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In March 1976, a great American portrait debuted to an adoring public. It was a bicentennial appreciation of George Washington … of a sort. Inspired by The Athenaeum Portrait, Gilbert Stuart’s 1796 painting featured on the one-dollar bill, this rendering of the first president featured one distinction. The original showed Washington with swollen, tightly closed lips due to a new set of ill-fitting dentures, while the 1976 version had a gap-toothed smirk instantly recognizable to America’s middle school reprobates. Equally recognizable was the blank stare that those same kids knew evoked the iconic question: “What, Me Worry?”
Drawn by 80-year-old illustrator Norman Mingo, Mad magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman graced the cover of Issue No. 181 in a glorious powdered wig. It’s one of 275 original paintings and drawings—alongside 150 physical objects—on display in “What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine,” an exhibition running through October 27 at the Norman Rockwell Museum in western Massachusetts. It covers the full 72-year history of Mad, highlighted by the stretch from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, when the magazine pilloried mass culture—television, movies, politics and more—in a way that introduced satire to kids raised on tamer entertainment like “Leave It to Beaver.”
Nothing was off-limits in Mad, a newsstand stalwart that would reach peak annual sales in the 1970s of 2.5 million issues by delivering belly laughs and self-satisfaction to America’s class clowns through cartoons, parodies, sarcastic characters and an unending stream of gross-out gags. Mad gave mainstream American teenagers license to thumb their nose at institutions in a way that had never really happened on a mass scale, a seismic change that would have a huge influence on pop culture through the likes of “Saturday Night Live,” David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and “Family Guy.”
On a sunny August afternoon, I spent a few hours slowly wandering throughout the five galleries, reveling in the Mad days of my youth. At 53, I grew up falling in love with the magazine during the last years of its self-described “classic era.” Looking at all the amazing artwork, particularly the movie drawings of “The Odd Father” and “Jaw’d” by the legendary caricaturist Mort Drucker, took me back to the way-way-facing-the-rear-window-back of an Oldsmobile station wagon. In our family, Mad was strictly a road trip treat. Being immersed in all things Mad in the summer of 2024 transported me to 1980, thumbing through issues with my brothers while listening to Billy Joel and Queen on a battery-powered single-speaker eight-track player loop for the long trip from Montana to Los Angeles.
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And I’m hardly alone in my adoration. The Tuesday I visited the museum was crowded, with more than a few tie-dyed gray-hairs audibly laughing at the subversive spreads once hidden under their mattresses. The exhibition is the best kind of memory lane stroll, one that thrilled co-curator Steve Brodner, who came of age in the magazine’s heyday.
“In the period before puberty hits, you start to get an awareness of yourself in the world, and for kids wired a certain way you start questioning parents, teachers, other adults, and that’s what Mad did: It showed how important it was to be skeptical of institutions and so-called authority figures of all kinds,” says Brodner, whose own satirical art has appeared in a variety of publications over the last 50 years. “Mad was a cultural earthquake. It engaged us to consume newspapers, movies, political speeches, advertising, books and so on differently.”
“It was the first place that told me, ‘This is a load of crap they are trying to sell you for their own self-interest, and you don’t have to buy it.’ Mad was encouraging what we now call critical thinking, which is a dangerous thing,” he adds.
The antihero’s origin story
Mad magazine had its beginnings in 1947, when publisher Maxwell Gaines’ death in an upstate New York boating accident left his Educational Comics company to his 25-year-old son, William Gaines. Under Maxwell, the comics featured stories of science, animals, history and Picture Stories From the Bible. When William took over, he quickly shifted gears to “Entertaining Comics” (EC for short) and started publishing romance, westerns, science fiction, war and horror stories, most notably Tales From the Crypt. Gaines the younger had more than laughs and frights on his mind, however; woven into EC Comics were progressive ideals around racial equality, pacifism, environmentalism and the existential nuclear-age dread rarely spoken of in the placid, conformist 1950s.
