[HN Gopher] What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine
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What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 127 points
Date : 2024-09-23 16:25 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nrm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nrm.org)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| 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%...
| bluedino wrote:
| Hah! Mad Magazine was one of the things my mother refused to
| allow me to checkout from the library.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Jeanette Winterson recalled her mother's lament about books:
| "You can't tell by looking what's inside them."
| DonHopkins wrote:
| The Simpsons did the best tribute to Mad that captured its
| true essence:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzu4qILQqpA
| DaoVeles wrote:
| Complete opposite experience here, my grandad had a
| subscription to it! Not sure what happened to the decades of
| them because they were all gone by the time he passed.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I read the magazine religiously as a kid (early 2000s). I got
| special editions for christmas (collections of prior
| articles/comics on particular subjects). There was one about
| advertising (Called MADvertising or something) that has a lot
| of information about old advertisements from the 1950s onward
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Occasionally, I'll find old copies of Life and/or single page
| cut outs for movies/events.
|
| The advertisements (sometimes on the back) are honestly more
| interesting.
|
| There's no truer window into a capitalist country's soul than
| how products are sold!
| DaoVeles wrote:
| Dick Bartolo one of the writers for Mad used to host The Giz
| Wiz on twit.tv. It was a daily review of all kinds of random
| gadgets that come up, it looked to be a life long fascination
| with those advertisements in the back of magazines. Promise
| the world and deliver rubbish.
|
| He saw one that had "10 indestructible Fry pans for $1". He
| knew had had to get them because of how rubbish they would
| be. Apparently you fold them in half like paper they were so
| thin.
|
| Edit : Just looked it up, he wrote MAD-vertising. So there
| you go.
| criddell wrote:
| In case you didn't know, The Onion is back in print:
|
| https://membership.theonion.com/
| DaoVeles wrote:
| I am so glad to see things like this happening again. Im not
| saying "bring back all the magazines!" But some of them had a
| real place in the format.
|
| The one thing I loved about the old tech mags was because of
| the longer cadence they could really focus on long form and
| more indepth articles than what we usually get.
|
| Shout out to Atomic magazine in Australia during the early
| 2000s. Absolute peak of this stuff.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| You'll probably love this.
|
| https://s3-eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/cartoons-s3/styles/pro...
|
| ...An artistic portrait of Antonio Prohias (Mr. "Spy vs Spy")
| by Cuban cartoonist and illustrator Ramses Morales Izquierdo.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Found a Mad Magazine at my grandparents' place as a pre-teen,
| opened it, and immediately picked one of the spies to root for
| against the other one. Serious tribal instinct there.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I miss Spy Magazine (no relation to MAD or Spy vs. Spy).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_(magazine)
|
| My favorite cover (very slightly NSFW):
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3662697/The-spy-who-hate...
| borski wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I just love Don Martin's style!
| Cheyana wrote:
| Came in to comment on this, all of them were great but Don was
| the GOAT. And his sound effects! I would love to compile a list
| of them.
| eludwig wrote:
| I still have my original copy of "The MAD Adventures of
| Captain Klutz", probably bought around 1970ish. Such a
| singular talent. Died pretty young (68), which is sad.
| JackFr wrote:
| "Eat More Mangoes"
| kubanczyk wrote:
| If anyone is interested why there is "Potrzebie" above "what, me
| worry?" on the drum: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrzebie
| cancerhacker wrote:
| https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/fg.html
| euroderf wrote:
| I don't remember whether it was Potrzebie or one of the other
| classic MAD nonsense words, but one day I was amazed to see it
| as a town name on a sign in the Czech Republic. With a couple
| of accents.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| 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
| cancerhacker wrote:
| Many years ago, I was just doing a drive through vacation of
| New England and woke up in my B&B to the smell of roasting
| turkey - I hadn't realized it but I'd wound up in Stockbridge
| on Thanksgiving day. I don't recall anything special going on
| in town other than a radio station playing Alice's Restaurant
| on repeat.
| danielktdoranie wrote:
| 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
| bbarnett wrote:
| YOU! My mom would always come home, and claim it "was that way"
| when she bought it for me.
|
| I thought she was doing it. But it was _you_.
| xist wrote:
| 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...
