Stuff You Should Know - MAD Magazine: A Tribute

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

Chuck and Josh grew up on MAD Magazine and we hope you did too. What started out as a comic book that spoofed comic books grew into the foundation of American satire and cultivated a healthy skepticism in generations of kids. Hail to the clods at MAD!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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American city with each new episode. Our tour continues into the kind of venues you want to get to when you land in Detroit, Providence, Denver, or Seattle. Listen to Sound of our Town on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody we're going on tour and you can come out and see us in Orlando on August 12th, Nashville on September 6th and we're going to wrap it all up on September 9th in our hometown of Atlanta, GA. That's right and these are the last shows of the year. This has been a really good show this year.

We're super excited about it and this is going to be your only chance to be in the theater with us and you know like 1,500 over your closest pals. So go to stuffyshinow.com and check out our tour page for links and information and you can also go to link tree slash sysk for the same stuff. We'll see you guys this August and September. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. to stuff you should know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here. You know the usual gang of idiots. This is stuff you should know. There he is. Yeah, I kind of had to say something like that. I think it's done to think right off the bat. Oh, sure.

Right off the bat, like a bond that hit you yourself in the foot. So you were of course referencing Mad Magazine and that was how they referred to themselves, to their staff. Yeah, basically forever. Yeah, one of the great all-time satirical rags, one of the earliest. It's funny, right before you got on Jerry said something about, did the cracked website come after the Mad Magazine? And I said, well, I think she conflated them. And I was like, no, I was like, cracked was cracked

and mad was mad. Right. And I very quickly looked up because I was like, you know, I think cracked was kind of like a mad rip off. But they were pretty close together. Mad started in 52 and cracked started in 58. Yeah. But cracked was very far from the only mad imitator. I won't say rip off, but imitator. What else? There was a Hugh Hefner had one called Trump. Oh, yeah.

There were other ones called Humbug, both of which mad originator Harvey Kurtzman worked on. Yeah. There was apparently it was like a thing. Like mad made such a splash early on as we'll see that it basically created a whole new genre I guess. Yeah, and you and I were both fans as as youngins. Right? I mean, we talked about this. Oh, yeah. I was going through. There's a site called Doug Gilford's Mag cover site. Yeah, so you can spend a lot of time there. Yeah, you can. I believe he has like, I think there's 553 total original issues

that they have released. And I believe he has them all, at least the covers scanned. And then some of them, he's gone to the trouble of scanning the contents too. So you can read my magazine online. But I went through and looked at covers until I started recognizing one like I own that. I kept going through. And then they started to taper, like I own that, and they kept going through,

and then they started to taper off, and I didn't recognize them anymore. And in doing so, I was able to go back and figure out that I was a avid Mad Magazine reader from September of 1986 through September of 1988, my entire 10th, 11th, and 12th years of life. I did the same thing. Awesome.

Because I was kind of curious too. I was like, when did I even start? And man, I was, of course, I'm a little older than you, but I was earlier aged as well, because I was into it from like 80 to 85-ish. So I was like nine through 14 and 15 and then a little bit after that I'm sure but I don't know if you're like me Mad was an expensive magazine for a kid. It was cheap. It even said so in the cover

It was more expensive than other magazines and one reason is because they did not until 2001 have advertisements to also bring in money. So they made their money off of new stands and subscriptions. And I just remember throwing down for a mad cost a little doe. So I didn't have a ton of them. I got some hand me downs from Scott of course. But so many of those covers and movie parodies, especially from the great Mort Drucker, really just stuck with me. Yeah, no, same here. He was far and away the greatest of all the mad illustrators. And all of them were really great in their own way, but Mort Drucker was, if you're familiar with the mad, all of the movie parodies, the TV parodies that were just that looked

dead on like the people that was Mort Drucker. And he was named at least in one of the articles I read as possibly the greatest caricature artists of all time, like in history. Yeah, and I would not really I wouldn't I wouldn't go against that now He did almost exclusively movies though because their TV guy was Angelic Torres. Yeah, Angela Torres didn't mostly TV. Okay, and Drucker did mostly movies But they I mean they had similar styles. It wasn't like, you know, night and daylight, comparing Don Martin and, you know, Mort Drucker or something like that. But no shade on Angelo Torres's work either. So, but yes, they were more expensive than comic books, for sure.

Like, even out of the gate, the first mad magazine costs 25 cents, which is like several hundred dollars today, I presume. So, yeah, it was when you can get a comic book for like 10 cents at the time. Yeah, and you know, it cannot be overstated how much mad sort of laid the groundwork for modern satire, and then as we'll see also musical satire. And things like the onion and The national ampune things like that probably wouldn't well, they maybe would have eventually existed But they certainly had a nice paved road in front of them. Thanks to mad. Yeah, I mean, it's it's kind of hard to imagine the world without things like the Simpsons and the Daily Show and all that But I don't know I I mean, you could argue

that it would be at least a different world like you were saying, if not, that they didn't exist at all. Because of Mad Magazine, it's crazy. And one of the things that Mad Magazine did is another thing that it's really hard to imagine not existing in the world is teaching healthy skepticism to kids, adolescents basically.

