For seven decades , Mad magazinehas gleefully warped generations of teenaged minds with a simple substance ( according to former Mad editor John Ficarra ): " Everyone is lie to you , including magazines . Think for yourself . "
Mad magazine publisher did n’t manufacture parody , sarcasm , satire and " snark , " but Mad ’s subversive risible sensibility set the tone for everything funny that total after it , from " Saturday Night Live " to " The Simpsons " to " South Park " to " The Daily Show . "
At its peak in the mid-1970s , Mad swash a circulation of more than 2 million , at least one-half of them hive up under the mattresses of 11 - year - old boy and hand around at recess hidden inside geometry textbooks .
But by 2017 , its circulation was just 170,000 , make the powder magazine toeffectively close downin 2019 and block producing original cloth . But the Mad stigma lives on with new release of " best of " compilations like " MAD Mocks Music , " a special70th anniversary issueat Barnes & Noble and , more importantly , through its unerasable influence on American comedy .
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Make Fun of ‘Em
disturbed was the inspiration of William Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman at EC Comics , a low - brow publishing house that specialized in gory repulsion title of respect that drove parents testis in the 1950s , like " taradiddle from the Crypt . "
Kurtzman , a World War II veteran , mostly wrote and drew military comic strip for EC , but he had an itching to do something unlike — to poke merriment at the pathetic cliche ofcomic bookheroes and even EC ’s own horror mags . Gaines , who was EC ’s newspaper publisher , loved the idea .
" brainsick began as a comic record parody other comic books , " explainsJudith Yaross Lee , a scholar of American humor and professor emerita at Ohio University .
Mad ’s original form of address was " Tales That Will push back You Mad . " One of the early military issue in 1953 feature a brilliant parody telephone " Superduperman ! " starring a " creepy " Clark Bent ( the pathetic " assistant to the copy son " ) who transforms into the vapid Superduperman . Our " hero " is insert in the first paneltriumphantly punchingan octogenarian on crutches in the gut .
1950s ' proofreader loved Mad ’s spot - on spoofs , include a twisted parody of the clear - cutting kids of Riverdale called " Starchie . " Circulation soar up to 750,000 .
With Comics Under Fire, Mad is Reborn as a Magazine
In 1954 , lawmakers convened the " Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency , " which accuse comic Bible of poison the minds of America ’s youth . Gaines , the publisher of EC Comics , testifiedand defend his horror titles . " This seems to be a Isle of Man with a bally ax bear a cleaning woman ’s head up which has been severed from her body . Do you think that is in good gustatory sensation ? " asked a senator . " Yes , sir , I do , " replied Gaines , " for the cover of a horror comic . "
" For the past two class now , MAD has been dulling the senses of the country ’s youth,“wrote Kurtzmanin his introduction to the first issue of Mad , the magazine . " Now we get to work on the adults . "
Yaross Lee , the humor historiographer , co - edited a scholarly intensity ( withJohn Bird ) hollo " Seeing MAD : essay on MAD Magazine ’s Humor and Legacy . " In it , she explains that the expanding upon into a magazine formatting not only exempt Mad ’s writer from censorship , but also expanded their satiric targets to include parodies of movies , TV shows and popular music .
" Mad ’s M.O. was simple in both formats , " Yaross Lee compose , " take a comic vanity and advertize it over the top . "
Mad’s Jewish Roots Shaped Its Comic Sensibility
Parody , says Yaross Lee , is " imitation with a difference . " For Mad ’s writers and cartoonists , almost all of whom were Jewish guys from New York City , that " deviation " come up from their lived experience as outsiders .
In the 1930s and forties , art schools imposed quotas on how many Jewish students could be accepted in each class . bar from the " lawful " art world , many of these frustrated Judaic creative person became cartoonist . And in the process , they and other Jews of their contemporaries develop " a comic reply to discrimination and oppression , " tell Yaross Lee .
Mad referee from Iowa may not have understood the random Yiddish words spatter into parodies — likefurshlugginer(“beat up or junky " ) andganef(“thief or rascal " ) — but they responded to Mad ’s distinctly Jewish comic sensibility ; the foreigner unrelentingly mocking the mainstream .
‘Peak’ Mad: Politics and Counterculture
That seditious sensibility propelled Mad to new tiptop of popularity and influence in the sixties and 1970s , when the writers aim their satirical sites on political targets from both theright and the left hand : Kennedy , Nixon , the Beat poets , McCarthyism , hippy and war hawks .
" All art is political , " says Yaross Lee , " and Mad was counter cultural in its DNA . "
Mad ’s peak circulation was in the 1970s and its unexpressed subject matter of questioning office and skewering mainstream culture really resonate with that generation of readers .
" One of the things that is enthralling about Mad is the degree to which Mad affected the culture , and did n’t just mirror the culture , for a long fourth dimension , " write Paul Levitz , former chairwoman of DC Comics , foran essayincluded in " visualize MAD . " " I really conceive that Mad is one of the things that made the ' 60s possible , and even made the Watergate - era cynicism possible in many way . "
One of Mad ’s most controversial covers reach the shelves in April 1974 and summate up the decade utterly . In post of mascot Alfred E. Neuman ’s jerky grin was simply araised middle finger . Newman ’s catchphrase was " What , me worry ? " The toon boy ’s typeface had seem in ads as far back as the 1890s , but he was identify Alfred E. Neuman by Mad editor in chief Al Feldstein in 1956 .
Another long - run gag was " Spy vs. Spy " which featured two identical characters , one dressed in lily-white and the other in black , who were always sample to booby - trap each other . The strip was a parody of the Cold War .
The Legacy of ‘The Usual Gang of Idiots’
One of the reasons for Mad ’s incredible longevity and consistency was a horse barn of writers and cartoonists that joined Mad in the 1950s and 1960s and never entrust .
credit in typical Mad self - odium as " the common Gang of Idiots , " the listing of long - running Mad contributors included the lateMort Drucker , an ingenious caricaturist who drew just about every moving-picture show and boob tube takeoff from 1959 to 2008 . Al Jaffee , whoretired from Mad at 99 days older , created the magazine ’s stylemark last - page"Fold In " in 1964 and drew it for every undivided issue .
Interestingly , Kurtzman left Mad all the way back in 1956 to start another humor magazine yell Trump , published by Hugh Heffner of Playboy renown . But the writer Adam Gopnik noted that Kurtzman leave his fool on frantic and on genesis of American comedians and writer .
" Like Lenny Bruce , whom he determine , Kurtzman saw that the conventions of pop culture ran so deep in the imagination of his audience and fend at so great a remove from real experience that one could make a new sort of satire just by inventorying them,“wroteGopnik . " To say that this became an influential way in American drollery is an understatement . Almost all American caustic remark today follows a formula discovered by Harvey Kurtzman . "
Or as Yaross Lee puts it , " The brainsick sensitiveness is everywhere . "
