My father was a Greek immigrant, and I remember him disagreeing with my mother on *Mad *(she thought it was OK for us to read it because of the obvious erudition of the writers, which you noticed if you looked past the broad humor).
Dad once objected to a sticker that read:
Mail early!
[SIZE=“1”]Before they raise postal rates again![/SIZE]
Hardly a call to revolution. But dad thought it was disrespectful, and declared that they wouldn’t be allowed to do that in the old country. It was years before I learned about the perennial civil wars that had prompted him to come to America, and realized how such events will condition a person to keep their mouth shut, even after they’re in the past. And how I had never had to experience such conditioning here.
The salesman’s sign read, “Brighten up your day! Buy a tie!”
In addition to the B-29 factory, they were concerned that Col Hokum “(didn’t) even tan himself under (their) secret sun anymore!”
“Two und two iss eight! Zere are twelve days in a month! Columbus discovered bread!”
Sort of related: I always found it fascinating that, as far as I can remember, just about every sentence of dialogue in the magazine’s history ended with an exclamation point.
I bought the first issue of the National Lampoon and subscribed until C. Dennis Plunkett was editor. It was extremely influential, too (SNL was built upon the Lampoon – both writers and actors), but I think most NatLamp writers were influenced by Mad.
Not that they would have admitted it for a second. Quite early on in the Lampoon’s run they published a desperately vicious parody of Mad, which they attacked with the kind of vitriol they usually reserved for the likes of Nixon and Agnew. It reeked of trying too hard and protesting too much. Afterwards I would smirk whenever I caught the Lampoon “borrowing” from Mad. There were at least a couple of instances where they published panel cartoons from freelancers that were identical to gags that had appeared in Mad years earlier.
I’m sure O’Donoghue hated Mad. But it’s like hating your parents for coming before you. You can see the faults in Mad when you’re grown up.
Lampoon was the new face of comedy, but Mad was a big influence on the culture overall. Mad was made by Jews basically, where Lampoon was made by gentiles for the most part. The midcentury jewish humor was huge across the culture. And Mad was the gateway for every kid to find out about the world.
Torres came in around 1969; the first satire I remember him doing was The FIB. Up to then, it had almost always been Mort (the earliest one I remember him doing was Perry Masonmint, though there were probably ones that predated that).
The only two exceptions I can think of in the rest of the '60s were Hokum’s Heroes (Jack Davis) and Genteel Ben (Don Martin, if you can picture that). Mort must have been on vacation or something.
My favorites were the ones that had the cheerleader with no panties (I think that was the High School Yearbook edition) and the dog with a gun to his head: “Buy this magazine, or we’ll shoot this puppy!” :eek: (Was this the one with Heil Love? :dubious: )
That just reminded me about their parody of Raging Bull. At the beginning was an announcement that they were now allowed to use the “bad” word friggin’ and I recall it being practically every other word. It wasn’t until years later I was able to see the movie and understood the point of it.
That latter bit was from an article in which John Travolta ostensibly interviews someone who in years later would be called a “necro agent”, i.e. someone who manages the uses of likenesses of dead celebrities. Regarding his group of Elvis impersonators, one of whom was clearly Asian:
“So I’ll send him to the Orient! What do the gooks know?”
To the honest best of my recollection, that is exactly what the character said.
Anyway, regarding the OP’s question, I suggest the answer is a clear and unambiguous Yes. Frankly, I’d recommend any parent get their children subscriptions to Mad as soon as they turn 10. Exposure to subversion at a young age is critical.
As a kid, I tried, but could not get into the Mad magazine knock-off, **Cracked **(launched 1958). It offended my young self that they copied my hero, Mad, too closely. **Cracked **was, at best, an anemic, somewhat dim-witted clone of the original.
*Sylvester P. Smythe, I served with Alfred E. Newman. I knew Alfred E. Neuman. Alfred E. Neuman was a friend of mine. Mascot, you are no Alfred E. Neuman. *
However, I give them props for this spot-on self-deprecating remark someone apparently quipped on their website: *Our magazine was created as a knock-off of **Mad **magazine just over 50 years ago, and it spent nearly half a century with a fan base primarily comprised of people who got to the store after **Mad *sold out.
**Mad **stands head and shoulders above a plethora of imitators.
Speaking of Mad imitators, I’ve been trying to track down a specific issue of one for decades. The time frame would have been sometime between 1966 and 1969. It was definitely not Cracked. It could possibly have been Sick or Wild, but the issues I’ve found of those to date have held no clues.
