The MAD Files

I don’t remember when I picked up my first issue of MAD. But by the time I was 10 years old, in 1971, I was a rabid fan, waiting religiously for each new issue. The peak of my MADness coincided with the magazine’s greatest success. Its bestselling issue ever, No. 161 (September 1973), was one of my prize possessions: The cover, a spoof of The Poseidon Adventure, showed a drowning Alfred E. Neuman with his skinny legs sticking out of a life preserver. MAD taught me all about pubescent snark, but also about hippies, beatniks, advertising executives, the military-industrial complex, sex, pollution, politics, and other grown-up subjects. Most of all, it showed me that wisecracking could be a royal road to cultural literacy. (Cartoonist Alan Moore recalls that, after discovering MAD as an 8-year-old in the early ’60s, he astonished his parents with his banter about Caroline Kennedy, Fidel Castro, and Jimmy Hoffa.) MAD’s cackling satire was aimed in every direction, including its own writers and artists, known as the Usual Gang of Idiots, as well as its snot-nosed readers, who were mostly kids like me.

Before MAD there were the funny papers, with their well-worn jokesters: Dagwood and Blondie, Archie and Jughead, Little Orphan Annie. The funnies were calculated to make you smile or (rarely) crack you up, but not to dangle you upside down and show you the sheer dimwitted lunacy of life itself. For that, comics reader, you had to wait for the advent of MAD, whose Usual Gang of Idiots poked smirking fun at cows both sacred and profane. Proudly unfurling its adolescent gibes, MAD was kin to wild card TV comedy like the Smothers Brothers and Laugh-In. Small visual doodads festooned its pages, and there were tiny, snide jokes strewn about like buried treasure. This was a device to make young readers pore over each panel repeatedly, while picking their noses and ignoring calls to come to the dinner table. MAD’s densely textured comic vibe inspired the Firesign Theatre, along with Dr. Demento, Monty Python, Second City, SNL, the Simpsons, the Onion, and on and on—a comic Valhalla.

MAD’s history is as richly encrusted with oddities as one of Al Jaffee’s fold-ins. Submitted for your approval, then, a tour through the decades, pausing to admire landmarks along the way—the way-out movie parodies of Mort Drucker, Don Martin’s knuckleheaded Foneboniana, Dave Berg’s eye-rolling teens and ubergrouchy suburban Dads, Sergio Aragonés’ skittering nitwits, Antonio Prohias’ sleekly designed spy duels, and more.

It all began in the late summer of 1952, when the first issue of MAD—then a comic book, not yet a magazine—hit the newsstands. The initial spur came from publisher William M. Gaines, who wanted to give his artist Harvey Kurtzman something to do besides his elaborately researched war comics. Kurtzman’s counterpart, Al Feldstein, was doing yeoman’s work on the EC horror line, turning out seven comics at a time compared to Kurtzman’s two. Kurtzman wanted to up his salary, and so Gaines decided to let him try his hand at a satirical comic.

Bill Gaines’ father, Max, was the man who invented the comic book. In 1934 he started binding together newspaper comic strips and selling them for 10 cents. Max, a crazed disciplinarian who was the terror of his family, died in a freak boating accident in 1947. Twenty-five-year-old Bill, whom his father had always considered a ne’er-do-well, was now in charge of Max’s company, EC. The initials stood for Educational Comics, but Bill would change the name to the more apropos Entertaining Comics.

EC was renowned for its spine-chilling horror comics, so replete with gore that a national scandal ensued. (One infamous panel depicted a game of midnight baseball where the dead villain’s organs were used as bases, connected by his intestines.) In 1954 a psychologist named Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, which railed against comic books’ effects on young minds. Gaines had to testify in front of a Senate committee to try to save his horror comics from charges of depravity. The upshot was that censorship came to the comics industry. EC horror was finished. MAD, to escape the Bowdlerizing steamroller, was transformed from a comic into a magazine, so it couldn’t be censored.

