It's A Mad, Mad, Mad World
Sun Herald
Sunday August 10, 2003
Goofy mascot Alfred E. Neuman may be middle-aged, but his magazine still inspires comedians, cartoonists and satirists.
Sometime in the 1980s, after Michael J. Fox had conquered the small screen as Alex P. Keaton in Family Ties, then the big screen as Marty McFly in Back To The Future, he was asked in a TV interview about the point at which he knew he'd finally become famous. "When I got drawn by Mort Drucker in Mad magazine," he replied.
Fox wasn't alone. When Mad took the micky out of you, you knew you'd made it. The publication started in 1952 as a comic book parodying other comics, but a few years later it transformed into a magazine that made fun of anything that created a large enough blip on the political, social or pop-cultural radar.
In the new movie Down With Love, Renee Zellweger's 1960s character publishes a book about sex and the single girl. The filmmakers get across the idea that she's become a national icon by showing her caricatured on the cover of Mad, her trademark pink checked suit and wide-brimmed hat in place, and her face replaced with the gap-toothed, freckled visage of Alfred E. Neuman.
Alfred has friends in high places. Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, remembers his childhood excitement upon finding a secret stash of Mad magazines that his older brother had outgrown. The discovery obviously had an impact. Think about it: Bart's bratty, devil-may-care personality is not a million miles away from Alfred E. Neuman's. It's a short trip from Neuman's slogan "What - me worry?" to Bart's catchphrases "Underachiever and proud of it" and "Eat my shorts". The Simpsons has made a handful of Mad references over the past 13 years, from a female convict with a Mad fold-in tattoo to Milhouse picking up an issue and exclaiming, "Boy, they're really socking it to that Spiro Agnew guy! He must work there or something."
That last dig isn't far from the accepted truth. Even though Mad celebrated its 50th birthday last year - confounding Time's 1956 prediction that it would be a "short-lived satirical pulp" - it was very much a product of the 50s, 60s and early 70s. Sales peaked in 1973, when the September issue, with a parody of The Poseidon Adventure on the cover, sold 2.8 million copies. But there's been a steady decline since. Last year, the average issue sold just over 200,000 copies. There was a long-held policy not to take any advertising so Mad would be free to satirise just about anything it pleased - that policy was overturned in 2001. Times have changed, and maybe Alfred E. Neuman finally has something to worry about - the bottom line.
Still, Neuman should find comfort in having influenced so many. Take Charles Firth, 27, of the team that produces satirical newspaper/website The Chaser (and ABC-TV's CNNNN). His inner-city Sydney terrace is in such a mess that it's a wonder he can find anything in there. But he knows exactly where his collection of old Mad magazines is located. He pulls a stack of issues off an overcrowded bookshelf and flicks through them as he talks about one of his childhood obsessions. "I totally credit Mad magazine with putting me in the habit of reading," he says. "When I was about 10, my dad saw that I was into comics, and bought me a subscription to Mad, because he wanted to encourage me to read." Fellow Chaser member Andrew Hansen arrives. "I remember that the parodies were always very simple, so an eight- to 12-year-old could understand them," says Hansen, who was such a fan that he even had the Mad board game, where the aim was to go bankrupt. "There was no other outlet for that then, because children's TV didn't provide parody or that sort of humour."
Both agree that the magazine probably sowed the seeds of satire in their young minds. Look in the top right-hand corner of the front page of The Chaser and you'll even see an indirect homage: "$2.95 Bargain!" echoes Mad's tradition of positioning the word "Cheap" next to the cover price.
Dave "D. J." Williams's business card informs you that he is "Creative Consultant And General Office Slacker" at Australian Mad. He attributes the drop in sales since the magazine's heyday to the internet, computer games and the fact that there are a lot more magazines and comics in the marketplace. While acknowledging that in the 80s "the magazine was just running along and wasn't sure of its direction", he feels that it picked up its game in the 90s. He's also grateful that John Howard is still Prime Minister. "He's very good for satire," says Williams.
Mad devotee Doug Gilford is not so forgiving of 80s-era Mad. "There was a period when I wished they'd shut down," he says. This is from a man who runs his own Mad website, www.collectmad.com, and owns every single issue - that means the 38-year-old has more than 430 of them, individually sealed in Mylar bags, and chronologically filed in boxes in his Portland, Oregon, home.
"The 60s and 70s was the golden era because Mad was able to push buttons during a tumultuous time in American history," he says. "Watergate, Vietnam, assassinations. They had Nixon to pick on. As more media developed and tastes changed, Mad had to work harder to get noticed and was ultimately doomed to fail beside video games, shock radio jocks, internet humour and cable television."
It was more than 40 years ago when Mad hired its most enduring artists. Even casual readers who've not picked up an issue for decades will probably best remember it for Antonio Prohias's Spy Vs Spy, Don Martin's goofy characters and sound effects, Dave Berg's clunky drawings for The Lighter Side Of... series, Al Jaffee's fold-in on the last page, and Mort Drucker's parodies of TV shows and movies.
You could see Mad's influence on pioneering US comedy TV shows such as Laugh-In and Saturday Night Live, and Australian Mad's Williams feels it left its mark on local small-screen sketch shows Full Frontal and Fast Forward. Meanwhile, Mad's stable of artists held sway over generations of budding cartoonists. As a young outsider, celebrated underground comic artist Robert Crumb idolised founding editor (and renowned cartoonist) Harvey Kurtzman. "By age 14, I had gone through the pain of adolescent alienation," Crumb once wrote. "I realised I was a geek and I wasn't going to make it with the girls. My psyche was ready to receive the jolt from Mad magazine."
Here in Australia, some popular newspaper cartoonists confess to a touch of Mad-ness. Patrick Cook has said he had a collection, and was a fan of 1950s Mad artist Wallace Wood. The late Bill Mitchell of The Australian admitted he could never draw convincing feet on his characters until he studied Mad to learn the right way. And Steve Panozzo, who specialises in corporate sector caricatures, notes that Drucker's book Familiar Faces is one of his three cartooning "bibles".
In the foreword to that book, Charles M. Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, wrote, "Frankly, I don't know how [Drucker] does it, and I stand in a long line of admirers ... I think he draws everything the way we would all like to draw." Good grief. Even Charlie Brown, it seems, grew up in a Mad world.
© 2003 Sun Herald