And I guess Art Spiegelman, he created mouse, right? MAUS, the graphic novel. Okay. He had a great quote that I think really kind of got it across at the point of mad, especially early on through the mid-70s, is that the entire adult world is lying to you and we are part of the adult world. Good luck to you. That was, I mean, that's what they did. And it was, I mean, I'm sure I learned a lot of skepticism from Mad as well. Absolutely. You just couldn't read it and not pick it up, you know? Yeah, that was the point. So shall we talk history? Let's talk history, Chuck. All right, well, we got we have to talk about EC Comics. It was short for education comics founded in 44 by a guy named Maxwell Gaines,

who was one of the progenitors of comic books period. And EC Comics was ended up merging with Detective Comics. I hope I didn't get this wrong. To form what we knew later on as DC. And from the Maxwell Gainside and from EC Comics, we got titles like The Flash and Hawk Man, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman were probably the biggest ones. And I guess I should say this was the original incarnation as all American publications. Right. And then later became EC. Yes, but those characters he helped bring to reality.

Yeah. So he was a legend in the field still is in the field of comics. But he died early, I guess fairly youngish in it, at least suddenly. I think I saw a boat accident or something like that. And his son, William Gaines, Bill Gaines, took over the family business. And he had slightly different tastes than his father. He wasn't really interested in printing religious tracts or comics that featured people who were hurting, you know, camels and sheep and talking about God. He wanted to basically go in the exact opposite direction. So he changed the name of EC from education comics, entertainment comics, and he started publishing what became some of the most

notorious, gory, violent, gleefully sick horror magazines around. violent, gleefully sick horror magazines around. Yeah, it was sort of a way to stand out because comics were huge, huge business. I think by the 1950s, there were about 1.2 billion comics sold a year. That's like the number of podcasts now. Yeah, exactly. And 25% were crime and horror.

I don't kind of like podcasts, actually. And so EC, you know, Tales from the Crypt, we have EC to thank for that. And just lots of that, you know, you could sort of see the foundation of mad being laid, even though mad didn't do horror sci-fi per se, of course they dabbled in that and satire. But they started to tackle

things with themes like racism and police corruption and bigotry and stuff like that. Yeah, so there's like the contours of teaching kids like, hey, these things exist, but it was in the form of like horror comics or war comics or cowboy comics or something like that, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so this is a time where, I mean, we're talking the early 50s, right? This is like Pleasantville type America.

And they're talking about drug addiction and stuff to 10 and 12 year old. So it was pretty groundbreaking what they were doing. And because of that, they drew the attention of the moral panic that started to erupt over comic books. That apparently was brought on by a psychiatrist named Frederick, or Friedrich Wertham, Wertham.

Probably Frederick Wertham, but he wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent, and then he specifically called out some of the EC comics and described, you know, the, what was going on in them. And it was basically saying comic books are corrupting our youth. They're the reason that juvenile delinquents exist. It's comic books. And the Senate and Congress said, oh, we should, we should look into this then. Yeah. So, you know, they formed a senate subcommittee in spring of 1954 as they do as they do in that worth them or they're hum as you I think probably correctly pronounced thanks. He kind of opened up by saying this is one original quote I hate to say it senator but I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry. they get the children much younger.

So you can kind of see the hysteria going on of what they called the comic book menace. Plus completely ignoring the Hitler youth. Right. Exactly. And one very famous exchange that if you look up anything on this, these subcommittee hearings came between Gaines's son, who, like you said, took over for Pops, and a sender named Estes Kaffalver. Kaffalver.

Kaffalver? Not Kaffalver. Kaffalver. Kaffalver. I think it was Kaffalver. I can't remember. This is the famous Kaffalver hearings, or if he held some other stuff, but he was, he liked to hold hearings from what I understand.

Of course. He was a Democrat from Tennessee and there was one exchange between gains and keyfavor where he says where they're talking about, you know, one of the covers. And he said, this seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman's head up, which has been severed from her body. Do you think this is in good taste? And this is after Gaines said, already said, you know, our limit is to publish within the bounds of good taste. And Gaines said, yes, sir, or I do for the cover of a horror comic, a cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck can be seen dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck

of the body could be seen to be bloody. And the senator said, you have blood coming out of her mouth and Gain says, a little. And Kaffauer says, here's blood on the ax. I think most adults are shocked by that. So that was a very famous exchange where gains, he went on to basically make the point in what may have been the first, you know, mic drop. I won't read the whole quote, but he basically is talking about the fact of juvenile delinquency. He said it's a product of real environment in which the child lives and not the fiction he reads. There

are many problems that reach our children today, the problems are economic and social and they are complex and he was right, but it didn't matter. No, I mean, looking back 75 years later, you're just kind of like, oh, that's neat that that happened. But if you kind of put yourself in this moment, Bill Gaines was the only comic book publisher as as far as I could tell, who is willing to step up to the Senate and be like, no, this is all wrong. This guy is a crack pot. We actually have real societal problems that are causing juvenile delinquency. You guys are coming after comic books. He took on the Senate, or at least the Senate committee.