From the spring of 1955 on (issue No. 24) MAD the magazine was shielded from the persecutory fingers of government. Kurtzman wound up turning out only five more issues. Hugh Hefner offered him a sweet deal to edit Trump, a lavishly produced imitation of MAD. Kurtzman, who was at odds with Gaines, took Hefner’s offer and brought with him two MAD stalwarts: Will Elder and Jack Davis.

Gaines was in a tizzy. How would MAD survive without Kurtzman, Elder, and Davis? His first move was to appoint the rock-solid Al Feldstein as his editor. Over the next eight years Feldstein and Gaines hired a panoply of persnickety smart-alecks, like artists Mort Drucker, Bob Clarke, George Woodbridge, Paul Coker Jr., and Jack Rickard. Writers Dick DeBartolo, Frank Jacobs, Nick Meglin, Larry Siegel, Stan Hart, and Lou Silverstone kept the MAD zaniness in top form. Gaines also relied on Wally Wood and Joe Orlando, stalwart artists from the old EC days.

Don Martin, with his slovenly lunatic characters and his unique goofball vocabulary (Shplik! Blort! Farp!), joined the MAD crew. Antonio Prohias, a refugee from Castro who spoke no English—but didn’t need any for his wordless “Spy vs. Spy”—came too, and a few years later, Sergio Aragonés, known as the fastest cartoonist in the business, began splattering MAD’s margins with furious miniature comics. Al Jaffee, a member of Kurtzman’s stable, became maestro of the fold-in. Angelo Torres arrived in the late ’60s to draw TV parodies, and Jack Davis returned to the MAD fold.

It was Feldstein who made the shop run, getting out an issue every 45 days. Gaines sometimes commented on the cover choice but otherwise didn’t interfere with the magazine’s content. That was Feldstein’s territory. (Feldstein, who was MAD’s editor until 1985, was succeeded by John Ficarra and, for a time, Nick Meglin.)

MAD wouldn’t be MAD without its poster boy Alfred E. Neuman. The gap-toothed idiot savant appeared on the cover for the first time in 1956 (No. 30). The dapper Norman Mingo, who looked like the millionaire from the Monopoly board, originated MAD’s Neuman cover. The moronically grinning boy with jug ears and one eye lower than the other dates from the late 19th century, and had been used to advertise everything from soda pop to “painless dentistry.” Mingo gave him a makeover and, as Alfred E. Neuman, he went on over the years to impersonate a string of celebrities, including the Maharishi, Uncle Sam, Superman, Yoda, and Michael Jackson.

1950s MAD made elaborate fun of social climbing through hipsterish snootiness. “How to Be Smart,” from April 1956, announced, “On the following pages we will show you in a matter of minutes how you can look and act so that everyone will think you are smart, making you, in effect, smart.” Among the suggestions are some still very much au courant: Wear “heavy black eyeglasses” and a “strange-textured jacket.” Use words like “fabulous” and “darling” (even at the meat market!). And don’t forget to remark, with a “withering sneer,” “Who watches (yech) television?” (“Practice this sneer, try it on your friends.”) Among your home furnishings you will want an indoor firepit rather than a fireplace, and of course a ferociously abstract painting.

Also from the late ’50s, the “MAD Treasury of Unknown Poetry” spotlighted some choice lines from “The Cantilever Tales” by Melvin Chaucer:

Whon thot aprille swithin potrzebie,
The burgid prilly gives one heebie jeebie.
Do pairdish kanzas sittie harrie truman
Though brillig to the schlepper alfred neuman.

Potrzebie was one of MAD’s signature nonsense words, along with furshlugginer (the latter an actual Yiddish term meaning beaten-up, like a piece of junk), both ideally to be pronounced with a thick Eastern European accent. And as for Melvin Chaucer ... prior to Alfred, the shape-shifting Melvin—sometimes a child, sometimes an adult, always a nebbish—was MAD’s all-purpose mascot.

