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.

 

 

 

 

Mother's Day Cards from Disappointing Children

Satire of Pulp Magazines

Did MAD anticipate quidditch? 

Jaffee meets Rube Goldberg!  

    

Card Playing Dogs Updated! 

Recent work: The Birth of Treason

Rob Weir

Table for Two: Mixed Servings

 

 

 

Table for Two (2024)

By Amor Towles

Penguin Random House, 452 pages

★★★

 

In 2011, Julian Barnes won the 2011 Booker prize for The Sense of an Ending. I will return to that metaphor in my take on Table for Two, a collection of short stories by Amor Towles.

 

Towles is a wonderful novel writer who takes us deep into the psyches of his protagonists and immerses them in their time period. Can he do the same with short stories? Yes and no.

 

The first part of the assemblage is “New York,” six tales that begin or end in the Big Apple. “The Line” takes us to the Soviet Union shortly after the 1917 Russian Revolution. It, World War One, and domestic and foreign opposition to the new Bolshevik government devastated Russia. Urban residents had to adapt to long lines for necessities such as bread, vegetables, and cooking oil. Enter the ironically named Pushkin, who cheerfully stands in lines, holds the places of others, and queues for them. It's an uplifting tale of a man who gets what he needs by not wanting it.

 

This is followed by “The Ballad of Timothy Touchett,” the saga of a nebbish man easily advantage of. He ultimately gets a job at a bookstore that carries some antiquarian titles where Timothy's singular talent emerges: He's excellent at imitating other people's signatures. You can anticipate where that will go, but probably not how it gets there.

 

The remaining four stories are decent, but not necessarily the most relatable unless you’re a highbrow or high-powered New Yorker. A meddling daughter in “I Will Survive” is browbeaten into investigating her stepfather. He says he's playing squash each Sunday but has a surprisingly different activity in mind. “The Bootlegger” is a lesson on hubris focusing on an upwardly mobile man new to high culture but full enough of himself to be offended by an elderly gentleman illegally taping performances at Carnegie Hall.

 

Two more problematic stories are the “Di Domenico Fragment,” involving a mysterious group seeking to reassemble an Annunciation painting from the namesake Italian artist piece by piece. A New Yorker has a relative who has a fragment and smells opportunity. It contains my favorite line from the novel: “No one is born pompous. To obtain the state requires a certain amount of planning and effort.” I’m not sure how many readers will care about the setup, plus everything ends with a sigh rather than a flash.

 

The same lack of a strong sense of an ending also plagues “Hasta Luego.” It seems too improbable to be believable and too histrionic to make readers suspend belief. The plot centers on snowstorm, a cancelled flight, and a happy-go-lucky stranded traveler who cheers up the disgruntled, but is hiding a deeper problem than a day's delay.

 

The second part of the book, “Los Angeles,” takes a 180° turn. It’s one novella-length story, “Eve in Hollywood,” is a pot boiler mystery of voyeurism, blackmail, extortion, scandal, and murder in 1939 Hollywood. Olivia de Havilland is an absent-but-pivotal character who has just finished making “Gone with the Wind.” We are taken inside MGM and served large doses of petulant creatives, abusive producers, enormous egos, and double crossers. We meet Evelyn “Eve” Ross, Ms. de Havilland’s protectoress, and ex-detective Charlie Granger. They are trying to recoup nude photos and negatives of de Havilland snapped without her knowledge. Who took them, who is trying to acquire them for nefarious purposes, and where are they? Towles mixes fictional and composite personalities with icons such as de Havilland, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, David O Selznick, and Irving Thalberg, though the last is anachronistic as he died in 1936.  There is an additional cast of unsavory characters, some forced into sleazy activity and some with darker motives. There are strong currents to wade to keep track of the white hats and the black ones, but it’s a diverting story with a surprise/reprise ending that’s sharper than others in the collection.

 

I liked Table for Two, but I didn't love it. In my view, the short story genre is not Towles’ best. I appreciate that not every idea can become a full-length novel, but I found myself looking for universalizing dilemmas and themes. One-note stories–about ¼ of Table for Two–call attention to being fiction whose note fails to reverberate. Call it a tray of comestibles, some delicious and some disappointing. Somehow, my mixed metaphor seems appropriate.

 

Rob Weir

Bear: Releasing Today

 

 

 

Bear (2024)

By Julia Phillips

Hogarth, 304 pages.

★★★★

 

“Snow-White and Rose-Red” is a German folk tale that’s not the same story as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” though it does involve a dwarf. Also a ferocious bear and two young girls. I mention this because author Julia Phillips draws upon it for her page-turning modern tale set on San Juan Island in Washington State.

 

Hold the dwarf, but Bear is likewise about a bruin, two sisters, and a single mother. From there, Phillips allows her imagination to roam to construct an alternative narrative. Sisters Elena and Sam have been so close for so long that it’s as if they share a brain stem. As they edge toward their thirties they discuss leaving the island, but not things that matter more. San Juan is a major tourist area–especially for spotting orcas–but with a permanent population of under 8,000 there are not a lot of opportunities for locals. The location reminded me of the contrast between coastal Maine and its interior. That is, the wealth is in the hands of summer residents and visitors to the coast whilst those providing services live further away and close to the margin.

 

Elena and Sam tend to their dying mother, her illness probably linked to chemicals she ingested at work. You can imagine how hard it is to hold such a household together. Elena is a bartender/waitress at a golf club and Sam on the ferry that is the only way on and off the island. Sam depends a lot on tips, as she works for a food vendor, not the state. (Read no benefits, low wages.) Elena is calm and organized, whereas Sam is restless, a loner, and so bored that she routinely has sex with a guy in which she’s only marginally interested.  

 

In one trip across the strait Sam spots an amazing phenomenon: a bear swimming beside the boat. That’s weird because there are no bears on any of the more than 170 islands in the San Juan archipelago. She’s pretty sure it’s a carnivorous grizzly, which would be more unusual still, as Washington has very few brown bears. When the bear is seen again outside their house, Madeline, a state wildlife official, assures Elena and Sam the animal is almost certainly a lost black bear. Her advice is the standard response: avoid the bear, secure all garbage, and don’t feed it as a fed bear is ultimately a dead bear.

 

Madeline is wrong; it is a grizzly. Sam is terrified, but when Elena views it, she sees the glories of nature. Nor is she frightened by it; in her magical thinking, the bear is beautiful and a good luck talisman. Sam insists that Elena get rides to her job, advice routinely ignored as she enjoys walking in the woods. She’s not just fascinated with the bear, she’s obsessed by it. 

 

Bear is a metaphor for numerous things, including the secrets Elena and Sam keep from one another, the gap between the masks they wear and internal clashing aspirations, and the anguish of forging independent personalities. On a deeper level it’s a tale of freedom, civilization and wildness, and what we really see versus what we wish to see. Who is trapped? What boundaries should be obeyed and which ones ignored? What is the price of escape?

 

I zipped through this book in two sittings. Much of that is due to Phillips’ sparkling prose and her sense of knowing when to make the plot scurry and when to allow it to graze. It further engrosses if you allow yourself to embrace mythopoetic storytelling and remind yourself that even adapted folk tales have morals. In my view, those readers who have complained about its ending forget that Bear is a fantasy that relies on character types. There is no “real” Elena, Sam, or bear. But who among us has never felt trapped or had to wrestle with the dilemma of whether to embrace or flee?

 

Rob Weir