And they were very public hearings. And he stepped up when no one else would. And I read an account of the whole thing on the comics association site and they said that at first he was just killing it. But then he started to kind of slow down, lose focus and he ended up getting pummeled by the senators and some of his less desirable quotes ended up on the front page of the New York Times. Right. They equated it to him taking Benzadreen too early so that he peeked and started to get tired during the hearings because the hearings were postponed. But regardless, he got, he was defeated. And some people actually say if he hadn't of drummed up all that attention and drew the eye of the Senate, who knows what would have happened? But the upshot was that the comic book publishers got together and said, whoa, whoa, whoa,

whoa, you guys don't have to censor us. We don't need government censors. We can do this ourselves. We're going to create the comic magazine Association of America. And within that, we're going to create a committee, a board, a review board called the comic code authority in every single comic book that is published in this country. going to create a committee, a board, a review board called the Comic Code Authority and every single comic book that is published in this country will be reviewed in either given a stamp of approval or rejected by the Comics Code Authority.

You can rely on us. Just stay out of this. Yeah, and this was, this is about three months and change after the end of the hearings. So they were clearly kind of working on this, you know, a doubt if they just threw that together last second, like they saw the writing on the wall and got together. And, you know, this was good in a way because it kept the synonym out of their business. But what it also did was kind of self-sensor because you couldn't, all of a a sudden get a comic out there unless it had this stamp of approval from the code authority. And if it had the word weird or crime or

terror or horror, just in the title, it was rejected right off the bat. Yes. So the, I mean, the choice was clear. It was either, you know, fold your operation or start submitting to these standards that the comic code authority is laying down now. And Bill Gaines said, okay, that's it. We're just not gonna publish those comic books anymore. And he stopped publishing almost every single comic book he had except for one.

There was one comic book that they had released previously, and it was a humor comic. And it was called Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad. And that was the origin of Mad magazine. It was a humor comic book that was the one thing that remained after Bill Gaines burned down his entire comic book publishing empire, rather than submit to censorship. You forgot the colon. I was leaving that for you. Calculated to drive you mad.

And by the way, mad is always in all caps. Colin, humor and a jugular vein. It is good. So it's not an overstatement to say that Bill Gaines was a bit of a hero for being willing to stand up to, you know, a moral panic and put himself out there as potentially the face of, you know, the evil that everybody was worried about. And then just saying, like, okay, I lost, but I'm not going to just, you know, beat, you beat me, but that isn't me.

I'm going to join you. I'm going to go figure out another way to do it. So he just kept going in a different direction. All right. I think that's a very robust setup for us. So we're going to collect our thoughts and we'll be right back. What's up? This is Michael Rappaport. Did you know that I have a podcast? My podcast, the I Am Rappaport stereo podcast, has released over 1,000 episodes and counting.

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really stood out were movies that I didn't even see at the time. Actually, three of them. And that was kind of the fun thing about Mad is I wasn't allowed to see some of this time. Actually, three of them. And that was kind of the fun thing about Madness. I wasn't allowed to see some of this stuff. Oh, okay. But I could read the parody. So I remember crime more versus crime more. Instead of crime versus crime more.

Oh, it was a big one. Being not all there for being there. And the one for the shining, and I can't remember, wasn't the shitting, that the shining, and I can't remember, it wasn't the shitting, that was the substance. I can't remember what it was called, but I remember reading a shining parody too, like long before I could see that.

Oh man, I wanna read that one. I'll bet it was just legendary. Yeah, that was good. I don't remember any particular ones, but I mean, I know that there were ones on like Alph and Rambo. And see you were just after me. Yeah. Combined, we have a really good swatch.

But they would also do like adult stuff. This wasn't like they weren't like, what's the cool movie with teens right now? Like they did one of the cover one on LA Law. Well, Kramer versus Kramer. Yeah, Kramer versus Kramer. It's a great example too. But it's funny, that's like people getting their news from the Daily Show today.

You're getting to watch movies that you weren't allowed to see through Mad Magazine. Yeah, well, and we'll kind of see why here in a minute. That was a very nice setup, actually. I think so too. My thoughts still aren't collected though, so we might be in trouble. All right, so Tails calculated to drive you mad is the only title that Bill Gaines stuck with. Cale's calculated to drive you mad is the only title that Bill Gaines stuck with. He had a cartoonist named from EC named Harvey Kertzmann who was an army vet in World War II. And he did military comics for EC but kind of got tired of this and was like, you know,

I'm a funny guy, I got it since a humor, I'd rather work on humor things because I'm a big fan of humor magazines. And he said, why don't we spoof other comics? Like do a comic that satirizes in spoof comics. And so they started doing that. They started spoofing horror comics, sci-fi comics. Bill Gaines was beside himself. He thought it was brilliant.

And Mad sort of as we knew it was really born when Kurtzmann had that idea. Yeah, and one of the reasons it was so brilliant was because they were using the same artists and writers who were creating those comics for the spoof. So they were really like dead on and they looked like they were supposed to look and like they had this like the in-joke humor that of anybody who was a fan of those comics. So it was a pretty cool idea to start. And it was right up Kertzmann's alley, for sure, because he kind of got in board with some of the other comics, like war comics and stuff like that.

But it wasn't, it was not a hit out of the gate at all. It was apparently, I think issue number four in 1953. That was the one that really kind of caught everyone's attention because they lampooned Superman with the pretty obvious title Super Duperman. But it's really involved and funny and it's still today I was reading it this morning. I was like, this is pretty funny. Yeah, no, I agree.

