What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

mdf

I remember, as a child, attempting to reproduce the BASIC program in one of the MAD magazine issues. Somewhere, I had made a typo, which completely screwed the output. I guessed that the tediousness of the whole exercise was part of the joke, shrugged, and moved on.

Luckily, someone else succeeded: https://meatfighter.com/mad/

ethbr1

Through my childhood, my mother always found a copy of MAD to give me for Christmas.

Honestly, it'd be great to have more physical zine-style humor back in the US zeitgeist.

It's important to laugh at the issues of the day, while also thinking and doing something about them.

Satire and laughter is a critical antidote to the 24/7 BREAKING-NEWS panic-fear response that all-day news so often inspires.

PS: Also, long live Spy v Spy. Go team black spy. https://archive.org/details/SpyVsSpyTheCompleteCasebook/Spy%...

frankfrank13

I love MAD magazine. I remember my mom half-jokingly telling me to stay away from my older cousins' copies as a kid. Funny now, considering how tame it is compared to Tiktok/twitter humor. But as a kid it felt otherwordly.

Anyways here's the example MAD folding picture from the exhibit when its folded -- https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbtwberkshi...

dang

Related. Others?

The Mad Magazine Fold-In Effect in CSS – Thomas Park (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36856428 - July 2023 (5 comments)

Al Jaffee, king of the Mad Magazine fold-in, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35517629 - April 2023 (64 comments)

Frank Jacobs, Mad Magazine writer, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26819773 - April 2021 (18 comments)

Al Jaffee turns 100 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26461739 - March 2021 (28 comments)

The Al Jaffee / Mad Magazine Fold-In Effect in CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23457930 - June 2020 (43 comments)

Mad magazine legend Al Jaffee retires at age 99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442041 - June 2020 (25 comments)

A World Without Mad Magazine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20527990 - July 2019 (2 comments)

The World According to Mad Magazine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20427142 - July 2019 (5 comments)

Mad Magazine to mostly stop publishing new material - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20351524 - July 2019 (86 comments)

A personal tour of MAD magazine, in the crucible of a young life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11984032 - June 2016 (12 comments)

Al Feldstein, the Soul of Mad Magazine, Dies at 88 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7680093 - May 2014 (17 comments)

mauvehaus

The linked Norman Rockwell Museum is in Stockbridge, MA, which is also home to (formerly) the Alice's Restaurant[0] of Arlo Guthrie fame.

[0] For today's lucky 10,000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m57gzA2JCcM

trothamel

I saw this exhibition a few weeks ago.

My generally feeling was it didn't work that well, mostly because the MAD stuff is very dense, more dense than you'd expect from painting in an art gallery. A lot of it is also very dependent on pop culture that has changed in the interim.

Probably the two best pieces were the direct parodies of the Rockwell paintings, exhibited next to the pieces they parodied.

The Rockwell museum also made an effort to exhibit some of Rockwell's most humorous pieces in some of the side galleries, which worked well here.

ABraidotti

For any Sergio Aragones fans out there, the Cartoonist Kayfabe interview he did where he told the story of how he first got hired at MAD is amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm5jk2RadxU

PopAlongKid

I still have an Alfred E. Neuman for President bumper sticker somewhere IIRC.

When I was much younger, an older relative was overseas for a year, I used to trace some of the marginal humor (little funny drawings literally in the margin of the magazine pages) on "onion skin" airmail sheets (a thin piece of paper, to minimize weight, that you wrote your message on one side, then folded up into an envelope-size document with Airmail/Par Avion printed on the outside where you wrote the address, can't remember if postage was prepaid or you had to affix stamps). Because it was onion skin, it was semi-transparent which allowed for tracing. He appreciated the effort.

dogleash

>It is difficult to imagine a time when satirical, irreverent humor was not common across media

I hate the word "irreverent." It's in every article about comedy written by people who don't seem to understand the difference between disrespecting things that are safe to dunk on, vs breaking cultural boundaries.

kubanczyk

If anyone is interested why there is "Potrzebie" above "what, me worry?" on the drum: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrzebie

JoeDaDude

This nostalgia trio reminded me of the article claiming a long, previous-to-MAD history of Alfred E. Neuman.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/03/03/a-boy-with-no...

kopirgan

As a kid I used to enjoy MAD as my dad used to bring copies from his office library. Long before I even knew who Tintin or Asterix were, I knew Neumann. Lol

I bought a 6-7 CD set of all MAD issues from start to early 90s but it doesn't run anymore, not in Windows 11. Even the software was well designed with funny instructions and commands

borski

MAD was one of the first pieces of humor I truly fell in love with. I knew about comedy before it, but I don’t know that I really understood comedy before it.

