What, 'MAD' Worry?
Examining culture for over 50 years, the humor magazine still has no shortage of good material
By Mick Farren
For at least the last decade, I hadn't thought too much about MAD magazine, and, when I did, it was dinosaur nostalgia, a relic of my youth, like Eddie Cochran, Have Gun - Will Travel, or Pez. MAD ruled its own era, but its time had passed. I owned some decaying originals and paperback reprints, but these were the immortal fun of the 1950s. "Humor in a jugular vein" was how MAD described Bill Elder's treasured version of Edgar Alan Poe's "The Raven," Jack Davis's classic caricatures of Elvis Presley, and the Wally Wood masterpiece: a spoof of The Wild One that, according to legend, so amused Brando, that he started answering the phone with the name of Wood's character - Marlon Branflakes.
But it was still the stuff of youth. As the years wore on, MAD seemed bypassed, maybe even sidelined, first by the underground press and the illustrations of Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Skip Williamson, and S. Clay Wilson. Then came socially committed newspaper strips like Doonesbury, and new-look humor mags like National Lampoon, with jokes about LSD and cocaine. When National Lampoon indirectly spawned Saturday Night Live, TV seemed to be annexing MAD's former domain of no prisoners, pop-culture satire.
Well before the death of John Belushi, I had ceased to be a MAD reader. I would see it now and again on the newsstand and wonder how the hell it stayed in business, because MAD had never, in its entire history, accepted advertising. I'd also check to see if you still could fold the back page lengthwise for the crafted sight gag. What I didn't factor into my musings was MAD being a survivor. It had all but been born a survivor. When psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham, the absurd but infinitely dangerous moral reformer, had finished his 1950s national crusade to "clean-up" comic books, MAD was the only title that publisher William M. Gaines left standing, even though his imprint - EC Comics - had been scoring big-time with horror titles like Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, and Haunt of Fear, and the sci-fi comics Weird Science and Weird Fantasy.
Wertham - the man who adamantly believed that Batman and Robin were homosexual lovers and Wonder Woman was a lesbian bondage mistress - had so panicked Congress with his public appearances and his book, The Seduction of the Innocent, that lawmakers leaned on the comic book industry to impose the most stringent self-censorship. The "Comics Code," from which graphic storytelling would take decades to recover, left no place for EC. MAD, however, was not exactly a comic. The best definition was a "humor magazine," going its own merrily subversive way by, as one issue expressed it, "examining, evaluating, and the destroying culture in general."
That MAD had not only gone its own merry way in 1950s and '60s, but also continues to here in the 21st century, is something that, earlier this year, its current editor, John Ficarra, felt he should bring to public attention. He achieved this with a special issue of the magazine, in graphic novel format, titled The MAD War on Bush - a comprehensive collection of all the scurrilous but wholly warranted attacks MAD has made on the Bush administration over the past six years. Subtitled "A 'shock and awe' attack on the worst president of the 21st century," the cover alone sets the tone. Against a stars-and-stripes backdrop, G.W. Bush stands with a paternal hand on the shoulder of Alfred E. Neuman, while Neuman wears a T-shirt that reads, "I'm with Stupid."
To call Bush an idiot, here in 2007, can hardly be considered an act of supreme courage. With the president's approval ratings somewhere around the freezing point of gin, and Homeland Security demonstrably unable to evacuate New Orleans - let alone round up dissidents and confine them in some Patriot Act-sanctioned detention camp - satirists can feel wholly secure mocking him. You think Comedy Central would be running the asinine Lil' Bush if there was any risk involved? Let's think back, however, to the Days of Paranoia, the aftermath of 9/11, the hysteria that surrounded the invasion of Iraq and falling Saddam statue. The flags were on the SUVs and the word "traitor" was tossed around with vicious abandon. To criticize Bush was to betray the troops and give aid and comfort to Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, Dixie Chicks CDs were burned in the red state heartland. Back then, to jest was to run a definite risk. Surprisingly, MAD was actually running ahead of the pack.
The magazine acknowledged as much right after 9/11, when a caption in a feature titled "How Everything Changed" that read: "Late-night talk-show comedy writers who didn't have any problem making fun of the death of Jimmy Hoffa, Robert Blake's wife, and O.J.'s ex-wife suddenly get a conscience." Indeed, the MAD attacks on Bush go all the way back to the 2000, when the running gag was Bush's alleged cocaine use, and MAD featured deftly doctored photos of George with white powder rimming his nostrils.
Even in the grimmest of times, MAD just hammered away, although editor Ficarra denies any political agenda. "Since its inception during the Eisenhower administration, MAD's policy has always been to mock the man in office. We begin each new administration with a clean slate and we wait for them to do something really stupid. (Usually that happens around day two.)"
In his introduction to The MAD War on Bush, Ficarra nutshells the adversarial relationship between the gag writer and the leader of the nation: "Comedy writers used to think that there was no greater gift to their craft than the election of Richard 'I am not a crook!' Nixon. Then along came Bill 'I did not have sex with that woman' Clinton. Could it get any better? Sadly, yes. George 'You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie' Bush and his bungling administration have provided enough material to ... well ... fill a book."
Indeed, there are sufficient MAD Bush barbs to fill this book. And I discovered that, by assuming the magazine had long since seen its best days, I had missed a whole lot of good stuff. I had also missed an incredibly high level of quality. Although we talk of Wally Wood and Bill Elder with nothing short of reverence, current artists like Drew Friedman, Sam Sisco, Amanda Conner, and Mort Drucker maintain a standard of draftsmanship that is unsurpassed, while, at the same time, Peter Kuper offers a more modern, less-realist approach to his drawings. The graphic work is, overall, as immaculate as ever, and the advertising parodies are as painstakingly perfect as the print material coming out of any New York advertising agency or Hollywood studio art department.
Working the full spectrum of Bush crime, folly, and ignorance, The MAD War on Bush pulls no punches, covering as it does everything from torture at Abu Ghraib to inadequate veterans' benefits and Dick Cheney's draft-dodging psychotic megalomania. One might complain that some of the humor is brutally crude. In a spread comparing the Iraq war to earlier conflicts, Rush Limbaugh and Adolf Hitler are juxtaposed above a caption that reads "During WWII, the Reich blamed their problems on the Jews. During Iraq, the right blames their problems on the news."
Gags like these are as subtle as a Louisville Slugger, but MAD was never noted for its gentility of taste, and, to be frank, how much gentility do the current denizens of the White House truly deserve? "Do unto them as they do unto you" seems to be the principle.
Published: 09/20/2007
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