Spoof news stories The comic also prints regular satirical pastiches of typical tabloid and local media news stories. One issue featured a small write-up of a wedding. However, in true
Viz style, the wedding featured a lecherous groom marrying his pregnant (and significantly underaged) girlfriend, eyeing up her younger sister while being called a "cradle-snatching cunt" by her father (with the resulting fight prompting the bride's mother to cry out "less it, for fuck's sake" before the police arrived). Another such story revolved around a man who won an inconsequential amount of money on the pools, and began living an inordinately lavish lifestyle ("I bought the wife a new cover for her ironing board" being one such example of his largesse), which collapsed when the money inevitably ran out, much to his chagrin ("I wish I'd never set eyes on the money"). Other stories include ludicrous "kiss and tell" and similar stories by people who are portrayed as mentally disturbed, often with highly bizarre elements; examples include allegations by a man who claimed that, on holiday touring in his
caravan, he found a campsite run by
Elvis Presley who, when plied with drink, admitted to the
Kennedy assassination; another from a retired toilet attendant who described the nature of
faeces from various little-known
celebrities and an elderly woman who blames anti-social behaviour in her area on bored
Newsnight presenters, as well as a mental home patient who claimed to have had
sex with a number of children's TV
puppets. Another regular feature is a column by 'Tony Parsehole', a parody of columnist
Tony Parsons who frequently writes obituaries about recently deceased celebrities filled entirely with metaphor and empty sentiment which stops abruptly once the required word count is reached (with a note that the invoice is included). Additionally, there are often stories revolving around celebrities, some in the "tell-all" vein (such as a customs agent who claimed he found drugs in
Pamela Anderson's "plastic tits"). If one of a select band of frequently referenced stars is mentioned during these stories, they will be named humorously. Among others,
Lemmy Kilmister will invariably be referred to as "Lemmy out of
Motörhead",
Bono as "
Bonio" and
Sting as "Sting (real name Gordon Sting)", mixing the singer's birth and stage names. One particularly memorable piece of tabloid-esque wordplay parody, involving a fictional plot to assassinate
Paul McCartney by a disgruntled former roadie, read 'Top Pop Mop-Top Pot Shot Plot Flops', or with a gonad-focused violent encounter with a deranged
Mr. T and a 1970s playground toy, 'Crackers Baracus turns Macca's knackers into clackers'. Photos in
Viz news stories are often crudely edited and altered, much to the detriment of the subjects involved (teeth blacked out, facial features shrunken/enlarged, and so on). In the case of the aforementioned Lemmy, for one photo the editors simply took a picture of a man wearing a baseball cap and drew a crude approximation of Lemmy's facial hair and warts on his face (as well as writing "Motörhead" on the cap). Photos will frequently be captioned only with the name of the subject and a comma followed by "yesterday", e.g. "A train, yesterday". Following the format common in
tabloid newspapers, paragraphs within written articles include 'cross heads' which, in normal journalism, serve to indicate the theme of the following sections. In
Viz however, while these words often start out being relevant to the story, they quickly stray for comedic value and therefore have little or no relevance to the following text. The words will often follow a theme, such as TV cops' names or types of curry, and will sometimes spell out a sentence, rarely relevant, if read separately from the story.