In 1952, a comic book poking fun at other comic books debuted, but it would take four issues for Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD to take off. That fourth one featured the parody “Superduperman,” a blueprint for making hay of pop culture and politics. Amid a panic over youth corruption, inspired in part by EC’s other publications, editor Harvey Kurtzman convinced Gaines to retool Mad from a comic book into a magazine, and in July 1955 (Issue No. 24), a future mockery machine emerged.
Mad quickly found an audience, which prompted Kurtzman to ask Gaines for majority ownership in the company. Denied, Kurtzman took his small stable of talent with him to launch a short-lived competitor. Undeterred, Gaines installed EC Comics veteran Al Feldstein as editor, a position he would hold for 29 years. Feldstein’s 2014 New York Times obituary described him as the guiding spirit who “gave Mad its identity as a smart-alecky, sniggering and indisputably clever spitball-shooter of a publication with a scattershot look.”
Feldstein filled out the roster of artists and writers; the full-time staff was small, often just a half-dozen people give or take, so nearly every contributor worked freelance. Gaines paid good rates, and for freelancers, Mad was a steady side gig—plus, they could work from home, which was unique for the time. As publisher, Gaines created a hands-off atmosphere that let his creative team of artists’ freak flags fly.
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“There were no rules at Mad. Everyone wrote whatever they wanted. Now whether it was accepted was a different thing, but [Gaines] left us to our own cockamamie ideas,” says Dick DeBartolo (aka “Mad’s Maddest Writer”), who successfully submitted in 1962 as a 17-year-old high schooler and went on to be featured in every issue for over 50 years. “I sent in a self-addressed stamped envelope, and six weeks later I received a piece of cardboard with a $100 check stapled to it with a note: ‘Thought your story was being returned?’”
From its earliest days, Mad was steeped in a New York Jewish sensibility (the original Neuman is certainly in the “Seinfeld” DNA), so Gothamites would drop their work off at the Midtown Manhattan offices, but submissions came from all over the country. Writers and illustrators also didn’t work together. DeBartolo wrote movie parodies as actual screenplays, which were then sent to the artists.
“[Gaines] was a father figure to a bunch of kids, sometimes delinquent, who created an atmosphere for artists and writers to thrive,” says DeBartolo. “All he cared about was that the magazine was funny. His approach is the reason Mad took off.”
What it added up to was a publication put out eight times a year—Gaines thought some months, like near the start of school, would be bad for sales—that didn’t have the conformity of something put together by a staff forced to attend all those boring meetings. There were, of course, plenty of recurring features and characters, but page-to-page, the humor and style matched the whims of the talent and kept Mad from getting stale.
“The movie parodies were more than humorous versions of the films—they were often analytical and critical deconstructions of huge box-office hits. Roger Ebert wrote an introduction to one of our collections and said, ‘I learned to be a movie critic by reading Mad magazine,’” says illustrator Sam Viviano, who made his Mad debut in 1981 with a J.R. Ewing-Alfred E. Neuman mashup cover and would go on to serve as art director. “Going back decades, Mad had fake ads hammering the tobacco industry and how awful cigarettes were, which came after Gaines quit and a lot of contributors followed suit. They were ahead of the times, saying, ‘Don’t believe what you’re told about smoking: It’s gross, harmful and certainly doesn’t make you look pretty,’ in hilarious fashion.”
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It was a Mad, Mad, Mad magazine world
One of the most important, and beloved, magazine elements made its debut in April 1964, Issue No. 86, the one with the “Alfred of Arabia” cover: the “fold-in” back cover. Cartoonist Al Jaffee’s signature stroke of brilliance turned the Playboy centerfold inside-out. The “fold-in” required doing just that to the inside back cover, which Gaines loved because he thought diehards would buy two copies: one destroyed, the other kept pristine. Jaffee’s first effort, the first of 33 in black and white, was constructed around the torrid Liz Taylor-Richard Burton affair. The fold-ins went color in 1968, and Jaffee cranked them out until 2020, when he retired at the age of 99, having contributed to 500 of the 550 Mad issues overall.
