*School days, school days,
they are hot, not cool, days!
Burning and bombing from hour to hour,
fighting for Black and for Student Power!
Here come the fuzz in battle dress,
getting their lumps from SDS!
You’d better drop out of school, I guess.
It’s worse being dead than unread!*
I agree with Horatio Hellpop that Mad was probably the biggest influence in popularizing Yiddish slang in the U.S. Let me give my own story: I grew up on a farm. Everyone in my school district was white, and only a few of those were Hispanic (and those few were the children of hired farm laborers). There were no Jews and few Catholics in the district. Most people there couldn’t even have defined the term “Yiddish,” let alone recognized any word from it. My senior year in high school I briefly talked to someone from a city fifty or sixty miles away at an event that was for high school students from a large area. Later it occurred to me that he was probably the first Jewish person I’d ever met in my life.
And yet I knew a fair number of Yiddish words that were slang terms in English. I had learned them from reading Mad for so many years. I don’t know if I thought of them as being something particularly Jewish or from Yiddish. Rather, I probably just thought of them as being those funny words that Mad used sometimes.
To test this guess about Mad’s influence, I decided to use Google Ngram, using this Wikipedia entry for some Yiddish words in English:
Here’s the graph for “klutz”:
This really takes off after 1963.
Here’s the graph for “schmuck”:
This really takes off after 1962.
Here’s the graph for “shiksa”:
This really takes off after 1956.
Here’s the graph for “shtick”:
This really takes off after 1964.
It looks like the words had a big increase as Mad became popular. This is no real proof, of course. There were other Jewish influences in American popular culture, so it’s hard to know what the proof could be.
If you go into the citations that are behind the graphs in the years when they turn upward, it turns out that none are from MAD or cite MAD. That doesn’t prove that MAD didn’t influence the people who were using the words, but makes it much more probable that the influences were outside the magazine, from the larger culture. Jewish comics on television may have been a powerful conduit, or Jewish writers like those doing Sid Caesar’s ethnic humor.
The alternate possibility is that the directionality is the reverse of MAD influencing the culture: those uses may have allowed MAD writers to feel more free to use Yiddish words. I don’t know how to trace it either way.
What about “schnook,” as in “Hey! Get a load of that schnook!”
This may be of interest to some:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/studamerhumor.30.111?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Mad was banned in my household, which made it all the more attractive to me.
My high school English teacher said we would enjoy the Mad Shakespeare parodies much more if we learned the originals first.
Sneaky!
Here’s the thing: I can’t imagine a scholarly study from pre-1980 that would cite MAD for anything at all, even if it involved the impact of fold-in back covers on juvenile delinquents.
In grad school (about three years ago) I did a research paper on Yiddish influence on American English and an etymology website claimed that the word “klutz” entered American usage around 1967*. This was maybe three years before I first saw Don Martin’s “Captain Klutz” in paperback, and it coincides with the year the character was first published. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but by 1967, Sid Caesar and Milton Berle were pretty much off the air, and Allan Sherman’s last record was in 1965. I think MAD deserves more credit than it’s getting.
*The website in question doesn’t currently offer a date for this particular word.
Google Books include everything that they have scanned in. Except maybe scholarly papers. The one cited by terentii doesn’t come up.
If Google Books found uses of those Yiddish words, they probably come from average literary uses of them. In fact, up until 1980 virtually all the uses of Klutz are of proper names. The earliest hit appears to be a 1970 play by Norman Krasna, Bunny: A Comedy in Two Acts. Krasna was a 60-year-old Jewish writer. He probably didn’t get his Yiddish from MAD. Going forward a decade, you find hits for Mark Stein and Ben J. Wattenberg. I don’t think I’m out of line for thinking they are also Jewish writers who might know Yiddish.
But you also start getting a lot of hits for Klutz Press, a kid-oriented publishing company started in 1977 that started with books on juggling. That’s just the kind of usage that might have been influenced by MAD. Or might not.
All I’m saying is that Google Books is a great resource, but maybe it’s not great for answering this particular question.
I had never seen ***The Sound of Music *** until the summer of 1975, when I was in Tblisi, Georgia. The print was an old one that had been dubbed at Mosfilm Studios and spliced back together many, many times (the songs were all in English with subtitles). Still, the story was remarkably easy to follow.
After I got back to Minneapolis, I was at a friend’s house one night and found he had the copy of MAD with The Sound of Money in it. I swear, I fell out of the easy chair I was sitting in, I was laughing so damned hard reading the satire!
Exapno Mapcase writes:
> If you go into the citations that are behind the graphs in the years when they turn
> upward, it turns out that none are from MAD or cite MAD.
