It seems absurd to assert a kids humor magazine could significantly affect a nation’s culture…but, I believe it did just that.
In it’s heyday (50’s – 70’s), Mad Magazine had wide circulation and it was read primarily by those with the most pliable, developing minds: kids. Those kids grew up and changed America.
William Gains’ band of irreverent editors, writers, artists and contributors taught generations of kids via satire to think critically of the world they live in; to trust nothing at face value. Thinking back, it certainly influenced my critical worldview of everything from marketing to pop culture to politics.
The Influence section of this wiki articlemakes a good case for Mads’ significance:
Do you agree that Mad Magazine significantly affected America?
And, since American culture reaches globally, did Mad affect the world? Or, is that going to far?
Yes. MAD was subversive humor delivered to youth, and craved by cynical adults. Somebody else would have done something similar if they hadn’t. It’s usually that way, if National Lampoon didn’t make Animal House some other movie would have changed movies, if SNL didn’t do it some other show would have changed television, but like those, MAD was the one that did it.
I think I have some mileage on this topic. My Aunt Sue was a subscriber during most of the 60s and loaned (not gave) her kid nephew copies until 1968. I was a MAD subscriber from 1972 to 1990. At that point my age demographic got tired of the Corporate mentality that took over when Time-Warner went to color and then advertising.
In any case, for Sue and I these things were the satire equivalent of National Geographic and we kept them all. When Sue died Uncle Don asked me if I wanted her collection. At that time I sorted both sets by date and reread through most of them. I can say with certainty that the issues from 1964 through 1980 shaped my thinking on current events, politics and a myriad other lesser topics.
For my generation (Civil Rights, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra) MAD was a Bible of alternative viewpoints that opened my eyes to better or at least more beneficial ways to do things and live. I think I’m a better person for the things I was exposed to in MAD.
BTW: In 2013 I offered my nearly complete 1963-1990 collection on Craigslist for free to a worthy home. I probably had 20 offers by the second day. The winner was an elementary school librarian up in Oregon. She claimed she was going to make the issues available to the students. Carry on, Bill Gaines!
I was in high school when Mad #1 hit the newsstand (I bought one), and it was powerful,but had only a very small following. My parents didn’t think it was funny at all. . There was no media at the time that widely used satire. Comedy in the media consisted mostly of people in silly clothes falling down. As teenagers,we didn;t see it so much as satire, because we didn’t even know that the word meant. It was, instead, a bold departure in the way humor was presented. I think a more recent parallel could be drawn to MTV’s “Liquid Television” in about 1990, which opened up a marketplace for a daring style of presentation, for content that was already in the public awareness but had no vehicle. Mad’s influence is, I think, largely in retrospect. It took quite a few years for it to become really popular enough to “change the world”.
MAD --> National Lampoon --> SNL --> Mainstream takeover.
NOTE: Monty Python integrates in from its own path, but was more influenced by Beyond the Fringe vs. MAD, to my knowledge - although given the quote from Terry Gilliam above, it is great to think of MAD’s influence coming from the American member of the Pythons. It all comes together.
Although the first part of Mad Tv might have been akin to original magazine version light, it was influential.
Thinking about the life of the cast [deep bow] in the following years comparing with brain dead series like Friends et aliud, always makes me shake my fist in the air.
One quibble: it wasn’t a “kids humor magazine,” though it was certainly read by kids. But it wasn’t about kids: it was about adults and their grown-up world, and it gave me (and, I’m sure, many other kids) our first look at (and permanently colored our perspective of) many aspects of that grown-up world. For example, there were plenty of movies, some of them R-rated, that I read the Mad satires of long before I ever actually saw the movie itself (if I ever did).
And the humor of Mad, while it included the corny jokes of Dave Berg, the inventiveness of Al Jaffee, and the sheer wacked-out silliness of Don Martin, also included satire that basically just pointed out the Mad-ness of movies and TV and advertising and, especially, real life, in a way that cut through the BS and just pointed out what really was. (I still can’t think of Grease without seeing Mad’s take on it.) I’m sure Mad was one of the major influences on both my sense of humor and my view of the world during my formative years.
It permanently altered my world, I’m sure that if my dad had known the personality traits it would give his kids he wouldn’t have let my brother and I read his copies when he was done with them. I’m a terrible smartass with an inbuilt view of the world through skeptical eyes. I doubt I’m the only one.
Star Dreck!
I enjoyed Mad, especially Jaffee’s Fold-In’s on the rear cover, and will credit it with giving me a sharper critical eye on pop culture, but it was really the lamented Spy magazine that was most formative of my cynical outlook on celebrity culture and politics. For those who aren’t acquainted with it, it was essentially the print format precursor to shows like “The Daily Show” or “Last Week Tonight”, disguising first rate investigative journalism and laying bare the mistruths and misdeeds of politicians and public figures in the form of absurdist satire. It was Graydon Carter’s labelling of Donald Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian” that has haunted Trump for decades and made a resurgence as today’s commedians search for a label that accurately describe’s Trump’s particular brand of awful.
Ironically, Trump’s rebuttal is to insist that he is not diminutive in the length of his digits and thus in his nescience missing the thrust of the argument in order to parry the ornamental compound adjective selected for its locutionary merit rather than bearing any substnative criticism of the target, Trump verifies that he in fact the very icon of a vulgarian. Now, let’s go build that wall!
I loved MAD through most of the '60s but quit reading it when they started getting political. I don’t need that crap in my life.
A week doesn’t go by when I don’t sing “The Sound of Money” while I’m futzing around the house, though. Or quote something from “The MAD Hockey Primer” to my daughter (she’s been in Canada for 11 years now).
“Very suspicious!” (from the satire of Mission: Impossible) is heard in our household almost daily.
There may have been something somewhat similar to Mad come along sometime, geared toward kids, but I believe it would have been inferior in quality, less influential, and I don’t believe it would have started as early as the 50’s (50’s/early 60’s was my favorite Mad era…the satire and artwork were stellar then). Mad was a perfect storm of talent, timing and demographic.
Like many, I transferred from Mad to National Lampoon as a teenager, but I don’t put NL in the same league as Mad with regard to influence. NL was/is (?) biting college humor that started a couple decades after Mad and benefited primarily from a readership/viewership weaned on Mad.
The talent pool of MM is particularly noteworthy and I put William M Gaines (Brooklyn) at the top of the list; he was a gifted publisher with acute prescience and a keen eye for raw talent. Editors, Harvey Kurtzman (Brooklyn) and Al Feldstein (Brooklyn) were game changers. Mort Drucker (Brooklyn), Dave Berg (Brooklyn) et al were artists/writers at the top of their game. [Is it just me, or does it seems like a much higher concentration of top talent pours out of Brooklyn than any other place else on Earth?—particularly in the performing arts, and especially in humor. If someone tells me there’s a new comic playing somewhere, I’m “meh”; tell me he’s from Brooklyn, and I’m, “let me get my car keys”…unless it’s Adam Sandler]
**SPY **may be good satire, but, like National Lampoon, it wasn’t geared toward the malleable minds of children. And, it wasn’t a ground-breaker—it came along in the '80’s, after satirical humor was firmly entrenched in American pop culture (in large extent, due to Mad). Likewise, the U.K’s Punch Magazine offered biting satire, but it’s heyday was in the Victorian era, and it too was not geared toward youth.
I read Mad Magazine through out my teens and well into my twenties. I enjoyed it and had a lot of laughs. But I can’t think of anyway it changed my view of the world.
