Indeed, I’m jealous.
…but, I do have an original hardcover **Mad for Keeps **(forward by Ernie Kovacs)/1958, along with a stack of Mad pocketbooks (I benefited from lots of 50’s era hand-me-downs from my older brother and sister…wanna hear some Eddie Lawrence Old Philosopher 45’s? I got em.). [BTW, Eddie Lawrence is from Brooklyn, too!]
I’m going to disagree with both ends of this.
I’m reading Gilliamesque, his new illustrated autobiography. He mentions MAD as a big influence, true. But that was the original MAD, before it became a magazine and Harvey Kurtzman left. That MAD was true satire. After Kurtzman, it went from satire to silliness and lost all its bite. Gilliam went straight to New York after college specifically to try to get a job as Kurtzman’s new magazine, Help. (He did.) Nobody remembers Help. The real satire magazine of that period was Monocle. Nobody remembers Monocle either, but it was far more influential.
And the National Lampoon didn’t emerge from either edition of MAD. College humor goes back a long way. Every major college had a humor magazine, and the Harvard Lampoon was first among equals. Most college humor tended toward silliness - lampoons. All the stuff in the later MAD magazine comes out of college humor magazines, not the other way around. The song parodies, the cartoons, the uneasy mix of words and pictures. (Which they all copied from Punch, anyway.) Henry Beard and Doug Kenney at the Harvard Lampoon (following Christopher Cerf who again everybody has forgotten) were the ones to darken the silliness with 60s nihilism. I don’t think either one ever called MAD a big influence.
Was MAD in the background of most humorists? Absolutely. And so was milk. I’d put them at about par. It was one of dozens of influences to pick up on, not a world changer.
10 Little Hippies…
Get It Out Of Your System Land…
Dum Dum Afternoon…
Mad was also a big inspiration to Robert Crumb and the underground cartoonists, although as with Gilliam it was the early Mad with Kurtzman that was influential.
Influential for me, as I posted this before:
The issue shown in that article was one of my early memories of encountering Mad magazine in English in El Salvador in the 70’s. And it was also close to what others talk about the age being 6-10 when I landed my eyes on it. It changed the perspective of many.
A friend of my older brother that traveled often used to pass him those and they eventually came to me.
It was only later that I found about the past history of MAD magazine, but its subversive nature was even noticed by me during the dark days of the civil war era of the old country (EL Salvador). Anyone making parodies like those ones in MAD in the local media against the military governments of the old country would had been lucky not to be shot and dropped in a ditch.
Mad magazine did teach me an important lesson: There were indeed people that did not swallow the American government message that the USA was doing good in places like Central America. And critics of the American government were not shot and dropped in a ditch. Freedom of expression was indeed a real thing. That there was a sizable dissent of opinion in the USA does explain the contradiction that seems to exist when you realize how many refugees and immigrants from El Salvador came to the very nation that was responsible for a lot of the damage done there, and yet many like me choose to eventually become citizens.
I can tell you that Werham could had been onto something when he claimed that words such as “arghh”, “blam”, “thunk”, and “kapow” were producing a generation of illiterates. IMHO Werham , like many conservatives blamed that “illiteracy” when it was really satire and/or dissent (as it was many times with Mad Magazine).
I mean, look at the “damage” 
classic onomatopoeia like “SPWATH” (scrambled eggs to eyes) “DOONT” (bottle to head) “POIT”* (Female breast popping out a tight corset) that was caused to all those creators mentioned in the OP!!!
I didn’t appreciate some of the darker humor when I read it originally, but now that I’m older I do.
One example is I believe a Don Martin comic where a man is walking down the street frowning with a dark scribble over his head. He sees a tie salesman on the corner and buys a tie and now has a small smile. Next he’s running down the street holding the tie with a larger smile. The final panel has him in his dingy apartment hanging from the ceiling with the tie and a huge smile.
A movie parody that sticks with me is Star Blechhh The Moving Picture. The final frames of that one has Kirk asking Spock if they’ve witnessed the birth of a new life form. Then the next panel has a close up of Spock with a tear rolling down his cheek as he says "No Admiral, we’ve witnessed the birth of a new motion picture art form where the special effects are ten times more interesting than the plot, character and dialog.
But the last page of their parody of “Hogan’s Heroes” was a sequel of the show, “Hochmann’s Heroes”, set in a concentration camp.
Their first riff was in December 1967. Star Trek: Main Engineering
Maybe it did. I started off on MAD magazine by reading my older brother’s copies. He was 8 years older than I, so maybe I started off young on MAD. It had great parodies of the current TV, films, and popular culture. I dropped MAD when National Lampoon started up. By then, I was buying them myself and my budget didn’t cover 2 humor magazines.
Unfortunately, it was one of the few TV satires not drawn by Mort Drucker. 
No one was ever as good as Mort at this!