That very first panel has a super duper man punching and an old person on crutches. It was very dark character. Clark Bent was the, you know, the alter ego. And the reason it's noteworthy, because they, Dave, Rousse helped us with this. He pointed out they had already done these spoofs like flesh garden and dragged a net instead

of drag net for the TV side. But they got sued, well not sued, but they got a cease and desist from DC Comics and sort of Streisand effect before Streisand was new that there was going to be an effect named for her. Right. It got attention. and was new that there was going to be an effect named for her. It got attention, and all of a sudden, kids were reading these comic parodies. Yeah, there was a good one in June 1954 on Starchie,

which was Archie, and careful. I mean, you, right, it was, again, really well drawn, really interesting. If you took a Archie and rein it through like what would happen in the real world, but it's still a parody, that's what they came up with. And like so comic books were incredibly popular at the time.

Like you were saying there are billions being printed, right? Yeah. So this magazine or this comic book was spoofing comic books. So they just went in and just caught on like wildfire. So this was the one that Bill Gaines had left after he stopped publishing the horror comics and the cowboy comics and the war comics and the sci-fi comics. Yeah, and so you could sort of hinted that, you know, Kramer versus Kramer and L.A. Law, these were sort of, it wasn't necessarily stuff for kids. Cramer versus Cramer and LA Law, these were sort of, it wasn't necessarily stuff for kids. And that happened when they made the switch from a comic book, parodying and satirizing other comic books to a magazine, satirizing other magazines.

A couple of stories why this happened. One was that Gaines was like, hey listen, we're not going to be under the comic code authority if we turn ourselves into a magazine. But apparently one of the real reasons that wasn't as public was Harvey Kurchman wanted to do this. He was sort of bored with a comic book thing, wanted to get into magazines. And so to keep Kurchman around, who was just a key early cog, switched to a larger format to a glossy magazine. And all of a sudden, they were spoofing magazines. And Kertzmann specifically even said, for the past two years now, Matt has been dulling the senses of the country's youth. Now we get to work on the adults, right? Even though, I mean, I'm sure there were some adults reading it, but every kid I knew

read it. But it did definitely like update their readership into a slightly higher age category from, I think so. I think teenagers read comic books back then, but this was like, you know, you could find teenagers and now maybe college kids reading it as well because it was just geared slightly differently just by default because it was parodying other magazines, right? So Harvey Kirtzman has like fans still today who are like if Kirtzman had never left, who knows how great mad magazine would have been because he was a perfectionist genius, which was his undoing. Like apparently he would miss publication dates because he was just tinkering with stuff

endlessly. Everything needed to be tinkered with. And apparently he was really good at it. I read an article, an interview with Al Jaffee, who was the longest running cartoonists at Mad. And he was saying like, Kirtzmann was the best editor he'd ever worked with, but everything needed editing, everything needed tinkering, which made everything delayed and more expensive. And the reason Kirtzmann left was not because Gaines said,

hey, you need to to rain all this in or fire it or anything, but Gaines very wisely retained editorial control. So Kirtzmann had to go ask Gaines for ask gains for everything. And Christmas did not like that. Geniuses typically don't like that kind of thing. And so, he struck out on his own after just a couple of years. Yeah. And, you know, this is, you know, when they made that switch to the magazine, this is when they, all of a sudden, could do, like, TV shows and movies. They got a whole lot more political. And then, as we'll'll see song periods and stuff like that, another big sort of longstanding tradition with Mad was skewering, marketing and PR and advertising.

And they, because they didn't have ads, and that was one of the things I loved about Mad, even though it cost a little more, is that every page was, you know, some things were funny or than others, obviously, but every page had funny content on it. The spoof ads, to me, were great. Everything they did was funny, because they didn't have to just sort of bow to the advertiser. And it really would have been, I didn't ever saw any post 2001 additions. It would be really weird

for me to see a mad magazine with a legitimate advertisement in it. I wouldn't know. I would look for the joke still somehow. Yeah, it's a little mind-warping when you were used to it for decades. Totally. You know, not. And yeah, that was a big part of it too. It was like, I mean, that's probably the most ubiquitous way people are lied to on a daily basis is through advertising. So it was essential that they lampoon ads too, just to they couldn't just leave those alone. It would have been distinctly impure and neither Harvey Kertzmann nor Bill Gaines would have stood for that for sure. for that first, sure. All right. So, Kertzmann leaves in 1956. This is what you were talking about with Hugh Heffner.

He had his satirical humor magazine called Trump, believe it or not, four issues. Then he went on to work for the other one you mentioned, Humbug, which was only about 11 issues. But he, you know, like you said, he still has people that sort of bowed to him today because he laid the groundwork and the foundation for sort of satires we know it today. Yeah, he also went on to create a longstanding playboy cartoon from the 60s to the 70s called Little Annie Fanny.

And it was just a dirty cartoon that apparently really fulfilled him as an artist. But yeah, he was just a legend just as much as Bill Gaines was, maybe more in some circles for sure. But after Kurtzmann, Kurtzmann's very much credited with establishing the tone, the voice, the idea behind Mad, that was carried on essentially until 2018 maybe, as we'll see. But in the intern also created laying the foundation for American satire to come. After that, again, Al Feld-Mom board, and I get the impression a little more of a work course and a little less of a endlessly tinkering perfectionist. He brought on some of the names that you are familiar with, like Mort Drucker and Al Jaffee and Don Martin and just these long time mad contributors,

they came on under Al Feldstein's overseeing ship. You like that, huh? Yeah, sure. In fact, the Senate committees should not be committees on oversight anymore. They should be on overseeing ship. I agree. It's got a little more flair to it.

