Fun (magazine)

Fun was a Victorian weekly humorous magazine, first published on 21 September 1861 in competition with Punch.

The magazine's first editors were H. J. Byron and Tom Hood. They had many well-known contributors, including Tom Robertson, Ambrose Bierce, G. R. Sims and Clement Scott but the most important contributor to its success in its first decade was W. S. Gilbert, whose Bab Ballads were almost all first published in Fun between 1861 and 1871, along with a wide range of his articles, drawings and other verses.

At a penny an issue Fun undercut its rival, Punch, and prospered into the 1870s, after which it suffered a gradual decline. It passed through various ownerships under different editors, and ceased publication in 1901, when it was absorbed into a rival comic magazine, Sketchy Bits.