Thank you, Mad magazine!

Piggy

Unlicensed street skeptic
Piggy
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Mar 11, 2006
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I just want to say, for what it's worth, "Thank you" to Mad magazine.

When I was a kid -- and I mean a little kid -- I used to swipe my older brother's issues of Mad and read them. There was a lot that I understood, but a lot that I didn't... and I sure as hell wanted to. I wanted to comprehend the sex, the politics, even the movie satires.

It was the era of Watergate, and my political foundation was formed primarily by Mad's comic commentary on the events of the era, together with the documentary series The World at War, which my father allowed me to watch over my mother's objections.

What I learned from Mad was that patriotism does not consist of unflinching loyalty to this or that leader. Rather, patriotism consist of loyalty to the highest principles of the nation.

I also learned that there's more than one point of view, that free speech is precious, and that a good sense of humor goes a long way.

Today, when I see so much acrimony, so much blind loyalty to this or that party, religion, or politician, I am truly saddened. Mad opened my eyes to the dangers of partisanship at a very early age, and I will never forget those lessons.

And The World at War, at the same time, opened my eyes to the truly horrible consequences that can result, among the most civilized of people, when a blind eye is turned.
 
What? No other Mad fans?

No wonder we're in such sad shape. :(
 
Mad was a rare treat over here in the UK when I was a kid, only two newspaper shops sold it in my town and their stocking was quite irregular however whenever I could I would buy it. I learnt everything i know about USA culture and society from Mad....

Have to say The World at War had a profound influence on me - helped by the hauntingly beautiful music.
 
I too grew up with Mad Magazine in the late 60's (8-10 years old). Looking back it seems Mad Magazine was to me what the Daily Show is to the youth today, but on a monthly basis.

Nixon should be thanked by Mad Magazine for being both a caricature of a person and of a president (in a presumably non-dictatorial country).

I downloaded a while back from the Usenets the very first Mad as a PDF. Great art work and story lines.

Charlie (what, me worry?) Monoxide
 
I loved Mad magazine. I still remember, from close to 30 years ago, poem and song parodies, by heart.

From a Dr. Seuss environmental parody: "There was a man, whose name was Cliff. Of city air he took a whiff. He did not have a handkerchief, to strain the air he chanced to sniff--and now poor Cliff is cold and stiff. Who are you, with that funny head? What is your name--is it Fred, or Red? --"No, no, no, my name's Con Ed; I fouled the air that made Cliff dead. But I'll be punished, I can tell. A million bucks, they'll fine me well. A second's income, shot to hell."

And, to the tune of America the Beautiful:

Oh cancerous, for smoggy skies, for pesticidal grain
Irritated mountains rise above an asphalt plain
America, America, thy sins shall be thy doom
Monoxide clouds shall be thy shrouds, thy cities be thy tomb

wonderful, subversive, stuff.
 
Piggy said:
What? No other Mad fans?

No wonder we're in such sad shape. :(
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Hey, I was a dues-paying member of the Alfred E. Neuman fan club. And Spy vs Spy inspired me to write comic strips, or at least try.
 
I grew up reading MAD Magazine. My parents had a stack of them from the Kennedy years (I still have a box full). Most of what I know of America came from them.
William M. Gaines was my hero.

I sometimes leaf through them and chuckle at stuff. Don Martin was a genius.
Mort Drucker did the best movie parodies.
 
Meffy said:
Potrzebie.

Etaoin shrdlu.



And I know what they mean, too!
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Please enlighten me. You will be solving one of the minor mysteries of my life.

I was going to sign this post Roger Kaputnik, but decided against it.
 
Mad forever ruined the song "She's a Grand Old Flag" for me:

Oh she's a fat old hag
She's an unsightly bag
But she's still my true love
Emmy Lou
She's the emblem of
The land I love,
Her complexion is red, white, and blue.

Overweight and big,
In her ill-fitting wig,
Oh forever in peace may it wag,
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
I'll escape from that fat old hag!
 
The three seminal magazines of my youth:

MAD
Consumer Reports
Scientific American

What else is there that you need to know?

What me worry?
 