It appears to me that the contents of Mad are not included in the database used for Google Ngram. The books that are collections of Mad articles are included in that database, but they didn’t appear for a few years after Mad started publishing. Can someone find a list of the Mad collections and when they appeared? So perhaps the influences of Mad can be seen in the uses of Yiddish slang in other publications. I suspect that Mad was an important influence in the increased popularity of Yiddish slang in English, although it took several years for Mad readers to begin using it in other publications. Again, this is not proof.
Mad was *required *reading in my family. Older brother, sister and dad were faithful readers. Dad and sis were talented lay sketch artists and created spot-on Mad-style caricatures.
More than a couple times, dad would help illustrate my grade-school poster-board projects. I’d be a little embarrassed to bring them to school (after all, Captain Klutz and words like “shklorp!” have no business being on a poster about photosynthesis, or the American Presidents :o)—luckily, my teachers had a sense of humor.
Later, in middle school, I drew Sergio Aragonés-style “marginal” cartoons for our school paper. On one issue I drew a little too close to the original (I had cartooners block) and got busted for plagiarism. The teacher was a Mad reader—who knew!?!
I loved Mad and agree that it was hugely influential. Living in England I came to it late, first happening on the Mad Reader No 1 paperback in 1960. My world was never the same again. Those incredible artists! Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Will Elder, Harvey Kurtzman, I’d never seen anything like it. And it was so so funny. Superduperman, The Lone Stranger, Dragged Net, Flesh Garden, Starchie, the book became my most treasured possession and I was hooked from that day.
Then I discovered that Mad had been the last survivor of the fabled EC Comics, whose horror comics I’d always ached to get hold of. Little chance of that in those days as they’d all been banned in the 50s with the introduction of the pathetic Comics Code Authority. That was the impetus for William Gaines switching Mad from comic format to magazine in 1955, thus removing it from the purview and Sunday School strictures of the CCA.
Mad certainly changed my life, as I’m sure it changed America.
I don’t know from the rest of the world, but I’ve long said of myself ‘it all started with Mad magazine.’
Good article!
I agree, **Mad **was/is (?) very New York (Brooklyn), jewish satire. I’ve often wished I was born a New York Jew (instead of a New Jersey gentile); it’s a club I’d like to belong to—the funniest people on Earth.
I compensated by dating mostly jewish girls in my youth.
The irony, as has been mentioned, is that Cracked is now one of the most popular humour sites on the internet, while I would suggest most people are completely unaware Mad is even still publishing.
Just to add an international data point to the proceedings - Mad was certainly around when I was growing up in New Zealand (late 1980s-1990s) but it wasn’t influential at all - most people I knew thought of it as “that magazine with the weird-looking kid on the cover”.
Spy vs Spy was probably the most popular feature in it; the parodies usually fell flat for me because they were full of references to TV shows that weren’t airing in New Zealand or US Politicians I’d never heard of (remember, there was no internet for much of this time).
Even the parodies that were of TV shows/films I did know didn’t always seem particularly funny - there were a few good ones, though.
For what it’s worth, satire wasn’t a new concept to me or my friends humour-wise; but NZ was much more UK-focussed for its entertainment so we magazines like Viz and TV shows like The Goodies and various Annuals/Compendiums from the UK.
The humour in Mad just seemed off for me in a way that I could never quite put my finger on - not offensive or even bad, but just not working on some fundamental level, if that makes sense.
Yeah, but what does it have to do with the magazine? Didn’t the owners of the site basically just purchase an established name? (And I’m aware that they did briefly publish a physical magazine, but I don’t think even that was Sylvester P. Smythe and Shut-Ups.)
Yeah, I suppose Bieber outsells Beethoven these days, too. Most popular doesn’t necessarily mean best. **Mad **had its day in the sun, that day is unfortunately over.
**Mad **wasn’t popular in New Zealand? I knew New Zealand is home to a lot of lizards and flightless birds. I wasn’t aware it had any mammals that couldn’t swim or fly there, let alone humans. 
But, apparently at least 1 person from New Zealand was influenced by Mad (read last line of #1 in this link).
It doesn’t have a lot to do with the magazine itself; just more the observation that if you say “Cracked” to a lot of people (particularly in the university/young professional age demographic) their first thought will be likely be “Influential humour website”, not “Magazine which had the temerity to do the same thing as Mad at one point back when your parents were in school.”
It wasn’t popular when I was growing up there; it might have been before that (possibly in the late 1970s?), but I doubt it - I rarely saw old editions at garage sales on in waiting rooms or anything like that.
Obviously there were 3 million people living in the country when I was growing up and undoubtedly a few of them would have been fans - but I didn’t know any of them and the magazine didn’t have any impact on our popular culture the way The Simpsons did, for example.
Martini Enfield writes:
> . . . I rarely saw old editions . . . in waiting rooms . . .
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a copy of Mad in a doctor’s waiting room in the U.S.