The Parodic Sensibility and the Sophisticated Gaze

Abstract

The dramatic success of Playboy magazine in the 1950s paralleled the meteoric rise of television as both an industry and cultural form, but the magazine's relationship with the new electronic medium was an uneasy one. Television's status as a domestic, even feminine, medium posed particular challenges, even more so than the “masscult” critique. Rather than recommending specific programs for consumption as it did with books, albums, and movies, the magazine promoted parody as a “sophisticated” way to engage television. Parody was adopted as a form of interpretation that produced alternative pleasures and meaning, thereby making visual consumption practices a marker of cultural capital. The tensions between Playboy and television were especially apparent in Playboy's own syndicated program, Playboy's Penthouse (1959—1961). The urbane and varied performances of the program, and its distinctive televisual style, offered a version of sophisticated television production that supplemented the magazine's model of sophisticated television watching.