Brainache said:
Please enlighten me. You will be solving one of the minor mysteries of my life.
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Two of them!

I was going to sign this post Roger Kaputnik, but decided against it.
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:-D

The Linotype, a keyboard-operated machine that cast a line of metal type at a time, helped speed up the printing industry in the late 19th and 20th centuries. As you filled a line with text, the machine would assemble wedge-shaped "spacebands" and master type forms called "matrices" in a row. If you mess up there's no "Undo" -- you have to fill out the line, send it to be cast in hot type metal (then thrown in the "hellbox" to be re-melted) and start a new line.

To fill out a line of text, the easiest thing to do was to run the finger along the first two rows of keys. The Linotype isn't arranged like a typewriter, though; the letters in those rows are... you've guessed, haven't you? -- etaoin shrdlu.

Occasionally a Linotype operator would forget to discard a defective line, and it would sneak into the printed material.

Such a defective itme might looketaoinshrdluetaoinshrdluetaoinshrdlu

... like that. MAD Magazine adopted the mystical incantation etaoin shrdlu as nonsense words which typically appeared at random places in the (ostensible) page margins, in the early days often alongside printed cockroaches IIRC.

Righty, that takes care of etaoin shrdlu.

Portzebie was another early MAD catchword. It's a genuine Polish word, a forn of the noun "need" according to Wikipedia. It's not pronounced anything like the "pot-ra-ZEE-bee" most English-speakers use.

Donald Knuth, possibly the world's greatest computer scientist, didn't get his start with "The Art of Computer Programming" (Vol. 1 pub. 1962, Vol. 4 presently coming along in installments). His first published work was "The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures" in MAD, which included scads of MAD in-joke words as units.
 
HarryKeogh said:
I loved the Sergio Aragones drawings in the margins.
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Me too, except now I'd need reading glasses to discern them.

I might actually consider getting that CD-rom. I always loved the movie parodies, except for the musical ones. Most of the time they referenced songs I didn't know. I don't know how many times I read "Sung to the tune of 'The Girl That I Marry'". Or maybe it was just the same issue many times.

I saw a MAD a couple years ago, and while pleased that they still had "Dave Berg's Lighter Side of...", I was a little disappointed that they cut from the former four-line panel layout to three. Better visuals, perhaps, but fewer jokes.

I used to frequent a certan comic shop quite a bit, and couldn't resist picking up the large "action figures" of Black Spy and White Spy. But the pieces I really like are the Alfred E. Neumann Justice League figures.
http://actionfigures.about.com/library/nosearch/n0801dcdalfred.htm
 
Meffy said:
Two of them!




Donald Knuth, possibly the world's greatest computer scientist, didn't get his start with "The Art of Computer Programming" (Vol. 1 pub. 1962, Vol. 4 presently coming along in installments). His first published work was "The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures" in MAD, which included scads of MAD in-joke words as units.
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I also liked the potplant called Arthur.
And the little "if so and so married....." in the margins in the very early ones.
 
My mate got me an official MAD Magazine "What... Me Furry?" shirt years ago. Gotta lose more weight, get back down to where that will fit again. :-D
 
Meffy said:
Portzebie was another early MAD catchword. It's a genuine Polish word, a forn of the noun "need" according to Wikipedia. It's not pronounced anything like the "pot-ra-ZEE-bee" most English-speakers use.
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The combination "rz" in Polish is pronounced as a "ch," and the "ie" isn't a dipthong. It's pronounced, very roughly, "poh-cheh-bee-uh."

I read Mad as often as I could from 1980 until 1992 or so, and like Darat, much of what I know of American culture (or did prior to moving to the US) was gleaned from Mad (along with Doonesbury and Bloom County). I do own Totally Mad on cd-rom, that is, every issue up to 1998, though I haven't looked at in a while. Certainly, Mad in the 1990s I'm rather schmeh about. I guess I quit reading after they ran an anti-smoking article that was just plain unfunny. Strangely, when I was doing basic training in the Dutch army in 1993, I remember one of the platoon instructors saying to me, "You strike me as the kind of man who reads Mad magazine. Am I right?"
 
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