Mad (magazine)
8 quotes
"What, Me Worry? (#24 – 07/1955)"
"The first issue of the magazine hit the newsstands in 1952, with sharp-eyed sendups of movies, advertising, celebrities and comic strips: Mickey Mouse became "Mickey Rodent" and Superman "Superduperman." To the delight of its largely teen-age audience, it brought satire into the mainstream, along with up-to-the-moment New York humor sprinkled with Yiddish, nonsense and non sequiturs."
"Saturday Night Live would be unthinkable without Mad; so would Home Alone and Tim Burton. Even such diverse and serious types as Gloria Steinem and Art Spiegelman acknowledge the stunning impact of Mad on their life and work. Gaines’ little comic book has quite possibly been the most subversive magazine of modern times, simply because it taught readers-kid readers-to giggle at the pomposities and contradictions of mainstream culture. Mad exposed the lighter side of everything young people were taught was heavy. Starting out in a decade fanatically devoted to the status quo and worshipful of grown-ups, Gaines dared to muse, ”I think that 13 just may be the age of reason.” From today’s vantage point, in an age awash with irony, it’s hard to grasp how astounding the first Mads must have seemed when America was liking Ike and loving Lucy. Yet the most popular modern pastimes-the twisted celebration of the distasteful, the obsessive satirical reshuffling of the pop-culture deck- derive from that willfully juvenile revolution."
"Gaines enabled Mad to turn down all advertising partially by maintaining a very low overhead. The magazine’s crowded, toy-strewn Manhattan office included such decor as a year-round Christmas tree. His regular staff rarely numbered more than nine or 10, and he relied on free-lance cartoonists and writers accepting small pay in order to be showcased in Mad."
"While the early issues of Mad chose child-centered material to satirize, the focus turned in the 1960's to more and more difficult concerns - adult hypocrisy, sexuality, women's liberation, divorce, the drug and alcohol scene. One feature, entitled If Babies Could Take Parent Pictures, contained illustrations with this caption: Here's my idiot father trying to drive and take pictures at the same time. I was lucky to get home alive. The phrase my idiot father does not have a jarring sound in 1981; children today are cheerfully irreverent toward their elders. But the words were shocking then, coming from a child. A convention was coming to an end - one that compelled children to repress their natural (Freud would say Oedipal) hostilities, forced them to mutter under their breaths perhaps, but rarely to be openly abusive. Mad Magazine was clearly influential in the move toward free expression among children; its relentless exposure of parental hypocricies during the 1960's caused shock waves of admiration and reaction among its young readers, who were not unaware of their older siblings' angry accusations of hypocrisy against The Great Society's war in Vietnam."
"Much of the material Mad satirized in its pages was first available to children in other media, especially television and the films. As these began to show increasingly adult material, Mad's pages also began to become more sophisticated. The magazine grew racier, but its readership grew younger. In the late 50's our readers seemed to be about 15, l6, late high school, early college. Today the mean age is probably about 13, Al Feldstein says. He attributes the change unequivocally to increased television viewing."
"It’s really a look at life, a look at the absurdity from a graphically visual point of view. If you illustrate some one-liners, it destroys them because that one-liner works better in the mind’s eye–you hear it and form a picture in your mind of what’s happening. But then when you actually see somebody draw that and make it graphic, then it doesn’t work anymore. For instance, Woody Allen in one of his early stand-up act lines said, “And I came home and there was my mother in a corner knitting a chicken.” Now everyone has always broken up at that line–there’s an insanity, an absurdity, that’s wonderful. It just sounds right. But if we did a drawing of a woman sitting on a couch knitting a chicken, it destroys it. Because once you graphically see it, once it’s in print, it’s no more a mind’s-eye absurdity; it becomes a graphic reality. And not every graphic reality is funny. So a MAD idea really translates well into a graphic reality–it’s not a mind’s-eye image."
"There is a MAD philosophy–not that we adhere to a policy, we have no policy. But the philosophy is really is that to be funny, it has to work on one of three levels. It has to be completely satiric, which means it really has to be like a funhouse mirror reflection; it’s not enough to do somebody as they exist because that’s already done. You have to distort the image so that everyone knows who it is, yet the distortion has to do with the humor we derive out of that image."