“Only MAD non-conformists achieve genuine originality,” the magazine explained in June 1959. Not the beatniks, but the “bravely idiotic MAD readers” were the true rebels. Beatniks sported jeans, sandals, and “scratchy beards,” and raised outré pets like “ocelots, minks, deodorized skunks and rhesus monkeys.” But vastly cooler MAD nonconformists wore “smart-looking MAD straight jackets” (a real item briefly marketed by the magazine!) and “light-weight pith helmets.” For pets they raised “falcons, leeches, octopi, anchovies, water buffaloes and performing fleas.”

In spite of such nose-thumbing, MAD also doted on the beatniks, recognizing a kinship between their daffy rhythms and the magazine’s penchant for absurdity. MAD caught some flak for rewriting Lincoln’s Gettysburg address in hipster-speak à la Lord Buckley: “Fourscore and like seven years ago our old daddies came on in this scene with a new group, grooved in free kicks, and hip to the jazz that all cats make it the same. Now we’re real hung up in a crazy big hassle, digging whether that group, or any group so grooved and so hip can keep on swinging.”

MAD made fun of celebrity gossip magazines too. A fearless expose, “Was Snow White Really Snow White?” after demonstrating that “these seven dwarfs are imposters,” called on readers to “Act! Form groups! Write your congressman! But mainly, go kill yourself!”

My favorite MAD one-page parody from the ’50s is “Reader’s Disgust” (April 1957), a pitch-perfect takeoff on the Reader’s Digest table of contents, drawn from various lifestyle magazines. Featured are “I Can’t Wiggle My Ears” from the American Journal of Psychiatry, “Locksmiths are Lousy Lovers?” from Hardware Annual, and “Renovate Your Bathysphere” from House and Aquarium.

By 1960 MAD had conquered the teenage market. According to some estimates, it was read by most American college students and almost half the country’s high school students (at least the male ones). Believe it or not, MAD would become even more popular in the next dozen years.

As the ’60s dawned MAD continued its fond mockery of rebellious youth, notably in “Tomorrow’s Parents,” drawn by the superb Wally Wood, where two aging juvenile delinquents discover to their horror that their children are growing up square. Upon learning that her son wants to be a doctor, the bobby-soxed mother cries, “Like, I have no son!” In “My Fair Ad-Man,” MAD’s My Fair Lady take off, a beatnik shaves his goatee and becomes a Madison Avenue exec.

The ’60s were the golden era of MAD movie parodies. They were drawn by Mort Drucker, whose characters sported spindly twining legs and fleshy faces, and were instantly recognizable. My favorite among Drucker’s parodies is “Flawrence of Arabia” (written by Larry Siegel), a merciless skewering of David Lean’s epic. When Flawrence first puts on the typical Islamic male’s white robes and headdress, he bursts out in song: “I Feel Pretty,” by Sondheim and Bernstein. A conflicted soul, he laments to General Allenbuzz, “I mean. I know I’m great—but I think I’m a fraud! I like killing—but then again I hate it! I’m a show-off—but I’m really shy! What should I do?” He then winds up on a psychoanalyst’s couch. The shrink, playing the Jewish mother role, suggests, “Why don’t you find yourself a nice Egyptian girl and settle down.” But uh oh: The girl turns out to be Liz Taylor as Cleopatra, and Flawrence’s troubles are just getting started.

MAD also delivered expert television spoofs like “Bats-Man,” by Drucker and Lou Silverstone. Sparrow the Boy Wonder wants to be a normal teenager who goes out on dates (“Holy Kinsey Report! I’ve got a date with a girl”), only to be told by Bats-Man, “What’s wrong with you kids today? Your date will have to wait until evil and injustice have been erased from Gotham City! And after that, we’ve got problems in Asia!” Many decades later, I still remember being shocked by Sparrow’s evil scheme to kill Bats-Man. With “Bats-Man” MAD managed the unlikely—making fun of a show that made fun of itself.

