A teenager\young woman is complaining that she forgot to bring her transistor radio to the beach. In the last panel she says, “I feel practically naked without it.” Her bikini has no bottom, and they show it from the front. I swear I saw this in the early seventies, but this seems a bit risque for MAD.
Are we sure it wasn’t just supposed to be a very small bikini bottom, one that just barely covered her?
That rings a bell. I want to say it was a Dave Berg “Lighter Side” bit.
I too think it was probably a very skimpy bikini; no actual nakedness depicted.
Or was it a Playboy cartoon?
Definitely MAD, and I remember seeing pubic hair. I was young at the time; it belonged to one of my older brothers. I think it may have been one of the strips in “The Lighter Side of the Beach.”
Reminds me of the Dave Berg bit (yes, in “The Lighter Side”) where a cute woman asks her husband for money to get a nose job. “I’ve always been self-conscious about my nose,” she says.
In the next panel, we see she’s wearing a baby-doll pajama top that leaves almost nothing to the imagination, and she’s really, *really *stacked.
“What nose?” asks her husband, dreamily.
This was maybe in 1967 or '68.
Are you sure it wasn’t National Lampoon? That was the Mad-magazine clone that had nudity. Was there ever any other comic in MAD that had anything like nudity? Its not something I remember.
FWIW, ***Playboy ***broke the pubic hair barrier in 1969 with a pictorial featuring Paula Kelly (later of Night Court fame). The first Playmate to show bush was Liv Lindeland in January 1971.
You’d better believe that centerfold is etched indelibly in my memory! :o
Sounds more like National Lampoon, but the approximate year would help.
Definitely not in Lampoon. It would have been early seventies (think 35 cents cheap).
I remember the cartoon, but not where it was from. Given my reading history, it could have been in Mad, NatLamp, or Playboy.
The National Lampoon was in no way a Mad-magazine “clone.” It was heavy on text, with a sprinkling of a few cartoons and parodies of comics, while Mad was pretty much entirely cartoons/comics. The target audience for the Lampoon was college and above, while Mad was more focused on junior high to high school. I switched from Mad to National Lampoon when I went to college after the National Lampoon began publication in 1970.
Because of this, I find it almost impossible to imagine that Mad would depict full frontal nudity in the early 70s. But it sounds more like a Mad joke than one that would have been in National Lampoon or Playboy.
The magazine was in our house in full view of our parents. They didn’t forbid us from acquiring Playboy, but they would not have let us keep it in the open.
There is no way it was Mad if there was pubic hair to be seen.
No way.
mmm
Found it. It was indeed MAD, but no nudity. From “The Lighter Side of Summer Resorts”, issue #137 (September '70).
Did you notice that the guy on the left in the “They’re not girls!” panel is Dave Berg himself? He usually drew himself in each issue.
Ninja’d while looking in my copy of Absolutely Mad.
Sometimes we see what we want to see. 
Yes, but he had changed his look by the early 70s from what it was earlier.
Are you sure it’s not publisher Bill Gaines?