop printing, citing “rising production costs, declining advertising revenue and shifting reader habits.”
Still, Tim is bullish. He’s watched the magazines he worked for go under, and he thinks he knows why: they were “trying to scale for the sake of scaling,” he said. “That’s never how you make cool stuff.” Most magazines’ “business model is still like the ’90s business model,” he added. The Bowery Review simplifies things: ads cover the print run, and the writers get paid. “I don’t know why it’s more complicated.”
The Bowery’s refusal to bend a knee to the online kingdom isn’t the only appealing aspect of it. Tim, with a background of pitching to (and sometimes getting rejected by) everyone from The New Yorker to The Paris Review, loves to say yes as often as he can. “If it’s funny, it runs,” Tim said. In an average issue, he gets “somewhere between 500 and 800 submissions,” and he reads every one himself, “because I’m the only real filter.” Some get cut for practical reasons, but plenty make it in, including work from first-time submitters. “We’ve been the first place to publish a bunch of people by now,” he said. “That’s something I’m super proud of.”
The masthead mixes those newcomers with comedy royalty, though the downtown crowd may not know who they’re looking at. “A band no one’s ever heard of is like a rare jewel,” Tim said. “A comedy person no one’s ever heard of is like, I would have heard of them if they were good.”
Some of the names here are ones only comedy nerds will recognize. One such person is Jack Handey, the man behind SNL’s “Deep Thoughts,” who has written for a few issues — Jack is one of the comedy elders Tim’s writers are “obsessed with.” Tim acquired Jack the fan way: he ordered one of Jack’s books online, typed a pitch into the box meant for the inscription and got an email back a week later. Tim called having him “like having Babe Ruth” on your team. There are also cartoons from Asher Perlman, and Simpsons veteran Mike Reiss is in the mix. Seinfeld writer Tom Gammill will have work featured in the next issue.
I’m a Bartender. Here’s What Your Drink Order Says About You.
Dirty Martini? Beer and a shot? Long Island Iced Tea? Turns out, you are what you drink.Issue 5 leans further into satirical journalism. Contributors Dylan Fugel and Carly Silverman went to Wigan, England, where the football club’s mascot is an anthropomorphic meat pie named Crusty, and gave him a dead-serious, 30 for 30-style interview. (They brought Tim back a keychain.) At KGB, Dylan wants to set the record straight on how it came about. “I would like it noted that we were visiting my parents in the U.K.,” he says of the trip with Carly, his fiancée, “and decided to do this interview to get some time away from my parents.”
Elsewhere in the issue, a parody Colgate ad appears five times, with fewer dentists “agreeing” each time it shows up. The edition also continues a serialized novel written by Tim: when a new dean cuts the internet at an upstate liberal arts college, two sophomores start an underground Playboy-esque magazine and become campus outlaws.
Tim also wants more bite. “People have lost the sense of what satire can do to embarrass people,” he said. “I do want to bring some of that back.” Not cruelty — “I would never ruin some mom-and-pop business” — but a little public discomfort for those who’ve earned it. “I’m not gonna do anything that ruins your business,” he said. “But I’ll ruin your weekend. I’ll make you have an awkward meeting with your boss.”
He’s tested these waters before. Tim once wrote a parody of New York Times writer Alex Vadukul’s style, with Alex at a Columbia frat party, without asking him first. Alex got tagged on Instagram and texted Tim something like, “I think, thank you?”
“He was a really good sport about it,” Tim said.
On Sunday, I asked Tim if he was excited for the launch party. “I’m always excited, but also deeply nervous,” he said. They had more RSVPs than ever before, a far cry from the early days when he was personally DMing everyone. (“This looks so thirsty,” he remembered thinking.) He wasn’t hoping for any one person in particular, though. “It’s like that scene in Hook, where the dad comes to the baseball game,” he said. “I just hope people have a fun time.”
Literary nightlife is having a moment, and The Bowery Review has been throwing parties since the start: at Biggie’s Bodega in Dimes Square, Night Club 101 in the East Village and then at galleries like Trotter & Sholer. KGB brings a different crowd, and Tim likes it that way. “It’s way more important to me that the comedy people like it than the Dimes Square crowd,” he said. “It’s a comedy product, and then a literary product, and then — wouldn’t it be nice? — cool.”
To end the reading portion of the night, Tim takes his turn at the front of the room and reads a letter from Santa he wrote. I’m standing in the middle of the room with his wife, Bailey, when a guy squeezes past us, still laughing. “That’s pretty good,” he says to no one in particular. I’m reminded of the answers I couldn’t seem to find as a kid: you learn to be funny the same way you learn everything else. Somebody puts it on a page, and you read it.
The Bowery Review can be purchased on its website and found in New York at McNally Jackson, Iconic Magazines and Casa Magazines in the coming week.
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