CSotD: Loved You Madly
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My father brought this magazine back from a business trip. I was on the verge of turning 8, which was a little young for it, though I liked the parts I could figure out.
But my brother was 12 and right in the sweet spot. He got himself a subscription and so I was able to grow into the magazine, which didn’t take long.
And when he left for college, he gave me his bust of Alfred E. Neuman which at some point fell off a desk and that was that.
Well, they wouldn’t be valuable if they were all still around.
This Frank Frazetta back cover appeared on the October, ’64, issue and became an instant classic, including, as I note in a 2013 CSotD posting, prompting a gig for him to do the poster for Woody Allen’s “What’s New, Pussycat?”
However, I think that, as the funeral orations for Mad begin to flow, the more important topic in that posting is the observation on shared culture then, versus now.
Others will likely note that, when Mad began, there weren’t many sources of satire and pointed commentary in the US; even Playboy wouldn’t appear on newsstands for another year.
That’s true and that matters, but another part of why Mad’s parodies carried so much impact was the fact that we shared a common culture, exemplified in the Ed Sullivan Show, which was programmed to gather Mom, Dad, Bud and Sis around the TV each Sunday and offer them each something to enjoy.
Such that Mad Magazine could satirize a broad swath of culture and everybody would get the jokes.
I wrote more briefly about Mad last April in my MOCCA coverage, because I’d run into Ed Steckley, a former (aren’t they all?) contributor to the magazine and former Mad art director Sam Viviano, here seen in his collectible-NYC Mad Jacket as the pair of them stand around blocking Maria Scrivan from selling anything.
Proof of the durability of the magazine’s spoofs came when I referenced a line that Viviano immediately recognized, completed and sourced with full credits, which was from “East Side Story,” a 1963 spoof, which is to say, published 12 years before Viviano sold his first piece to the magazine.
Oh, and Roger Ebert credits the magazine with inspiring and mentoring his entire career, so there’s that.
And if all that clicking on links has not been enough, I also covered a sort of farewell appearance of the whole furshlugginer gang of idiots at the AAEC convention in 2017 which is worth a look.
I have to say a lot of my affection for the magazine is nostalgia, but there’s nothing wrong with that, and, when you add, to the increase in satiric competition they faced, the loss — by death or retirement — of the magazine’s old Yiddish founders, well, if I’m going to inveigh against remakes of classic movies, it’s only consistent to feel that Mad today wasn’t Mad yesterday because it wasn’t and it couldn’t have been.
Still, it was lovely, wasn’t it?
Two other MOCCA moments:
That MOCCA coverage also included — as you’ll know if you read the whole furshlugginer thing — running into Abrams Editor Charlie Kochman, who sang the praises of Brian Fies’s then-upcoming “A Fire Story.”
Friend-of-the-Blog Fies was interviewed about the book on PBS Newshour last night and you can catch him at about the 45-minute point.
And, BTW, the book is as good as “Editor Charlie” had said it was going to be.
Plus it included discussion of a panel with, among others, Steve Brodner, whose latest grand exploit is a delightfully sharp piece in the LA Times pointing out the new Bill of Rights as written by Dear Leader.
And we know it’s really Brodner who wrote it, and not Donald Trump, because it’s a funny parody and you can’t do a funny parody of something if you’ve never read the original.
Which reminds me that, if the White House posts a picture tomorrow of the massive crowd on the National Mall for his celebration, I’d recommend you check it carefully for Peter, Paul and Mary, and Martin Luther King, because they probably won’t really be there today.
Meanwhile, here’s a holiday salute for art directors and graphic designers everywhere, which I am pretty sure white supremacists won’t seize for their own nefarious purposes, though they can have the one with fleurs-de-lys.
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