A much easier target was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In “201 Min. of Space Idiocy,” by Drucker and DeBartolo, Dr. Haywire, using the video phone from the space station, catches his wife and the milkman in flagrante delicto. Unruffled, she asks him, “On the way home from the moon, will you pick up a loaf of bread, Dear?” On the Jupiter mission the astronauts treat themselves to a glass of steak and a glass of potatoes, followed by a glass of pie. Best of all are the apes dancing around the monolith. Is it “a Prehistoric Handball Court,” they wonder? The massive monolith orbiting Jupiter resembles “the box the United Nations building came in.” So much for Kubrickian sublimity.

I cherish “MAD’s Peek Behind the Scenes at a Hospital,” by Al Jaffee and Larry Siegel, in which an orderly tells a hapless patient, “What do you mean you want us to change your room? The pairing off of people in Semi-Private rooms is a highly specialized science!” Jaffee’s art is a busy cartwheel of doctors, nurses, and patients, all being slowly devoured by mindless medical snafus.

Antonio Prohias, a Cuban émigré who had the barest sliver of English, brought “Spy vs. Spy” to MAD. To Prohias the Cold War was a zero-sum contest in which each side was at its wit’s end but still hopeful that some new bit of ingenuity would reduce the enemy to a poof of black or white smoke. Prohias’ spies, always outsmarting themselves, had the ageless tenacity of Wile E. Coyote, and were every bit as luckless. With no identifying marks except that one was black and the other white, they were perfect mirrors of each other. “Spy vs. Spy” with its mind-bending, puzzlelike format resembled the diagram of a joke rather than the joke itself.

The ’60s was the era of the great advertising slogans, each one an unforgettable bit of poetry: “Put a Tiger in Your Tank,” “I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel,” “Let Your Fingers Do the Walking,” “I’d Rather Fight than Switch.” MAD relentlessly spoofed these classic ads, saving special ire for cigarette-makers (whose product, they insisted, would lead you straight to the graveyard).

Arnie Kogen’s celebrity wallets were a highlight, particularly his Howard Hughes, whose home address was listed on his ID card as “Texas, Las Vegas, The Bahamas, Nicaragua, a car parked somewhere in the Western Hemisphere, a treehouse in Brazil, and a summer home in Atlantic City, N.J.” An accomplished prankster, Kogen once placed a Situations Wanted ad in The New York Times that read: “Shepherd, Experienced. Will not cry wolf.” When a Times staffer asked Kogen about the phrase “Will not cry wolf,” he explained, “It’s a familiar line in the trade. A man who won’t cry wolf is one who’ll stick to his job and watch over his flock.”

In the April 1968 issue, the MADsters introduced readers to the magazine “Hippie,” with its priceless headline “Is Free Love Worth It?” But their greatest hippie satire was “’Uptight’ is a Dry Sugar Cube,” using Peanuts characters. Here were the Peanuts crew, grimy and bedraggled, smoking pot, turning on and dropping out. MAD explained that “Uptight is ...”—among other things—“taking an LSD Trip and seeing ‘The Mormon Tabernacle Choir.’” The illustration showed a slumped-over, shaggy-haired Linus surrounded by dozens of Charlie Brown heads, all singing piously.

Dave Berg was the house square at MAD. He was a religious Jew, and like Al Jaffee, later contributed drawings to the Moshiach Times, a Lubavitcher publication. Berg’s “Lighter Side” was always worth a chuckle as he lambasted the foibles of teens and their parents. Dad would blow his top while junior snickered and guffawed. This was a throwback to an older, more mainstream style of comedy, but Berg pulled it off in style.

Sergio Aragonés’ humans were tiny pullulating figures rushing around the page, usually at the margins of a bigger MAD story. Aragonés did a vast splash panel depicting Woodstock as a takeoff on Bruegel’s Children’s Games, with oodles of hippies doing their separate things: grinning, strumming, tripping, chasing pigs, dancing, stripping, sitting in trees, doing handstands, and finally dissolving at the horizon into a swath of unwashed, jammed-together concertgoers.