So Feldstein, one of the key things, besides, like you said, hiring some legendary staff, was bringing on a legendary mascot, and that is Alfredi Newman. He named Alfredi Newman or attached that name. Apparently, that was kind of a pseudonym. They used a lot of kind of goofy, funny pseudonyms in the office for different things Alfredi Newman was one of them But if you don't know anything about mad magazine and you've never picked up an issue You still probably can look at the little little Opie Taylor red-headed gap tooth big-eared

Well, I was about to say kid, but It was always hard to determine right Alfredi Newman's age in a way and that was part of the fun, I was about to say kid, but it was always hard to determine. Alvereign Newman's age in a way, and that was part of the fun, I guess. But that was the mascot. They wanted a mascot. They got one along with the, I don't know what you would call it, slogan. Catchphrase?

Yeah, catchphrase, which is what? Me worry, what comma, me worry? Oh, that's funny. I always read it as what me worry? Oh, yeah. Yeah, wow. We got two different brains. I guess. I mean, still the same thing, really. I guess. So he was the first one to bring that image. I believe the first cover was issue number 25, but he had been sort of used in the magazine previous to that. And in the mid 70s, there was an interview where he said, you know, I got this thing from this postcard in the early 1950s that had the caption me worry. I like that. Or me worry. Yeah, exactly.

And in 1965, this, and of course, this is, you know, 10 years before he admitted this, but in 1965, Maddo is actually sued by the widow of a cartoonist named Harry Spencer who said, hey, this postcard that you're going to talk about in 10 years was stolen for my husband's work. And he's had this copyright since 1914 it's the name of the characters the original optimist or the me worry guy. And mad and fighting the lawsuit said all right listen we know this image has been used before besides us so readers find uses of alfredii Newman out there and they came back with a bunch dating back to the 19th century. Yeah, they traced it all the way back. There was a couple of historians that are mentioned in a Paris review article. It's really interesting. Chronicles, the evolution of Alfredi Newman, but they traced it back to an 1894 play called

the New Boy. And they think that it's probable that the character that look, that face, is a mashup of the two actors that played the lead in the New Boy. Ron Howard? Yeah, Ron Howard and Ron Howard senior. Yeah. And this play like took America by storm. It was a big deal in the late 19th century. These actors were very much celebrated. And this character entered the pop culture and stayed, but over time people forgot where he came from originally until, I mean, we're talking like the 2010s before somebody said,

it goes as far back as this for sure. Yeah. And Dave was kind enough to include a bunch of cool uses. There was an auto part store that used it, a soda, happy jack soda in the 1930s, a pain reliever in 1908. All kinds of uses in the judge basically was like, hey listen, this is in the public domain. Everyone is using this, I don't know why, but everyone is using this goofy guy's face. And the mad magazine, or I'm sorry, the original afferty Newman painting was by Norman Mingo.

And for mad, they had some pretty strict rules of usage, which was you had to always have a forward, either a forward-facing face, like not from an angle or from profile or anything like that, or just fully the back of his head that had been done. And any other usage of the face that was any different had to go through what I sort of think was probably a pretty strict, like there was probably a pretty serious meeting at Mad Magazine if they wanted to change that in any way. Yeah, they'd be like convinced us. Why?

Exactly. But that's why that Alfredi Newman is just so recognized, believe in when he's, I remember he was Lindy England. Wasn't that the private at Abu Ghraib who had the picture ever taken like pointing like with with gun fingers at a like a naked hooded tortured prisoner. Yeah, I remember they did Alfredi Newman on the cover as her yeah, and and you knew exactly who was spoofing but you also could totally see that it was Alfredi Newman. All of it is because that Norman Mingo one just hit it so perfectly out of the game

that there was just no reason to alter it at all. Yeah, and I don't know. I never really thought about it. It's so ubiquitous and so just sort of burned in my brain. I was a kid and it never occurred to me just what brilliant branding that was. To not only just have this mascot and slogan, but to not change it and have it appear in much the same way every single time that you saw it. And as a kid, you were being, I remember when I was first thinking about tattoos, I've

thought about getting offered in Newman. I would like it more than what I ended up getting it, but it was such a sort of iconic and still is such an iconic brand mark. Same with the mast head too, the logo, the shape of the letters, spelling out mad all caps, that kind of thing, just as much as him, the two went together just so perfectly well for sure. But because they established that Harry Spencer did not have any sort of copyright over Alfredi Newman or over that kid, that image, you could do and use Alfredi Newman yourself

if you wanted to be a big jerk. And Mad couldn't do anything about it because they don't own the copyright to the image. It's in the, he's in the public domain, but Alfredi Newman himself, any usage that has ever been created for mad, if you, if you use that, they could sue your pants off. It's just if you went out and created a new Alfredi Newman type named it something different, then technically they couldn't do anything. But the whole world would be mad at you I think unless it was really great. I know a certain jerk in Kansas. It's a pretty great photo shot.