The Rockwell Museum exhibition covers the introduction of the fold-in, as well as other memorable regular features in the magazine’s pages. A “part leering wiseacre, part happy-go-lucky kid” was Kurtzman’s description of the nameless character whose first prominent appearance came in April 1956 (Issue No. 27). In December of that year, after Feldstein christened him Alfred E. Neuman, he appeared on the Mingo-drawn cover of Issue No. 30 as a write-in candidate for president, and he’s run in every election since. Similar looking gap-toothed imps had appeared in advertisements, playbills and elsewhere over the years, and a lawsuit filed by the widow of cartoonist Harry Spencer Stuff claiming Neuman had been copied from her husband’s cartoon, “the Original Optimist,” known as “Me-worry?” went nowhere. And by that time, Neuman had become synonymous with Mad.
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Another beloved feature came from the pen of Cuban artist Antonio Prohías. Forced to flee his native country after his cartoons took aim at Fidel Castro’s totalitarianism and he was accused of working for the CIA, Prohías would get his venganza in January 1961 (Issue No. 60), when he sold three drawings for $800. The world now knew the wordless Cold War enemies of espionage, the Black Spy and the White Spy, two interchangeable spooks hellbent on destroying one another. (The two were joined sporadically in the early years by the female Gray Spy, who didn’t have the face and beak of a crow and always outwitted her male counterparts.) Using a Morse code byline for “By Prohías,” the artist contributed 241 “Spy vs. Spy” cartoons, up until 1987, when the pen was handed off to other artists to keep the dynamite duo alive. Prohías died in Miami in 1998, knowing full well, as he told the Miami Herald 15 years prior, “The sweetest revenge has been to turn Fidel’s accusation of me as a spy into a money-making venture.”
In October 1961 (Issue No. 66), another long-running staple debuted with Dave Berg’s “The Lighter Side of the Television Set.” These pieces were often sendups of the then-burgeoning suburban lifestyle: office life, parties, winter, Little League baseball, hippies, sex, shopping and so on. Berg, who also created bumbling, cranky, pipe-smoking, hypochondriac alter-ego Roger Kaputnik, would end up writing for 46 years, penning “The Lighter Side of …” for 365 issues before his death in 2002.
Two reasons Mad had so many lifers were their personal loyalty to Gaines and their love of his lavish trips. Gaines was stingy with raises but generous with a huge perk: taking the staff and regular freelance contributors on elaborate vacations all over the globe. The first trip, taken in 1960 after hitting the million mark in sales, was to Haiti. It included a stop at the home of the island’s one lapsed subscriber. Gaines loaded up the crew in five jeeps, and they all got on their knees on his front lawn as the man received a renewal card. A neighbor saw the commotion and came over to check it out. Gaines proudly announced that they doubled their Haitian subscriber base.
What began as weeklong trips to tropical islands grew into full-on multiweek adventures—eventually with spouses and partners—to Japan, France, Russia and Kenya. These weren’t really work trips, either; it was all for fun, excitement, jokes (presumably plenty that wouldn’t fly today), and so much food and drink, as Gaines had a major gourmand’s appetite and the build to match.
“I went on my first trip in 1987, excited to go to Switzerland and Paris, but nervous I would have to sit at the kid’s table because these guys had been working together, and taking these vacations together, for a long time. But they embraced me with no hesitation, and I became a Mad guy for life,” says Viviano. “Gaines really was the Big Daddy, but he never forgot his roots. Well into the 1980s, he was still running it like a mom and pop comic books shop, using an old-fashioned check-writing machine. Anything to keep it from feeling corporate. DeBartolo pointed out Gaines had the clause that he ‘had the right to be unreasonable’ written into every contract, because nobody read them anyway.”
Gaines’ death in 1992, at the age of 70, was the beginning of Mad’s long, slow decline. DeBartolo says it wasn’t long before the “suits” came in and started cleaning up the place, starting with all the original art on the walls, which he thinks they sold for a couple million dollars. Gone were the days of white wine in the water cooler and a massive King Kong head hidden behind blinds in the boss’s office.
After the mid-1970s, circulation dropped precipitously, down to 208,000 in 2001 when the magazine switched to color and started taking real advertisements. In 2017, Mad’s corporate owner, DC Comics, moved the offices to Burbank, California. Pay rates were cut, and none of the aging New Yorkers were interested in making a West Coast go of it. Six issues were published that year, but in 2019, after 67 years, Mad issues with original content were officially kaput.