Letterbocks This section features letters both written by the editors and sent in by readers often with ridiculous names, usually in the form of obviously fictitious anecdotes (one reader claimed that by
defecating on the high seas, he was able to expel a single unbroken "monster"
turd; however, nobody wanted to grant him research funds for further attempts) or various observations, such as the "children say the funniest things" type (one issue featured numerous variations of a reader's young son making a reference to
masturbation during bathtime, such as "playing with [his] pork sword"; in this case, when the reader entered the bathroom, she discovered her son had indeed fashioned a sword out of pork sausages). Since Viz claims to offer £5 for the best letter published in a particular issue, many letters end with the inquiry, "Do I win £5?" Many make observations about celebrities (especially those who have recently died; one letter printed after the deaths of
Gianni Versace and
Diana, Princess of Wales remarked on both their violent deaths and friendship with
Elton John, stating "I tell you what. If I was
George Michael right about now, I'd be shitting myself") or current events (a 2000 issue remarked "The Government spent
£850 million on the
Millennium Bug, and the only thing that crashes is
Q [Desmond Llewelyn] out of the Bond films"). Most employ deliberate misunderstandings for comic effect (e.g. "These so-called
speed bumps are a joke. If anything they slow you down" or "I went to one of these so called Gentlemen's clubs and was shocked to see it was full of Women. To make matters worse many of them were wearing very little clothing", or the letter whose writer mentioned seeing a TV listing for the film
The Greatest Story Ever Told and stating their doubt that it would top the story told by their friend about a night spent "with a couple of strippers, a bottle of tequila, and some cocaine"). Often letters feature simple yet absurd statements ("I'm heading off to the pub in a few minutes and wondered if any of your readers fancied joining me for a pint" or "They say size doesn't matter – if that's true, why can't I get these shoes on?"), or improbable situations such as a letter writer responding directly to the letter that preceded theirs in the very same column and issue. A bizarre series of letters from a J Cursiter of
Bristol recounted his hobby of watching passers-by from "a series of cunningly-disguised hides". It is unclear whether Cursiter is a reader of the comic or a creation of the editors. Often letters are printed that criticise Viz, accusing it of "not being as funny as it used to be", condemning it as being offensive or of complaining about the frequent price rises. These are often published and sometimes even framed in a small section titled "Why I Love My Viz!", blatantly mocking
The Sun newspaper's habit of printing (positive) comments in little frames titled "Why I Love My Sun!" There are often invitations for readers to submit pictures, such as the request for examples of "Insincere Smiles", whereby people sent in pictures cut from newspapers and brochures of celebrities and politicians caught smiling in a manner which looks utterly insincere and forced (
Tony Blair featured at least twice). A similar series was of men who were wearing absurdly ill-fitting
wigs. There's also "Up The Arse Corner", where photographs are submitted of people whose pose, and/or facial expression, could be misconstrued as being in the midst of an act of
buggery; a notable example of this was when a letter requested a picture of
Ghostbusters actor
Ernie Hudson leaning over to sign autographs in front of a cardboard standee of himself, with the writer requesting the picture of "Winston Zeddemore bumming himself". Letterbocks also formerly featured correspondence from, and has brought fame to, the late
Abdul Latif, Lord of
Harpole, proprietor of the (real) Curry Capital restaurant (formerly the Rupali), Bigg Market. His Lordship often promoted his restaurant with spoof competitions and offers. One, genuine, offer involved getting a 20% discount on orders at his restaurant by bringing in a copy of the current Viz ad for it and pointing at his picture excitedly. In December 2006, he appeared in a seasonal broadcast to rival the
Queen's Christmas message.
Lame to Fame A semi-regular feature in Letterbocks is the "Lame to Fame" column, where writers can send in "claims to fame" where they explain their connection to well-known celebrities. The connections are distant or commonplace; for example: "I once had a drink with a bloke who had caught
Duran Duran's
Simon Le Bon's dog after it had escaped from his big house", and "My sister once shagged
Ringo out of
The Bootleg Beatles."
Top Tips A long-running segment has been the
Top Tips, reader-submitted suggestions which are a parody of similar sections found in women's magazines offering domestic and everyday tips to make life easier. In
Viz, naturally, they are always absurd, impractical or ludicrous: • A small coniferous tree in the corner of your living room is an excellent place to store Christmas decorations • Why waste money on expensive binoculars? Simply stand closer to the object you wish to observe • To stop
blue tits pecking at your milk bottles, don't buy any • Dead moths make ideal hang-gliders for
woodlice • Don't invite drug addicts to your house on
Boxing Day. They may find the offer of cold turkey embarrassing or offensive Some tips are for ludicrous motives, such as "how to convince neighbours that your house has
dry rot", while others are for ostensibly sensible motives but with ridiculous and impractical suggestions for their application: • Convince friends that you have a high powered job in the
City by leaving for work at 6 am every morning, arriving home at 10 at night, never keeping social appointments and dropping down dead at the age of 36 • Save money on sex-lines by phoning up the
Samaritans and threatening to kill yourself unless they talk dirty Some are just inexplicable: • To make your husband's trousers heavier, hang onions from the belt loops. Others inspire running jokes: • Fun-sized
Mars Bars make ideal normal-sized Mars Bars for dwarves • Normal-sized Mars bars make ideal fun-sized Mars Bars for giants • King-size Mars Bars make ideal normal-sized Mars Bars for giants • Normal-sized Mars Bars make ideal king-sized Mars Bars for dwarves A more recent trend is for sarcastic tips to be offered that are observations by the readers regarding other people's behaviour, such as a
barmaid who suggests male
public house customers who are "trying to get into a barmaid's knickers" should "pull back your tenner just as she reaches to take it when paying for a round. It really turns us on". In a similar vein, one reader suggested "Old people – are you worried that people in a hurry might be able to get past you on the pavement? Why not try stumbling aimlessly from side to side? That should stop them".