And then one last thing about Mr. A. E. Newman, that name was one of the hilarious like made up names that they would use to like sign fake letters to the editor and that kind of stuff. used to like sign fake letters to the editor and that kind of stuff. That's where they they were like, I think this name goes with this guy very well. Totally. One of the many pseudonyms. Yeah. I was just kidding. By the way, about the jerk part. He knows who he is. Sure. He'll laugh at this. You hope. All right. should we take a break? I guess. All right, we're gonna come back and talk probably too briefly about some of these legendary staffers

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So I mentioned ourselves as the usual gang of idiots. It's what everybody at Mad called themselves and called the whole crew. And everybody was very happy to be called that. They were, everybody had a really good sense of humor is another way to put it. Most of them, as we'll see. But I mentioned Al Jaffee earlier. And he apparently holds the Guinness record for the longest career as a comic artist. He started drawing for Mad in 1955.

55. Yeah. And when did he retire? Uh, he retired in 2020, uh, and very sadly, uh, I mean, say, sadly because he passed away, but he passed away at 102 on April 10th of this year, uh, 2023. So had it, I mean, just a legend. Uh, what a life. Um, ended up going away with Kertzmann when he did Trump and Humbug, but came back to Mad Magazine and was most well-known for doing the fold-in, which if you, if you know Mad, you know the fold-in, if you don't, it was the very last interior page of the magazine, like the inside of the back cover basically, where you would, it was a visual trick

where you would fold, you know, it would be a picture and it would have text at the bottom. And then when you folded it over in a certain way, it would form a new picture, and not only that, but all new text, like I can't imagine Lee and Lee's out was easy considering the text, like the picture is one thing, but to lay it out and have it say something different is a whole other thing. And it also says some significant stuff too. Like it was often about taxes that the government doing something shady or something like that.

Yeah, the two would always be, they would always sort of link together. So whatever you had on that first initial thing might be, it was kind of set up punchline basically is how it worked for sure And he in that interview I read with him He said it took about two weeks to make one of those things. I believe it and that the artists and I guess writers were all expected to produce 20 and then later on 25 pages of material a year.

And that was just the requirement. And if you hit it, it's not like you didn't hit it, it's not like you weren't you were fired, but they did an annual trip abroad for like a week or two. All expenses paid by mad. And if you didn't hit your quota, you weren't on that trip. didn't hit your quota, you weren't on that trip. Wow. That's pretty funny. I'm sure I'm not the only kid who tried to guess what the fold-in image would be just by looking at the unfolded image.

Sure. I used to stare at that thing trying to guess what it might be. And Jaffee was also a popular for something that I had the little side books I bought of snappy answers to stupid questions. Did you like those? Loved them. So do you have a favorite? Oh no. Okay, you just loved them all. Like a favorite joke or a favorite book? Favorite edition? Yeah, favorite snappy answers to stupid questions

page. Do you have one? No. I was just asking if you did. Okay. No, no, no, but I loved them. Okay. Do you have one? No, I was just asking if you know. Okay. No, no, no, but I loved him. Okay What about so that's L. Jaffee That's right. We're moving on to Dick depart. I've never known how to say this man's name. Dick debar tolo Debar tolo I think he was the one who wrote most of the parodies of TV movies just essentially any satire of like one of those two things was probably written by him between 1964 to 2017. Yeah and Debar Tolo was born in 1945 so he was submitting by 1961 as a So he was submitting by 1961 as a like 16 or 17 year old and getting some of that stuff in there.

And the best I can figure is he was kind of a full time staffer either at 20 or 21. That's really cool. He was just a kid and like you said, partnered with Mort Drucker and the great angel of tourists who, as you will see, is one of a sort of group of legendary Latin American or Latin and then American writers. He was Puerto Rican and then they also had a couple of guys that were gonna talk about named Cedars Gio, Adagonis and Antonio Projias. Very nice.

Oh, we're gonna talk about that now. So Projias was the creator of Spy versus Spy, right? Yes. And one of the reasons Cuban. Yeah, one of the reasons why he was so interested in the Cold War and all of the horribleness of it and futility of it. That was basically the ultimate message of Spy versus Spy is, you know, like, yeah, you can nuke one another, but we all lose. It was like, that's the general theme. But because he was Cuban and because he had been expelled from Cuba by Castro, which is it like, man, if you're in the 60s, that's like one of the most political things you can

do. Be expelled from Cuba by Castro. Yeah, go to America and be famous and make lots of money. Exactly. But he was famous already in Cuba when he showed up at the offices of Madden. Apparently, did not speak a lick of English, but his 14-year-old daughter did. So he brought her with him and she helped translate the interview and basically got across that her father was interested in working for Madden, Bill Gaines said you're hired. Or he probably said, tell him he's hired.

Yeah, exactly. He passed away in 1998. Sergio Eragonus is still with us at 85 years old. He is Mexican and was a very successful cartoonist in Mexico. Showed up in 1962, asked for Prohias saying, you know, I know you've got a guy here that could probably help interpret. Apparently that didn't work out. So he just said, all right, well, here's my cartoons, these one panels.

And Matt was like, we don't really do these one panels. But then someone said, you know, I really like these. Maybe we can do like our magazine is so chock full of stuff. Maybe we can squeeze in even more by doing what's called marginals, which is in the margins of the magazine, they would sneak in these little one panel cartoons. Yeah. Like just very, they just made mad. That one more thing.