It’s not that it was perfect; it’s that I grew up with it and came of age with it. Also, my immigrant parents didn’t get it, so I was able to enjoy it on my own and it was my first taste of figuring out what I find funny, rather than laughing when other people did.

owlninja

I just love Don Martin's style!

swayvil

Used to have a subscription. Me and Dad would try to get it first. Mom bought tons of their little paperback compilations at garage sales. They programmed me into the man I am today.

In retrospect, goddamn they were bleak. I guess that's just the later stuff tho. I saw the really early stuff in reprints. It had a different flavor.

AlbertCory

For some unfathomable reason, I can still remember their football fight song, to the tune of "Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame":

Cheer, cheer for old Pivnick Tech

We're gonna get it right in the neck.

Send a sound of Taps on high,

While Pivnick lays down to die, die, die.

What though the odds be great or small,

Old Pivnick Tech will fumble the ball.

While her undergrads get sick, and

Transfer to USC!

Modified3019

My babysitter in the late 90’s had a stack of mad magazines (and possibly other humor type competitor mags, like Cracked or Nuts) I would explore.

The one that lives permanently in my head is a bit where they show off a full page cutaway of a house (and possibly wider social infrastructure) designed for every single person being so fat they use mobility scooters to get around, the tone framed of course an an optimistic advancement for society.

That said, I’m not sure if it was MAD or one of the other copycat humor mags. I’ve never been able to find it again in the MAD archives I’ve seen.

CobrastanJorji

Are there any Mad Magazines of today? Are there some publications that we'll look back on in 20 years and say "that really shaped humor and it's crazy how many interesting people seem to have all read this when they were young?" Are they online?

nineteen999

My favourite issue was the one that had "video games based on real life"

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/167708-mad-magazine-video-...

Some are pretty funny. I always wanted to implement a bunch of them.

supportengineer

My mom would buy me these because she loved hearing me laughing hysterically.

CalChris

When I was a kid, we’d regularly get MAD at the supermarket. We’d all read it cover to cover. I was young and some of it was over my head but that’s ok. In junior high, my college age sister gave me a subscription to Sports Illustrated which I read cover to cover; SI had a reputation of paying the most for its articles and the writing was excellent. In my 20s, I subscribed to Spy and was inoculated by phrases like fat fingered vulgarian against a future which should never have happened.

danielktdoranie

When I was I preteen in 1980s I loved MAD. I even had a collection, I resisted the urge to fold the back page just to keep them nice and instead folded the back page of a copy in the grocery store

tamaharbor

One of my favorites has always been the pharmacist behind the scenes dispensing all prescription medications from a single huge bottle of aspirin.

xist

Stuff You Should Know had a podcast last year on it with the back story of how it was created https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-stuff-you-should-know-26...

ngcc_hk

I have heard (in uk?) you listen to radio to get the source and type it in! By the time of late 1970s you have source code disc or even pirated diskette (cutting hole). Hence except a few miss the experience of typing your source code or listening to them.

ForOldHack

The first read would be to find all the squggles of Sergio Aragonés...

Brilliant marginalarian.

patwolf

I used to read MAD as a kid. At some point in the 90s they released a CD-ROM set of every issue. It was a neat idea, but the software was pretty bad, and some of the scans we're great. They simulated the fold-in effect, but the alignment was off on some of the issues.

zwieback

I grew up in Germany but my parents wanted us to learn English so we had subscriptions to many US magazines like Time, National Geographic, New Yorker and, most beloved of all, Mad Magazine. Us kids would fight over the issue when it showed up, good memories!

lifefeed

n+1 once said McSweeny's (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/) is just Mad Magazine for the literary set, and today is the right time to share that.

baerrie

Every Friday from age 7-12 my mom would take me to the grocery store with her and proceed to take 2 hours to shop. I would read every comic they had including MAD and Cracked. Also superhero stuff

whartung

If you look around in stores, MAD is doing kind of “best of” issues.

I purchased one recently with their old sci-fi stuff (original “Star Drek”, there Star Wars parody, etc. ). I found it in a grocery store.

Classic stuff to be sure.

082349872349872

in my day MAD was purely subscription based: no advertising

interludead

MAD didn’t just entertain, it pushed boundaries and made people question the world around them

benrmatthews

“What Simple Pastime is Becoming a Luxury that Many Americans Can No Longer Afford?”

Anyone have the “after” of the fold-in image?

peppermill

I once worked with the Normal Rockwell Estate and their letterhead used Comic Sans.

hoseja

>spoke truth to power

I've become actually allergic to certain phrases.