The cover price inevitably went up over the years, but to the Usual Gang of Idiots who produced the magazine, Mad was forever “CHEAP.” As far as I was concerned, it was a steal. On a value-per-laugh basis, Mad couldn’t be beat. Each issue was a satirical horn of plenty, every spread as dense with lunatic detail as the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Mad, which ceased publication in 2018, was the work of many artists, each with his or her (but mostly his) own style. (DC Entertainment relaunched the magazine later that year with a redesigned, bimonthly model.)
Some, such as Norman Mingo, were virtuosos of naturalism; others, like Basil Wolverton, specialized in the grotesque. But they all obeyed the same aesthetic imperative: leave no negative space. The resulting gags-within-gags were known in-house as “chicken fat.” The movie and television parodies drawn by Jack Davis or Mort Drucker were larded with it. Ditto Al Jaffee’s Fold-Ins. Sergio Aragonés made sure that not even the margins were left untouched.
In the catalogue for “What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine”—an exhibition on now at the Norman Rockwell Museum, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts—the former Mad editor John Ficarra writes, “Some people remember where they were when man first walked on the moon. Others can recall where they were when they first heard the Beatles. Me, I can tell you exactly where I was the first time I ever saw a copy of MAD Magazine.”
So can I. It was at a day camp in Connecticut, circa 1990. I was six years old. I don’t think I got a single one of the written jokes, but the drawings were a revelation. A family friend later gave me a couple of boxes of back issues from the 1970s and 1980s. The references—Spiro Agnew, OPEC, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice—were largely new to me, but the visuals were instantly familiar. Because while Mad reflected an enormous amount of social and cultural upheaval in its pages, the magazine’s staff had less turnover than the Supreme Court.
So whether you became a reader at the dawn of Mad or in its long twilight, you knew all the same artists: not just Mingo, Wolverton, Aragonés, Jaffee, Davis, and Drucker, but also Don Martin, Paul Coker, Dave Berg, Bob Clarke, George Woodbridge, Paul Peter Porges, Antonio Prohías, and Don “Duck” Edwing, not to mention Will Elder, Wally Wood, and Mad’s founder, Harvey Kurtzman. (Mad regularly repackaged old material in newsstand-only “Super Special” issues, exposing newer fans to the magazine’s archive and saving the publisher a bundle.)
The 1966 Off Broadway revue The Mad Show was a minor hit, and Mad TV has its defenders, but for me, Mad can only be properly experienced on paper. I came to this realization the hard way, after getting rid of my entire hoard while cleaning out my mother’s attic one day, thinking that a recently released DVD-ROM with more than 600 issues of Mad loaded onto a single disc would be a good enough substitute. Boy, was I wrong.
A few years ago, my sister-in-law came upon a stack of issues from the 80s and 90s on the curb outside a neighbor’s house and texted me a photo. Did I want them? Yes, I did. That batch became the start of a new and growing collection. I’m getting more of the jokes this time around. But mostly I’m savoring the chicken fat.
“What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine” is on at the Norman Rockwell Museum, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, until October 27
Ash Carter is a Deputy Editor at AIR MAIL and a co-author of Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends. He is currently editing a collection of Edward Jay Epstein’s best writing
