Mad Magazine File
'Mad Magazine:' 60+ years of satire (2013)
03:19 - Source: CNN Business

Editor’s Note: Gene Seymour is a film critic who has written about music, movies and culture for The New York Times, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly and The Washington Post. Follow him on Twitter @GeneSeymour. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN  — 

It was 1962 and I was a nine-year-old boy who, in the opinion of his parents and teachers, watched way too much television – which, of course, placed me right in the crosshairs of Alfred E. Neuman.

I had by then had only a glancing familiarity with Alfred’s cartoon face as the grinning, gap-toothed mascot of MAD magazine. It was published in black-and-white, and at first I (mistakenly) thought the pop-culture and politics-skewering magazine was just supposed to be funny. And what kid couldn’t snort at the spoofs of then-contemporary TV shows: “Lassie” (“Lizzie the Wonder Dog”) and “Have Gun, Will Travel” (“Have Suit, Will Commute”), the latter of which if memory serves, included a bit where a seedy, hairy, unkempt outlaw informs Paladin what he likes least about him: “Stranger…You DRESS neat!”

But it wasn’t until that 1962 issue, whose lead TV send-up was “Dr. Killjoy,” a rowdy goof on the then-popular NBC version of “Dr. Kildare,” (girls dug its star Richard Chamberlain), that I went all in on MAD. This was Killjoy as a ninny who in the middle of surgery says, “Nurse! Take this sponge away! It’s a bloody, yucky mess!” Nurse (horrified): “Doctor, that’s the patient’s brain!”

Don’t look at me that way. I was nine, and so were my friends at school, and even now I could go on and on like this. But MAD, apparently, won’t. This year’s August issue will be the last you can buy at a newsstand and, save for its end-of-the-year special, books and collections, there won’t be any new magazine content. After issue No. 10 of its current volume, it will reprint earlier material — but with new covers.

Kids who ate up the goofy transgressive magazine for decades will have already committed every line of those stories to memory. That seminal (for me) 1962 issue, for example — there was the “Eating Out” skits under the rubric “You and the Knife and the Muzak Department”; “TV Ads We’d Like to See”; Don Martin’s take on water skiing and, inevitably, some of Cuban cartoonist Antonio Prohias’s “Spy vs. Spy” cartoon strips, which took some of the edge off our youthful Cold War anxieties.

That’s how MAD magazine sunk its hooks into baby boomers, and then their children. Some of my boomer contemporaries insist that I’d missed MAD at its best: its first three years from 1952 to 1955, during which it carried out such satiric savagery as turning the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings into a daytime quiz show (“What’s My Shine?”); comic book spoofs with titles like “Superduperman,” “Little Orphan Melvin,” “Batboy and Rubin” and “Woman Wonder;” TV and movie send-ups such as “Dragged Net,” “Howdy Dooit,” “The Lone Stranger,” and “Hah! Noon!”

Retrospectively, I loved these as much, if not more than the stuff I continued to gobble up through my adolescence, such as the 1965 “Flipper” parody entitled “Flapper.” (Sample dialogue: “Flapper’s not a stupid fish!” “No, dad, he’s a stupid mammal!”)

OK, so maybe you had to be there. But through 67 years and 13 presidencies, MAD magazine was there for every emerging generation of smart alecks and media saturated kids who felt both comforted and emboldened that somebody besides them noticed how even the pop culture products they loved the most were prone to hokum and overhype.

Each generation eventually outgrew MAD and found other sources for satiric venting, notably TV sketch comedies such as “Saturday Night Live,” “SCTV” and even a weekly series bearing the MAD brand. But one’s impulse for critical thinking had to get its charge from somewhere and MAD was always a reliable starting point for kids questioning cultural and political authority.

I’m aware I’m leaving out all the other things we loved about MAD, especially (for me) Al Jaffee’s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.” (Q: “Are you going surfing?” A: “No, I’m a delivery man for an ironing board company!”)

And now MAD is leaving and it’s the end of an era.

You wish this were another one of their jokes. It’s not. And not only are we bummed, but we’re kind of worried about what will happen to the next generation of smart alecks yearning for validation. I wouldn’t be surprised if Alfred E. Neuman, after all these years, is worried – and no longer smiling.