Getting MAD

When the playground bully in the Oval Office recently called Pete Buttigieg, “Alfred E. Neuman,” it sent Buttigieg scrambling to Google. “I’d never heard of him,” the 37-year old admitted. “It must be a generational thing.”

For even a dope like the president, whose reading was likely limited to Playboy and Penthouse (and then only for the pictures) to know who Alfred E. was, speaks to MAD’s pervasiveness in society over the decades.

Like reading The Catcher in the Rye or listening to punk rock, you had to be the right age to discover MAD. Written and drawn by the “usual gang of idiots” as they described themselves, the staff was made up of primarily New York, liberal-minded Jewish guys who helped generations question not only authority, but popular culture, politics, society and (especially) Madison Avenue.

MAD’s worldview was progressive and bipartisan. Corporations were mostly evil. Cigarette advertising was worse. Most TV shows were idiotic. Politicians were not to be trusted. Parents were loving, but often clueless. MAD never spoke down to its readers. While I had the impression that its staff, all children of the fifties (and forties), never got the Beatles, when it came time to parody them, Ringo was the obvious target in this gentle, gender-bending Breck girl ad:

From the days when MAD was still a comic book and not a magazine, it published one its sharpest satires, Mickey Rodent, which had Mickey, jealous that Darnold Duck was stealing the limelight, selling out his feathered pal to a zoo; all the characters questioning why they always wore gloves, and Pluto holding signs asking why, of all the animals in Dizzy Land, he was “chosen to remain mute.” Talk about questioning authority. And still funny.

New issues of MAD will disappear from newsstands before the end of the year. I pretty much stopped reading the magazine in the mid-Seventies when it was parodying TV shows I’d never seen and ads for products I wasn’t familiar with. It was time for younger kids to move up to MAD and for me to step away. National Lampoon was there to fill the void, followed by Saturday Night Live and, much later, Spy magazine and The Onion.

Twenty years ago, I tried to re-read Catcher in the Rye. It wasn’t working for me like it did when I was 13. I put the book down and gave it to my son. We all move on, which is just another way of saying, What, me worry?