“MAD’s Great Moments in Politics” for No. 116 (1967) was a bombshell. There was LBJ in the famous photo showing his appendix scar to reporters—but artist Max Brandel had laid a map of Vietnam over the president’s stomach. Another bold ’60s satire was MAD’s Dr. Seuss for grown-ups, in which a potbellied Seussian Hawk “wants to blow a great big hole into the Earth from Pole to Pole”—“It’s the Army’s answer to birth control.”

MAD was playing with countercultural fire. As early as 1958 they suggested that readers write to J. Edgar Hoover for official government-issued draft dodger cards. So many did so that Hoover sent FBI men to the MAD offices to interrogate Feldstein.

But MAD never picked a side. The magazine found long-haired revolutionaries just as ludicrous as establishment fat cats, both too earnest to be taken seriously. Both the left and the right were unable to take a joke, and so were a perfect match for each other.

By the early ’70s Bill Gaines, increasingly rotund, was sporting long hair and a beard, though he was no fan of the hippies (he canceled his membership in the ACLU when he found out they defended people who had damaged government property). Gaines was a wine connoisseur, gourmet, outspoken atheist, collector of King Kong memorabilia, and compulsive neatnik with many obsessive habits. He was also a member of the Lighter than Air Society, for zeppelin fans. Gaines led MAD staffers on a number of junkets to exotic locations. In 1969 the Usual Gang traveled to Kenya, Tanzania, and Athens; in 1970 to Japan, Thailand, and Hong Kong, and in 1971 to London, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Leningrad, and Moscow, where locals told Gaines he looked liked Karl Marx. The number of bearded MAD men on the tours made them resemble Benjamin Harrison’s cabinet, someone jested.

The MAD trips led to a memorable series of drawings by the gang. Gaines appears as Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid in one, holding a mug of beer; in another, by Don Martin, he is a goofy pear-shaped Snow Queen in the Leningrad Ballet. Cartoonist Paul Peter Porges, after sharing a Paris hotel room with Gaines, depicted the bug-eyed hirsute publisher yelling into the phone: “Room Service!! Send up some liverwurst with paté foie gras and a side order of braunschweiger with a gallon of wonton soup, extra kreplach and a bottle of Chateau Lafitte Spätlese and make sure the umlauts are inside, not outside the label! Lots a onion rolls and poach me a goyim in sherry for later and reserve me a table at the Café le Puique for twenty and where is my tarte aux midgets I ordered ...”

Richard Nixon was a popular target for ’70s MAD, along with disco, the Me Decade, and, as always, the nonstop lies produced by the ad industry. MAD also explored the peaks of high culture with features like “A MAD Treasury of Shakespeare’s Lesser Known Quotations” (a sample: “Women, Mercutio, are the itch we gladly scratch”; “A tragic tale is best for winter. In summer, ’tis off to the beach”). The magazine itself was just as suitable for wrapping fish as it ever was.

MAD lasted until 2018, but starting in the ’80s it began what many have viewed as a long slow decline. There were still lots of standout moments—who could forget the full-page poster from August 2008, where candidate Barack Obama, in boxing trunks and gloves, towered over the knocked-out Hillary Clinton like Ali over Sonny Liston, with an astounded Bill Clinton gaping from front row ringside? A withering satire of TV’s Mad Men from 2011, by Arnie Kogen and artist Tom Richmond, was worthy of MAD’s golden age. And Dick DeBartolo’s finest hour might have been in 1997, with his endless list of side effects for a miracle drug called Stoppa-da-Sneezin, all in tiny print. The admirable Peter Kuper inherited “Spy vs. Spy.” A platoon of new artists and writers came to the magazine in its last years. MAD lost some of its dash and zing, but it went out in a properly nutty and daft manner.

MAD was, for all its cynicism, too determinedly silly to be cool, much less superior. The magazine never took on self-righteous airs, and never shared in the mean-spirited snarkiness that drives our current politically correct mud wrestling. “What, Me Worry?” was the slogan of a holy fool, wiser than the know-it-alls, and forever young.