The first reaction to the news that Mad magazine was ceasing publication of new content was, I confidently suspect, one of collective epiphany that Mad magazine was still publishing at all.
Though the magazine had existed for just shy of seven decades, its presence in a typical reader’s life is haltingly brief: from the end of elementary school to no later than the end of middle school. It pads the bridge between childhood and adolescence, and then it’s gone.
The magazine was always dependent on that cyclical arrangement; readers mature and the younger siblings inherit the subscriptions. But with digital media shaping more and more how humor is expressed and consumed, Mad came to be seen as something of a relic. Passing by grocery store magazine racks over the past decade, I don’t ever remember actually seeing issues displayed.
Mad has resigned itself to this reality, pivoting to something resembling an encyclopedia: publishing issues with archival material and saving contemporary material for year-end special editions. It’s a bit anticlimactic but nothing entirely new. A big part of Mad’s output has always been reprints and anthologies of its older work, of which there is an unfathomable amount and much of it is still valuable.
Mad’s role as juvenile ephemera has often caused its status as a legacy publication to be overlooked. It appeared only a year before Playboy and coincided with Esquire’s and New Yorker’s peaking influence. And like those titles, Mad‘s fingerprints are all over popular culture of the late 20th and early 21st century. It might even have more traces than any of them. (...)
The magazine was a creatively fertile platform for its artists, who innovated the comic book medium by simultaneously sending up its formulae and testing their limitations, then adapted it to the more sophisticated magazine form. Among Mad’s best early artists was Kurtzman’s high school classmate Will Elder. Elder’s precise style could imitate any comic to an uncanny degree and could pack a single panel with copious sight gags. The latter skill was on full display when he drew an entire story around the text of “The Raven” in issue nine.
As a magazine, Mad’s focus broadened beyond lampooning comic books. It poked fun at do-it-yourself assemblage guides, dating customs, sports, the Cold War, and social pretensions. One feature was “How to Be a Mad Non-Conformist.” “Ordinary conformists,” the piece goes, “waste their time reading banal best-sellers” and “sensational daily newspapers. Ordinary non-conformists go for childish science fiction” and “boring literary journals,” while “Mad non-conformists read The Roller Derby News, the pre-Civil War Congressional Record, old Tom Swift books, and back copies of Classified Telephone Directories.”
More impressive were the magazine’s parody advertisements, with faux-Rockwell paintings and earnest copy that could, if only for a few seconds, fool the inattentive reader into thinking “Sailem Floating Cigarettes” and “Crust Gum Paste” were genuine products.
Though Mad was more visual than verbal, its Jewish humor was an unmistakable element. Kurtzman filled its text with Yiddish-based wordplay—potrzebie, ganef, furshlugginer—that became a secret language for devoted readers. In addition, outside contributors included comedians Ernie Kovacs and Sid Caesar, the comedy duo Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding, and musical satirist Stan Freberg. It experimented with verse, advertising copy, and even CB radio jargon. “Mad was a puzzle of comedy,” Phil Proctor, cofounder of The Firesign Theatre, said. “You couldn’t take it all in in one reading, so you’d delve back in.”
Though the magazine had existed for just shy of seven decades, its presence in a typical reader’s life is haltingly brief: from the end of elementary school to no later than the end of middle school. It pads the bridge between childhood and adolescence, and then it’s gone.
The magazine was always dependent on that cyclical arrangement; readers mature and the younger siblings inherit the subscriptions. But with digital media shaping more and more how humor is expressed and consumed, Mad came to be seen as something of a relic. Passing by grocery store magazine racks over the past decade, I don’t ever remember actually seeing issues displayed.
Mad has resigned itself to this reality, pivoting to something resembling an encyclopedia: publishing issues with archival material and saving contemporary material for year-end special editions. It’s a bit anticlimactic but nothing entirely new. A big part of Mad’s output has always been reprints and anthologies of its older work, of which there is an unfathomable amount and much of it is still valuable.Mad’s role as juvenile ephemera has often caused its status as a legacy publication to be overlooked. It appeared only a year before Playboy and coincided with Esquire’s and New Yorker’s peaking influence. And like those titles, Mad‘s fingerprints are all over popular culture of the late 20th and early 21st century. It might even have more traces than any of them. (...)
The magazine was a creatively fertile platform for its artists, who innovated the comic book medium by simultaneously sending up its formulae and testing their limitations, then adapted it to the more sophisticated magazine form. Among Mad’s best early artists was Kurtzman’s high school classmate Will Elder. Elder’s precise style could imitate any comic to an uncanny degree and could pack a single panel with copious sight gags. The latter skill was on full display when he drew an entire story around the text of “The Raven” in issue nine.
As a magazine, Mad’s focus broadened beyond lampooning comic books. It poked fun at do-it-yourself assemblage guides, dating customs, sports, the Cold War, and social pretensions. One feature was “How to Be a Mad Non-Conformist.” “Ordinary conformists,” the piece goes, “waste their time reading banal best-sellers” and “sensational daily newspapers. Ordinary non-conformists go for childish science fiction” and “boring literary journals,” while “Mad non-conformists read The Roller Derby News, the pre-Civil War Congressional Record, old Tom Swift books, and back copies of Classified Telephone Directories.”
More impressive were the magazine’s parody advertisements, with faux-Rockwell paintings and earnest copy that could, if only for a few seconds, fool the inattentive reader into thinking “Sailem Floating Cigarettes” and “Crust Gum Paste” were genuine products.
Though Mad was more visual than verbal, its Jewish humor was an unmistakable element. Kurtzman filled its text with Yiddish-based wordplay—potrzebie, ganef, furshlugginer—that became a secret language for devoted readers. In addition, outside contributors included comedians Ernie Kovacs and Sid Caesar, the comedy duo Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding, and musical satirist Stan Freberg. It experimented with verse, advertising copy, and even CB radio jargon. “Mad was a puzzle of comedy,” Phil Proctor, cofounder of The Firesign Theatre, said. “You couldn’t take it all in in one reading, so you’d delve back in.”
by Chris R. Morgan, The American Conservative | Read more:
Image: K. Vlahos
[ed. See also: Metallica to publish children's book, The ABCs of Metallica (The Guardian).]