It was just one more thing that was like, oh, this is mad magazine, you know? Oh, yeah. I wonder if he also was responsible, you know, like the interstitial little cartoons of, you know, like the guy sweeping up the logo of bloopers and practical jokes with Dick Clark and Ed McMahon. Yeah. Very much like that. And I'm wondering if they hired him to do that too.

I hope they did, because if not, they kind of ripped them off. You know what? I seem to remember knowing that to be true, but I'm not going to say absolutely, but that does really ring a bell. Okay. Good. I'm glad. So we're going to say definitely maybe there's another guy too that was worth mentioning.

His name is Dave Berg. He did the lighter side of. Oh, yes. Pretty funny like multiple panels of, you know, I guess pretty funny stuff. The one that I always remember, his drawing was amazing too. Not quite as, it was much more linear and angular than more Drucker's stuff, but still, you know,

visually interesting. There was a guy shaving in his beard, and he was halfway done when his like, why for girlfriend calls from the other room, like, I changed my mind, keep your beard. And he's like making this face in the mirror. For some reason, ten-year-old Josh thought that was remarkable and remembered it. I don't even think I laughed at it. But for some reason, it just stuck with me, right?

It's funny how that stuff happens. Yeah, for sure. But he apparently was the one conservative, religious, white, suburban, dude, Gentile. Most of the other, well, I shouldn't say most, but a lot of the others in the whole conceit of Mad, especially earlier, was like Jewish. Yeah. So Dave Berg was just very much in tension, I guess, with the rest of the staff.

And Al Jaffe said that he kind of acted like he felt like he was carrying the whole thing on his back. And the magazine or just the conservative man. The magazine. Like it was all him or something like that. So he seems like a pretty interesting dude. But if you remember that comic, the lighter side of, there was very frequently a late middle-aged gentleman with like a pipe and a leisure suit. He was always being put upon by hippies.

I'm under the impression that that was him doing himself. I am trying to remember, I'm trying to remember what that character looked like. He had glasses, whitish, shortish hair. And everything was almost always done from the bust up. With the pipe? Yes.

Okay, I'm looking at him now. I think it's like Hank Hill. Yeah, a little bit now that you mentioned it for sure. A bit, a bit, that totally is him. So that's Dave Berg. I think he that you mentioned it for sure. I bet I bet that totally is him. So that's Dave Berg I think he was worth calling out for sure Yeah, you know, we did mention Mort Drucker, but I wanted to to recognize that he passed away in 2020 And I think he was in his 90s so like these guys are living in their mid 80s to 90s and into the hundreds

Not all of them, but like maybe there's something to humor and laughter. Right. Being medicine, who knows? But we did mention Don Martin briefly, I wanted to talk a little bit more about him because he was there from 1956 to 1988, was known as Mads Maddist Artist. He did, he had a very distinct style that like you said earlier was nothing like the sort of caricature realism of a more drucker or tourist.

But very distinct style did a lot of poem parodies, did these single character, like single page character parodies, like it would just be a big picture of like Moses and then just a bunch of little like things about Moses, like a comment on the sandals or you know how he did his nails and you know align Pointing to this part on Moses's body. So a lot of those but mostly did He had these comic strips. They were he did two to three per issue and They were maybe a couple of pages usually, but it was just sort of a good old-fashioned comic strip. And that was sort of Don Martin's jam. Yeah, and everybody had a very long face

and very long feet. Yeah, his stuff is unmistakably could spot it anywhere, even with your eyes closed. So the thing is, like you said, these people were living into their 80s, 90s, hundreds even, and a lot of them were working like up until very shortly before their death. So these people worked at this magazine, putting this magazine out for decades upon decades. And as a result, mad had the same voice like all throughout. It was just the thing that changed was the stuff that was parodying, you know?

I mean, so I just think that's really cool. It also explains why in the Simpsons, when Bart and Millhouse are reading Mad Magazine, they're talking about Spiro Agnew and Bart and Bart Millhouse go, they're talking about that Spiro Agnew guy again. He must work there. And I remember thinking the exact same thing, because these guys are, by the way, Spiro Agnew

was vice president to Nixon. Yeah, yeah. Just a thought for it. I remember, that's how I knew that name. Yeah, exactly. Yes, for sure, me too. I knew that name for a good six, seven years before I knew who he was.

And that was like this kind of unspoken, unwritten tradition for kids that started reading it and like probably the early 80s onward. Because these dudes were still talking about Spiro Agnew in like 1986. Yeah, there's no reason that a 12 year old in the mid 80s should know anything about Spiro Agnew. But I just thought that Simpson's joke was just dead on.

That's pretty good. I don't remember that joke, but that's awesome. So another thing we need to talk about is a very big lawsuit. They were no stranger to lawsuits. They were no stranger to the FBI kind of sniffing around every now and then because they were subversive and counterculture. And so the FBI of course would always be interested in that. But a big lawsuit happened in 1961

when Mad released a special called Sing Along with Mad, which had 20 song parodies, popular music. And the first exhibit in the trial was a musical salute to a hypochondriac sung to the tune of Irving Berlin's Pretty Girls like Emelody called Luella Schwartz describes her malady. So the estate of Berlin was not happy about this, sued and the judge, and this ended up being a landmark decision because it went all the way to the Supreme Court. Like any satire that we enjoyed today,

we can kind of trace back to this lawsuit where a judge said that as a general proposition, we believe that parity and satire are deserving of substantial freedom, both as entertainment as a form of social, and this is the key part, and as a form of social and literary criticism. Yeah, Mad Magazine did that.