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Technically, Mad is still being published, but it’s recycled material from the glory days with a new fold-in and cover. It’s a niche’s niche now, and kids like Bart Simpson who dreamed of meeting their Mad idols were left in the last century. (To wit, I sent my 13-year-old Swiftie daughter a postcard from the exhibition of the April 2024 issue featuring Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce to her sleepaway camp. She said nobody in the cabin had ever heard of Mad.)
Given that the magazine’s readership peaked 50 years ago; that so many of the early Mad men—it was always a boy’s club—have died; and that Alfred E. Neuman is basically a museum artifact himself these days, an exhibition this year celebrating it makes perfect sense. The question is: What’s the connection between the folksy Norman Rockwell and the ribald Gang of Idiots? Turns out, it’s literal.
“We are a museum fully dedicated to art of illustration, generally what is published in one form of mass communication or another,” says Stephanie Plunkett, the museum’s chief curator. “Rockwell, who drew 322 Saturday Evening Post covers, was a great humorist and a cartoonist in certain ways, so from a curatorial standpoint, I knew this is where a Mad exhibition of this size and scope belongs.”
The show evolved out of conversations many years ago between Plunkett and Murray Tinkelman, an artist and historian who was crazy about the magazine. Whenever anyone involved in the pre-planning mentioned it, even in casual conversation, people’s eyes got as wide as a Don Martin bug-out.
“People who knew Mad didn’t need any sort of explanation as to what the exhibit would be. You could see from the smiles they understood it and wanted to see it,” Plunkett says. “We thought that during challenging times, everyone could benefit from laughter. It’s mainly been middle-aged fans and up on a warm nostalgia trip, but we’ve had a dedicated viewership that’s driven higher attendance than usual.”
The most entertaining wrinkle of the curation process is that it included its own Indiana Jones—or “Inbanana Jones,” to use Mad lingo—Ark of the Covenant moment. Buried in the archives were 1964 letters from Feldstein and art director John Putnam attempting to commission Norman Rockwell for “a definitive painting of the sly little elf, Alfred E. Neuman, who represents our mascot and ubiquitous presence.” Mad offered $3,000 for a charcoal print and a full-color oil painting. Rockwell made a note to ask for his standard $5,000, but in a short letter found in a private collection, the then-70-year-old eventually declined the offer, saying he and his wife thought better of it and, “I hate to be a quitter, but I’m afraid we would all get in a mess.”
“We thought a correspondence between Mad and Rockwell was a long shot, so finding the back-and-forth letters made for an amazing day. Norman rarely did commissioned drawings to begin with. Both Marvel and Bob Dylan were turned down,” says Plunkett.
They are certainly simpatico hanging on the wall. One of the exhibition’s highlights is Rockwell’s 1960 Triple Self Portrait side by side with its spoof, the 2002 Alfred E. Neuman rendering by Richard Williams. The stately paintings offer a nice contrast to some of the wilder bits of ephemera like the board game many of us played as kids (whoever goes broke is the winner), the Charles Schulz-drawn Peanuts panel with a special Mad guest, a roasting Christmas display and a nightmare-inducing clip of Fred Astaire hoofing it in full Alfred E. Neuman getup. The curators know who the target audience is: people who still get a kick out of decades-old barf japes.
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“In putting the show together, nobody mentioned Mad ever being considered high art. It was written to make kids laugh, all these artists and writers in a state of arrested development because they had to get into that mindset,” says Brodner, who posts new daily illustrations at The Greater Quiet. “This didn’t mean talking down to their audience. There were sophisticated political references like Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew burning subpoenas as the conmen from The Sting, but always with the understanding of what 11-year-olds find funny.”
I was one of those 11-year-olds, and you couldn’t wipe the big, broad, goofy Alfred E. Neuman smile off my face at the Norman Rockwell Museum. And what do you get when you cross Mad magazine with the illustrator synonymous with 1950s Americana? The museum has an answer with a brand-new fold-in: “Freedom From Worry.”
"What, Me Worry?" is on view at the Normal Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, through October 27, 2024.
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