McDonald's McDonald's was accused of plagiarising a number of
Viz Top Tips in an advertising campaign they ran in 1996. Some of the similarities are almost word-for-word: • Save a fortune on laundry bills. Give your dirty shirts to
Oxfam. They will wash and iron them, and then you can buy them back for 50p. –
Viz Top Tip (published May 1989) • Save a fortune on laundry bills. Give your dirty shirts to a second-hand shop. They will wash and iron them, and then you can buy them back for 50p. – McDonald's advert The case was later
settled out of court for an undisclosed sum (donated to
Comic Relief); but many
Viz readers believed that the comic had given permission for their use, leading to
Top Tips submissions such as: • Geordie magazine editors. Continue paying your mortgage and buying expensive train sets ... by simply licensing the Top Tips concept to a multinational burger corporation. The magazine published them. At around the same time, the following
Top Tip was also published: • McDonald's advertising executives. Why not steal someone else's idea and then claim you overheard it in a bar, you fucking cunts. In addition, a burger bar ''McWonald's'' was used as a story setting and displayed a large W in the style of an inverted
Golden Arches M. This establishment had spotty-faced teenage staff vomiting and smoking; a child customer informs his mother that he does not want to finish his burger as it "tastes of pigeon and has cigarette butts in it". In a further attack on the company, the map of
Cuntinental Europe, given away free with Issue 118 and showing a large cartoon of
stereotypes of the British and their neighbours over the relevant geographical areas, displayed the McDonald's logo on potentially insensitive locations, such as the
Parthenon and the vicinity of the
Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Spoof advertisements and competitions Viz has had many different spoof adverts for various items, such as ornaments, dolls, sheds, china plates and novelty
chess sets. These poke fun at the genuine adverts for such items in magazines found in the colour supplements of Sunday newspapers. Those found in
Viz are absurd, such as a breakfast plate depicting
Diana, Princess of Wales's face in the middle of a
fried egg, "No. 22 Shit Street" (which was a diorama of a dilapidated
council house complete with rabid dog, youthful vandals and a "gently rusting" washing machine in the front yard), and "Little Ted West", a
teddy bear dressed to look like serial killer
Fred West.
Viz has manufactured some of these items and sold them, including a china plate depicting "The Life of Christ...In Cats", featuring pictures of a cat in various stages of Jesus's life, and the "Elvis Presley
Dambusters Clock Plate of
Tutankhamun", a clock featuring Elvis in the style of
Tutankhamun's death mask in addition to
Avro Lancaster bomber planes. Many of these adverts had a form with a tick box at the end, with outrageous binding statements in small print that invariably led the purchaser to
usury, such as "I enclose £49.50 in an infinite series of escalating payments". Another staple of
Viz advertisement parody are the adverts for public and government services which one would normally not expect to find advertised; for example, one ad consisted of the words "Raped? Burgled? Run over? Why not call the police", placed next to a picture of a grinning policeman. Another ad exhorted male readers to join the
British Army, because "all the birds are gagging for squaddies" (with the fine print on the reply coupon indicating to the respondent that spending "33 years hiding behind some garden wall in
Belfast should just about see [him] right" when it comes to the ladies). The 'PC Brigade' were also featured as if they were the fire brigade, stating they attended emergencies such as 'collapsed turbans' or freeing gypsies from railings while leaving British people stuck tight. They also carried the slogan 'Fueling middle England's persecution complex since 1958'. A long-running joke has been small adverts for bizarre sheds ("TV Sheds", "Shed Bikes", "Shed Snakes", etc.). Testament to the quality of these is invariably provided by a Mrs. B. of
Essex. Adverts for loan companies have been parodied frequently since approximately 2000, usually with an absurd twist, such as ones aimed at
vagrants, offering loans of between 5 and 10 pence for a cup of tea.