Here’s what I remember most clearly: the last article in the magazine was several pages of a racy comic strip about a Mickey Spillane-type hard-boiled detective, with a little lady standing outside the panels with a whitewash brush, censoring the strip. A whole article of visual puns based on southern foods (spoonbread: a loaf with spoons sticking out; hush puppies: dogs with their mouths tied shut; hominy grits: a guy pointing to his plate apparently counting “how many,” black-eyed peas: anthropomorphized beans with boxing gloves). An apparently real letters column referring to past articles (so this wasn’t a debut issue or a one-off) including a complaint that they had misspelled “cemetery”; the reply was “Observation corract, we’ll be more carefool.” What I remember less clearly: a full page (possibly front or back cover) saying something like “This magazine is for Conservatives and Radicals” with a cartoon of two essentially identical figures, one carrying a copy of “Das Kapital,” and the other with, I dunno, something to mark him as a right-winger. A story about the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Real ads for books called “How to Be a Polack,” “How to Be Italian,” “How to Be Jewish.”
John Benson put together a book called The Sincerest Form of Parody that collects stories and features from a dozen different MAD plagiarizers that appeared in 1953 and 1954. They are crude and too heavily influenced by EC’s horror comics, but I’ve never seen them anywhere else so having a collection is great.
Cracked started in 1958, along with Nuts, Think, Panic, Loco, Zany, and Shook Up. Sick started in 1960. More followed all the time.
Tibby, I don’t have a good listing for the 60s but I know Yell and POW! put out issues in 1966.
Mad undoubtedly influenced plenty of people, precisely because it was around – IS around – for a long time, and was immensely popular. You may prefer the humor of Panic and Trump and Humbug and those other obscure humor magazines (and the later imitators, like Cracked and Sick and the abysmal Crazy, but Mad definitely had a bigger impact. It did that partly by being around and available, but it stayed around and available because it was good in the first place. Mad was clearly an influence on Weird Al Yankovic (He admitted it, and even guest-edited recently) the Wikipedia article on Mad gives several quotes from people who say it influenced them. I know it influenced Me – My “Dr. Seuss’ Beowulf” is the result of years of reading things like “Mad’s Poetry Round Robin”, where they rewrote poems in the style of other authors
("'Twas the night of the battle and all through the slaughter
Not a Creature was stirring – we all needed water."
– from Clement Clark Moore’s “Gunga Din”
“I think that I shall never hear
A Raven who is more sincere
Than the one who’s rapping at my door
Who’s ever saying “Nevermore!”
A Raven that, I must confess,
Would leave my house a filthy mess.
Let other poets praise a tree
A Raven’s good enough for me.”
– Joyce Kilmer’s The Raven
I just quoted those from memory)
It’s telling that all those other humor magazines are gone – heck, even the redoubtable British magazine Punch is gone – but Mad soldiers on. Even though it now takes advertising, it still has Al Jaffee, Mort Drucker, Paul Coker, Frank Jacobs, Duck Edwing, and others. Anmd it has added new features that are worthwhile (I look forward to the Twenty Dumbest Things of the Year. And Planet Tad, written by Daily Show and Last Week Tonight writer Tim Carvell.
It definitely changed me and my world view. A writer quoted by **Tibby or Not Tibby **matches my feelings about Mad pretty well.
[QUOTE=Brian Siano]
Mad was a revelation: it was the first to tell us that the toys we were being sold were garbage, our teachers were phonies, our leaders were fools, our religious counselors were hypocrites, and even our parents were lying to us about damn near everything.
[/QUOTE]
My wife will ask me once in a while why I seem to question everything, looking for sources and motives and lies behind things she takes at face value. Now I realize that part of the answer is “Because I subscribed to Mad magazine from 1962 until 1970.”
This is very close to a topic that I’ve long pondered (I’d write a thesis on it, if I was going for a degree): the family tree of late 20th century American humor.
For me, the parents are Harvard Lampoon and Second City (Chicago). Harvard Lampoon spawned National Lampoon. Alumni of National Lampoon (Michael O’Donoghue, for one) worked for Saturday Night Live. Alumni of Second City (Belushi, for one) worked for National Lampoon (the Radio Dinner album) and SNL…and the rest is history.
Need to work in the SCTV branch (those guys from Toronto).
Oddly… MAD, while hugely influential, did not have a lot of offspring.
Oddly, while there are several histories of Second City, there has never been a history of either the Harvard Lampoon or of college humor magazines in general. A few anthologies of their humor exist, but generally it’s the largest hole in the history of humor.
