I loved Mad when I was younger, thought that it was totally wrong when Family Guy started mocking it, and I’m a total FG fan.
Mr. Shakespeare (F. U., not the other one) pretty well said what I was going to. For a mid-range Baby Boomer, Mad was absolutely the only venue available in the early '60s that taught genuine critical thinking. Alfred E. Neuman remains the most valuable spiritual guru of my life.
It sometimes seems Mad did its job a little too well, unfortunately, making us all so distrustful of hypocrisy that we fail to recognize genuine honor on the rare occasions that we find it. But that beats the obsequious obeisance toward public institutions that perpetually puzzled me through childhood.
From “South Chicago:”
(sung to the tune of “There is Nothing Like a Dame”)
We got tommy guns that fire
Ninety bullets at a clip
We got blackjacks and brass knuckles
And a shotgun that’s a pip
We got telescopic rifles
That we hardly gotta aim
But now and then, we try a frame!
I said to myself, I said, “He better mean 43-Man Squamish.”
My first sentence in Spanish was ,¡Mi tio es enfermo, pero la carretera es verde!’
Did you ever see the “Mad” parody in “National Lampoon,” around 1970/71? It was called “Citizen Gaines?” it was brilliant! (It may have even been drawn by Mort Drucker)
Instead of “Rosebud,” Gaines’s final word was “satire,” and the reporter went all over trying to find out what he meant!
Gaines was very much alive at the time, but by '71, “Mad” had lost much of its edge!
It stinks. The whole thing stinks. You stink.
Some of my favorite moments:
Woodman, Spare That Tree illustrated by Don Martin.
Don Martin in general. Even though I have both of the computer collections, I had to buy the 40 pound 2 volume set “The Completely MAD Don Martin”
From Dave Berg’s Lighter Side Of… : “When she said I have 20/20 hindsight I should have said…”
The Dulltons:
“Since visitors always end up sharing our bed, I hope next time instead of a smelly old tramp we get a purdy lady”
“John-Mop! We Dulltons don’t think like that!”
“Wul then how come there’s so many of us?”
My prime Mad period was from 1970 to around 1980, although my older cousin had all the issues from the 60s and I pored over them whenever I was at his house. He had a huge stack on the floor of his walk-in closet, just to the left of the door. That’s where I sat.
I knew the approximate day of the month the new issue would arrive at the local drugstore each month, and I’d bike there in great anticipation. There were times I made the trip four or five days straight before the new issue had finally arrived. For a time this monthly trek was a huge event in my life.
It’s incredible how much of Mad has stayed with me. Especially the movie and TV parodies whose titles I can recite with ease (Movies: Catch-All-22, Botch Casually and the Somedunce Kid, Boob and Carnal and Tad and Alas, The Oddfather, The Great Gasbag, Five Easy Pages…and Two Hard Ones; The TV shows: Makeus Sickby, M.D., Blarney Miller, How Are Ya Five O, Gall in the Family Fare, The Mary Tailor-Made Show, and Clodumbo).
I remember buying an issue of Cracked now and then, and finding it a very lame imitation of Mad. There was another imitator…anyone remember Sick? It was actually a tier above Cracked, in my opinion, but miles below Mad.
And yes, I still have all my original issues.
mmm
“John-Mop! For thinking those evil thoughts, you go memorize ten verses from the Bible!”
“OK Ma. But the Bible’s where I begat them evil thoughts in the first place”
“Voyage to See What’s on the Bottom”
~VOW
From that spoof:
The captain wants full atomic power, you know what that means.
Yes chief two hamsters in each cage, but you remember what happened the last time we did that.
Yeah we wound up with hundreds of hamsters, so this time we put boy hamsters with boy hamsters, and girl hamsters with girl hamsters.
“We Three Slobs from Omaha are
Spending Christmas Eve in a car.
Driving, drinking,
Glasses clinking
Who needs a lousy bar?”
My father had a couple of old issues from the 1950s that I thought were pretty funny as a kid. I read Mad regularly in the 1960s, and there were definite stylistic differnces from the 1950s editions. Those 1950s ones seemed better for the most part.
I collected MADs in the 1950’s, but they were absolutely forbidden in my household, along with Playboys, The Realist, Rock & Roll, Jazz, and anything else that smacked of The Devil, who we all know is lurking everywhere to corrupt the flower of our nation’s youth.
So I had to hide my record and magazine collection from parental eyes.
So far, so good. But years later when my parents moved from our homestead, and I wasn’t around, my uncle, a fundamentalist from the same cloth, found my stash and helpfully tossed everything, probably using surgical gloves to avoid dangerous moral contamination.
When I found out later, and pointed out that he had tossed a few thousand dollars of saleable collectibles, it didn’t bother him in the least. He was doing the Lord’s work.
Charlie, the milkman
Is the biggest slob in town!
Never leaves the quarts you’ve ask him for,
When he does, they’re upside-down!
My memory is fuzzy on where I first encountered this amazing parody, either Pogo or MAD, but in any case: Deck Us All With Boston Charlie
Gracias!
This thread composed
by the
usual gang of idiots.
I’ll drink a Moxie for that!
Aside from the self-serving aspect of it, y’all might enjoy Favorite "Far Side" Memories (MAD, too) - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board Favorite “Far Side” Memories (MAD, too) – one of my first “successful” threads!