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| 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...
| genewitch wrote:
| My cousins had a large collection from i guess the 70s and very
| early 80s that i read a lot. My mom and aunt had read them too.
| So one day i bought a new one at the store and brought it home
| and my mom found it. There was a parody of Edward Scissorhands,
| and one of the topiaries he made was of a middle finger. I
| didn't know what that was as she described it (flipping the
| bird). Apparently that was enough to get it banned in my house.
|
| Incidentally, i got a parent teacher meeting for bringing some
| stickers from one of my cousin's Mad magazines to school. There
| was a "POINK" onomatopoeia with a lady's boob and a wardrobe
| malfunction on one of the stickers, and this was enough to
| warrant the third degree.
|
| Mad magazine was pretty tame, i never got the puritanism
| exhibited by everyone around me, especially since they had read
| the magazine when they were young, and their kids, too, but i
| read the same ones and suddenly it's taboo?
| whartung wrote:
| 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.
| genewitch wrote:
| full color, higher page counts are ~$18. I get maybe one a year
| and i have no idea where they are!
| mdf wrote:
| 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/
| m463 wrote:
| dedication to create an svg version...
|
| https://meatfighter.com/mad/mad.svg
| arp242 wrote:
| It was pretty common to distribute code as "listing" like this.
| Typically it came with a checksum for every line and a small
| program to compute and print that for your own program that you
| had typed over, which you could then use to fairly
| quickly(-ish) spot any typos.
|
| All of this is how I learned to program by the way. Kids these
| days don't know how easy they have it.
| mellavora wrote:
| Checksums! Bah, I used to have to code uphill both ways in
| the snow, and I liked it!
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Checksums were a great idea but I just could never resist the
| temptation to make changes to the program as I was typing it
| in.
| dole wrote:
| The Commodore version of the source in the magazine _never_
| worked. I probably typed it in at least five times in whole
| thinking I 'd screwed something up. It wasn't until a few years
| ago (from an HN post, no less) that I found the link above and
| finally, finally got to see what the code did.
| evanelias wrote:
| Excellent link, thank you for posting this.
|
| In case there are any other Sergio Aragones superfan weirdos
| like me here, who only click MAD-related stories in order to
| command-f for "Sergio Aragones" and then move on when
| inevitably there are no results: today's your lucky day, click
| that link above!
| derencius wrote:
| nice. I'm a Groo fan.
| benrmatthews wrote:
| "What Simple Pastime is Becoming a Luxury that Many Americans Can
| No Longer Afford?"
|
| Anyone have the "after" of the fold-in image?
| swayvil wrote:
| Teeth. I can't afford teeth.
| genewitch wrote:
| "eating"
| duskwuff wrote:
| "Eating."
|
| https://i.postimg.cc/wjXHqQhF/MAD-Fold-In-Al-Jaffe-172-What-...
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| You thought the _early_ 1970 's was when the US currency had
| been damaged the worst?
|
| This was 1979. By then it was tens of millions more Americans
| who were being discarded economically[0] in order to retain a
| fuller illusion of prosperity within reach for the remainder.
|
| [0] Never to be heard from economically again.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| in my day MAD was purely subscription based: no advertising
| supportengineer wrote:
| My mom would buy me these because she loved hearing me laughing
| hysterically.
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| dogleash wrote:
| >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.
| eterm wrote:
| Yes, very few news sources are genuinely irreverent. The
| Register is one of the few, and you can tell, because it often
| gets people in the comments here complaining of it's style.
|
| A lot of content out there, user-driven especially, is just
| sarcastic or "ironic" for the sake of it, not actually pushing
| boundaries. Worse, they're often cementing the status quo but
| doing so in a way that doesn't actually make the point they
| want to make.
|
| They just state the (often minority) counter-point in a
| sarcastic tone and leave it to the reader to fill in the
| (typically agreeable) blanks.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| They want the benefit of the label without the execution
| swayvil wrote:
| 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.
| tamaharbor wrote:
| One of my favorites has always been the pharmacist behind the
| scenes dispensing all prescription medications from a single huge
| bottle of aspirin.
| patwolf wrote:
| 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.
| CalChris wrote:
| 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.
| lifefeed wrote:
| 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.
| peppermill wrote:
| The whole take-down is great:
| https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-1/the-intellectual-situati...
| peppermill wrote:
| I once worked with the Normal Rockwell Estate and their
| letterhead used Comic Sans.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| 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.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| 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?
| cholantesh wrote:
| Web sketches and memes will probably be looked at that way, but
| as far as a satirical publication that has sight gags and
| comics...maybe the Onion, but maybe not as contemporary as some
| of its pretenders, of which the Hard Drive is the only one
| that's remotely as funny.
| lykahb wrote:
| The Viz Comics is similar
| mdaniel wrote:
| This may interest you:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=totally+mad+magazine&ia=web
|
| > "Totally MAD" is a collection of the issues of MAD Magazine
| from the start until 1998 published by Broderbund
| zwieback wrote:
| 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!
| trothamel wrote:
| 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.
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