In addition to the secret B-29 factory, though, I do remember Schultz doing his “shtupidity” routine: * “Awwwww, what a lovable Kraut! You just gotta love him!”*
Agreed. Mort Drucker was/is more than a mere caricaturist; he peeled away the layers of facade to reveal the true substructure. Genius.
I remember reading the satire of Mission: Impossible and being in stitches over the caricatures of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. When the show came on that week, I couldn’t watch it without rolling on the floor laughing! 
I recall in the late 1970s, Mad still used language that wouldn’t fly today. I clearly remember seeing the word “faggot” in one issue. (“If I see Rudolf, Frosty, or that faggot drummer boy one more time, I’ll barf.”) I also recall an issue that referred to a Chinese man as a “chink” and even a Chinese Elvis who sang “prease wray off of my brue sway shoo.”
IIRC, Mort typically did the movie satires, while Angelo Torres did many of the TV satires, at least during the era I’m familiar with.
I’m not well-versed enough with many of these examples to dispute any of this.
But I would make a distinction between influence on other humorists’ views, and influence over the general public’s views.
I grew up in a small town in West Virginia, and started reading *Mad *when I was in grade school in the late 1960’s. No one I knew had read Kurtzman’s post-*Mad *work (except, a few years later, Little Annie Fanny, and we mostly just looked at the pictures - a lot of the humor was over our heads).
By the mid 1970’s, we had started reading National Lampoon. But *Mad *had more influence on our thinking. It was the reason that a generation of brats began to question the long-trusted institutions of government, corporations, advertising, etc.
The Lampoon was sometimes incredibly funny. But I can’t think of any opinions I had before I started reading it that were changed as a result. Part of that may have been the respective ages when I started reading each of them - I discovered Mad at an earlier, more formative age.
Again, I’m talking here about laypeople like myself. Comic artists and writers might indeed have been influenced more by *Help, Trump, Humbug, etc. In music, their counterpart might be someone like the Velvet Underground (the familiar comment is that they sold 500 albums, but every one of them was bought by a future musician or music critic).
Mad was more like the Beatles, both of which were familiar to small-town kids in our formative years.
*I agree that Kurtzman, as the visionary of Mad, is not nearly as famous as he should be with the general public.
They also had a progressive side:
In one of those ‘Primer’ books ostensibly aimed at kids, they showed a dour-looking censor at work:
"This is a censor’s stamp. It is used to blot out dirty, offensive words.
"Words like CENSORED. Also CENSORED and CENSORED. And especially, CENSORED.
"But some dirty, offensive words are not blotted out by the censor’s stamp.
"Words like kke and wp and plack and ngger.
“Could it be that all censors are full of CENSORED?”
(*They spelled the words out).
Agreed.
You can’t compare the depth and depravity of Mad’s satire to that of adult-oriented satire magazines (National Lampoon, Punch, Trump, Help, etc.). Mad didn’t go to those depths because it would not have been allowed and it would not have been understood by it’s target audience. Mad went as far as it should have for its demographic and it did so brilliantly.
At the age most of us read Mad Magazine, we understood it was teaching us important things about the adult world. Even at age 5 I knew Archie, Jughead, Superman, Batman, etc. were fun, but somewhat lame attempts of adult cartoonists trying to amuse us. But Mad was different; it was adults letting us kids in on the secrets of life. And we listened.
In some ways, *Mad *was more influential than our teachers. It was more like your cool best friend, the one all the kids want to hang out with. Things your teachers taught you (e.g. Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863), you’d remember till you took the test, then probably forget; things your cool friend taught you, you’d remember for life (e.g. here’s how you make a perfect spitball).
I’m fond of telling people that I got more actual *education *reading *Mad *than I did earning three college degrees (although since I’m an engineer, that’s not saying much).
I couldn’t claim that it would be done as well unless gravity drew the same set of talent together by coincidence. But the timing was right. Mad authors reflected society and the comic mindset of the time, pushing at the envelope of permissibility, an audience growing wiser from exposure to television, and a new world for youth emerging from the post-war baby boom.
I remember the first issue of National Lampoon that I bought. February 1974, the one with the groom and sheep atop a wedding cake.
I was a bit embarrassed to buy it, but I was hoping at least to get the young guy cashier to check me out. But, as luck would have it, it was the elderly woman cashier who called me to her station. I put another item on top of the sheep to hide it, but of course the cashier picked up the magazine to read the price. Her face screwed up when she realized what was depicted on the cover and she gave me a disgusted stare.
I couldn’t get out of that store fast enough. But, it didn’t stop me from buying next month’s issue.
Heh. My parents were in a quandry, at first they thought National Lampoon was Harvard Lampoon, which was ok because Harvard. Realizing it was not exactly the same thing it instantly became smut. I argued that it was really the same thing because the same people were involved, and they knew by then they couldn’t keep me from seeing pictures of naked women. They lost in the end because they couldn’t help reading it (I’m sure my mother would still refuse to admit that she did).