A male character is being subjected to a series of psychological experiements related to torture.
One of these is an earnest economics professor (apparently clueless as to how boring he is) who acknowledges that the only reason he wants to participate is so that he can lecture someone without having them fall asleep.
His lecture proves so boring that the character/victim begs to be released, and accuses the professor of being a terrible sadist.
The professor responds, “Wait! We can’t stop now! I still haven’t covered the federal reserve system!”
I had thought this passage was in “A Clockwork Lemon”, the 1973 Mad satire of “A Clockwork Orange” (in which “Alech” is tortured with the likes of the then-dated humor of Dean Martin) but I looked it up, and it’s not.
I haven’t got my issues with me, but I believe that’s from the spoof of Midnight Cowboy, which was entitled “Midnight Wowboy”, and appeared in the April 1970 issue (#134). Later on, Jon Voigt showed up at the Mad magazine office, and they posted pictures of him reading the spoof
I can’t find any links to the relevant panel of the piece, and it’s been years since I read it (and I haven’t seen the real movie), but I think it’s a non-sexual reference to Voigt’s character’s role as a gigolo.
“Son, I’ll give you $20 if you’ll just sit there and stay awake while I talk to you.”
“$20?! Just to listen?!”
“That’s right! Y’see, I’m an Economics Teacher, and I want someone, just once, to stay awake while I’m lecturing!”
(Mad did like their bold fonts.)
Then a series of three images of the teacher lecturing as Joe Cluck nods off. Joe then attacks the teacher, yelling
“YOU SADIST…EXPECTING ANYONE TO STAY AWAKE DURING THAT!!”
“Stop! Wait! You haven’t heard about the Federal Reserve System!!”
Three of the wee hours was all it took to get a correct response on an obscure bit of dialogue from a 44-year-old comic book! I bet if the OP had posted at like 9am, it would have taken less than 3 minutes!
Where else but the Straight Dope would that happen?
Well, I didn’t even turn on the computer until I got here this morning. Three minutes is a bit short, though. It took about a half hour for that answer to make its way out from the depths of the sludge in my brain after I saw the thread.
This place does, indeed, rock. I once was able to answer a question at a meeting by putting it up on the Board during the meeting, and got an answer before the meeting was over.
I recently bought Absolutely Mad, the DVD collection, and was able to find the strip after this thread answered the question of what movie it was in.
The joke was, I think, a reference to Joe’s plummeting fortunes as a gigolo. In the movie, he’d earlier had to stoop to servicing a male client. Agreeing to listen to an economics lecture was apparently the next (even more unpleasant) step.
All written at a level that flew below 1970-era censorship standards (and over my then-ten-year-old head).
Incidentally, that issue also had a memorable letter to the editor and photo of Bridget Hanley (on whom I had a major crush) reading Mad and asking why they hadn’t done a spoof of her favorite show, “Here Come the Broads”.
They replied that there already was a “crazy spoof of that show… called “Here Come the Brides!”” (they liked their exclamation points as much as their bold fonts).