Off-Center Views: MAD Magazine at the Rockwell Museum

What Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine

Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA

Through October 27, 2024

MAD Magazine was an important part of my youth. Editors and cartoonists such as Bill Gaines, Al Jaffee, Dave Berg, Jack Davis, Mort Drucker, Al Feldstein, Harvey Kurtzman, and Don Martin were as familiar to me as baseball lineups. Many were Jewish, which is about as much as I knew about Judaism in my Protestant Pennsylvania hometown. You might also note that the names are male, which also meant a lot when it came to my personal battle against mainstream values. A new exhibition, The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine now on display at the Norman Rockwell Museum brought back a lot of those memories.

MAD was founded by Kurtzman and Gaines in 1952. By today’s standards much of its satire was pretty tame, but it filled a major humor magazine gap after older publications such as Ballyhoo, College Humor, Jester, Judge, and Puck disappeared. By 1952, the humor publication landscape was pretty barren. MAD was generally the publication of choice in the 1950s-60s-early 70s until it was bumped from its perch by the far-edgier National Lampoon. MAD peaked with over 2 million readers/subscribers in 1972. It’s still around–it was bought by Warner 1972–but its circulation has fallen to around 140,000.

One could call MAD a needed corrective to 1950s conformity and the Cold War, a bellwether of the 60s counterculture, and by the 1980s, an antique searching for reinvention. The Rockwell exhibit surprised me with more recent MAD material that can be pretty biting once you get past lame filler. But, then again, a lot of it always was pretty lame, which is why vets of the 1960s gravitated to National Lampoon in the first place (before it too grew saccharine and disappeared).

For all its virtues and shortcomings, there’s little denying the influence of MAD. Perhaps only Mickey Mouse rivals MAD’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman (get it?) in fame for a fictional character. There’s scarcely a comedian or cartoonist that didn’t draw inspiration from MAD: Stephen Colbert, R. J. Crumb, Terry Gilliam, Matt Groening, Art Spiegelman, Jon Stewart…. Not to mention that some very sharp minds wrote for it, including Stan Freberg, Ernie Kovacs, and two of my all-time favorites, Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding.

A small disappointment: I missed seeing Jaffee’s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.” Who can resist snark like: Q: “Are you asleep?” A: “No, I’m dead–leave the flowers and get out!” Like that one? How about: Q to man with a fish is his bucket: “Catch that?” A: “No, I talked him into giving himself up.” Or to a man on a beach: Q: “Been swimming?” A: “No–I just walked over from Europe.”

Here is a sampling from the Rockwell show.