Roger Mellie has frequently starred in such spoof advertisements, both in separate sections in
Viz and also his own strip. Mellie is portrayed as someone who is willing to endorse any product whatsoever for money or gifts. Scatological humour also featured heavily in the ads; one ad featured "Clag-Gone", which consisted of a stationary bicycle with no seat. Instead, the rider simply placed his naked bottom onto the "Clag-Gone"'s wire brush wheel, which then cleaned away "winnits", "tag-nuts" and "dangleberries". Another ad featured a tourist package where eggs were served in great quantities; a happy tourist was featured saying "I'm
egg-bound for Jamaica!". Genuine competitions have been run by
Viz, with proper prizes. One of the earliest was a competition to win 'a ton of money' a pointed satire of tabloid newspapers promising huge cash prizes to boost circulation, the prize was in fact a
tonne of one- and two-pence pieces, equivalent to a few hundred pounds sterling. Recently, they were giving away a
plasma screen television provided by the producers of
Freddy vs. Jason. Viz poked fun at the movie, describing it as "
shite" in the competition description, and described the runners-up prizes of DVDs of the film as "frankly worthless", which led to the producers refusing to hand over the prize, for insulting their film. Another spin-off was "
Roger's Profanisaurus", a
thesaurus of (often freshly coined) rude words, phrases and sexual slang submitted by readers. It has been published as several books, the 2002 print of which has a foreword by
Terry Jones. This also often features genuine regional slang. Roger's Profanisaurus has become a popular downloadable app for Apple's iPhone. In November 1987, a free mini-issue of
Viz was given away with issue 23 of computer magazine
Your Sinclair. This was done in response to
Your Sinclairs competitor,
CRASH, giving away a mini-copy of
Oink! comic with their issue 42.
Photo-strips Occasionally
photo-strips are included. These parody the format of supernatural and true-love British comics which were popular with young girl readers in the 1970s and 1980s, such as "Chiller" and "
Jackie", as well as the "real life
dilemma" photo strips often found in the
advice columns of tabloid newspapers. For example, a young woman is convinced that the spirit of her dead husband has possessed the family dog, and after some soul-searching, begins a sexual relationship with the dog. A running joke in these stories is that they often feature a car accident in which one of the characters is run down. In every case, the same man is driving the car, and always responds with the same line: "Sorry mate, I didn't see him/her!" The locations for the photo-stories are recognisable as the suburbs of
Newcastle upon Tyne where the Viz team are based. On occasion, this is explicitly recognised: the one-off strip
Whitley Baywatch, a spoof of the popular American TV show
Baywatch, is based in the North East coastal resort of
Whitley Bay. But other stories purporting to be set in London, or without a set location, are often also identifiably near to the Viz editorial offices in
Jesmond. In "He just loved to dance" (no. 103), for example, Komal's
Tandoori restaurant in West Jesmond is visible. In "Four minutes to fall in love" (no. 107), the
Gateshead Millennium Bridge provides a backdrop to the
dénouement. An occasionally recurring actor in these strips is Arthur 2 Stroke, now acknowledged as the "Guru of Viz" by Chris Donald founder editor. Arthur, former lead singer of the band The Chart Commandos, still continues to perform with "Big Black Bomb" and is still considered to be an innovating force on the Newcastle music scene. One such photo-strip was called "I Believe in Father Christmas", where an adult man believes in
Father Christmas. His wife, named Virginia, attempts to convince him otherwise. He visits a department store Father Christmas, just like a child, although he asks for a CD from either
Dire Straits or
Phil Collins. On Christmas night, the man goes downstairs to the living room, as he hears a noise and figures Father Christmas must have come. However, he is surprised to see that an
armed robber has broken into his house, who promptly shoots him and flees. His wife, in shock, tends to her husband as he is badly hurt, and he tells her he was wrong to believe in Father Christmas like some small child. However, the wife tearfully says that Father Christmas did indeed come, and left presents for them. The strip ends with the husband saying to his wife "
Yes Virginia, there is a Father Christmas". In his book
Rude Kids: The Inside Story of Viz, the comic's creator Chris Donald claimed that the first legal action ever taken against Viz was initiated by a man who objected to the use of a picture of his house (taken from an estate agent's catalogue) in one of these photo-strips, and that the British tabloid newspaper
Sunday Mirror tried to provoke media outrage over another photo-strip which, if taken out of context, could be misconstrued as making light of the problem of illegal drugs being offered to children. Actor
Sean Bean made a one-off appearance in 1996 titled "I've Bean to Paradise" where the main character, unhappy with his long-term relationship, attempts to seek out for more physically attractive women by undergoing a makeover as a lookalike of the actor (played by himself) and passing himself off as the actor with references to his past screen roles. ==
Viz in other media==