Boom. So yeah, the estate of Irving Berlin didn't Yeah, Mad Magazine did that. Boom. So yeah, the estate of Irving Berlin didn't know who they were taking on. No. But that's pretty cool. And they're taking on freedom. Right. Dave traces that straight to Weirdo Yankevic, which, I mean, that's a pretty obvious example. Like his parody music, you can, like, he can just do that.

Apparently he asks typically, but weird owl to bring it full circle is a huge mad fan. Not that surprised. Sure. Who made it onto the cover in 2015. And it was one of those rare covers where Alfredi Newman's expression is different. He actually looks concerned and weirded out, being close to weird out, and weird out has the Alfredi Newman expression on his face.

Oh, very interesting. Man, we just wrapped up like eight different parts of this episode into one cover. So look that up. Mad Magazine was very popular. It reached its peak in the sort of the late 60s and 70s at a circulation rate that topped out at a little more than 2.1 million magazines, which is a lot. It was just behind time and newsweek and circulation numbers. I kind of knew how many people read magazines back then.

Oh, huge. Yeah, I mean, 2.1 in circulation is a lot of folks reading that. Yeah, I think people really kept reading like news week and time and US news and world report until the early, early 2000s. Like magazines were a thing until then and the internet said I got this. Yeah, and that's sort of, you know, the story of Mad to a large degree, even though their readership did slip after the 1970s. I think it's probably doing all right in the 80s. And Dave makes a great point that like everyone

probably says, you know, my five or six years with Mad were the best because those are the ones that you knew and loved so much. But I think we all know that the 80s Mad magazines were the best. Far away. And you know, they they screw at everyone. They didn't pick sides. Obviously they were, you know, lefties in general, but they would they would make fun of all politics. But, you know, as with all magazines, it would eventually dwindle. They tried to save it at various points.

I remember when they moved to LA in the late 20 teens, I knew a few people, they basically hired a new staff of like kind of cool young comedy people. And I knew a few of them that ended up working for the newer iteration of Mad, but sadly that wouldn't last too long either. Right. Yeah. Who, anybody want to name check? I'm curious.

I'm trying to think, oh Brian Passane worked for him, I think. Oh, cool. Yeah, he is cool. And then, well, that's true. The saying's like, all right, you're a little older. Ali Gertz, she did, I'm not sure if she still does it, but did a Simpsons podcast for Max Fun and is a singer, sort of song parody person herself and met her to Max Fun. She co-hosted a trivia with me. Um, Ali's great. She was one of the editors.

And then there was someone else too I knew. And I was just, they were all very excited, you know, at the time, time obviously to sort of take on this huge mantle like comedy brand But you know with these huge corporate mergers Time Warner I believe Own them in the 2000s. They merged with AT&T and that was sort of the death knell Yeah, and so finally in 2019,

Mad Magazine stopped publishing original content. They still put out issues once in a while. And if you look at the cover of the issue, you're like, oh, this is new. Like they're parodying everything everywhere all at once. But or say like, what was another one? Oh, I can't remember right now, but currents at Westworld, right?

But that Westworld issue was all about tech, so they would go back and look through all the archives and find some good stuff about tech, put it all together in a compilation issue, then slap like a current thing on the cover. That's what they're doing today. So there's still, that's got to be a pretty fun job going through the Mad Archives to pull together new issues, compilation issues. I know a couple of guys who might be pretty good at it. Yeah, but that's the state of Mad today for sure. And I wanted, like, seeing what happened to Mad or where it is today, really kind of drives home what our colleague Jack O'Brien did for cracked. Cracked had gone the way of mad easily in the 90s, like long before,

like while mad was still doing pretty good, cracked had just kind of limped off and was just a brand somebody owned somewhere. And apparently Jack went to the owner, found out who owned it, and went and said, hey, can I try to revitalize cracked on the internet? And whoever owned it said, do your best. And he did. Like cracked the website, like just kind of blew up and introduced the whole new generation

of people that cracked. Yeah, it was great. Hello, Jack. Listen to the daily zeitgeist. He's in Mazda and doing that show for a while. Yeah, they've been at it It's got a daily for a long time. You've been a guest more than once and I've never been two times

I'm a member of the two timer club. That's right. I'm a no-timer Mad TV is something we should mention That ran for 15 seasons believe it or not And I watched that first from 95 to 2009, and they had little nods. Alfredi Newman was there early on for a few seasons. Spy versus spy, they would do these little animated spy versus spy shorts.

But it was a good show, man. And if you look at their roster, people, like a lot of them went on to be big names in comedy. Ike Baronhold, Steader Wilson, Nicole Sullivan, of course, the great Alex Borstein, Orlando Jones, Will Sassow, that's where Key and Peel met there. Andy Daley, Taren Killam, just like a sort of a who's who of comedy people.

Okay, great. Yeah, so Matt, did you never watch it? Not really, I mean here, there. Oh, it was good. It was not in my will house at the time. I don't know what I was into, but it wasn't that. It might have been like when I would have watched it, would have been during a time when Sarah and I was actually good.

So I might have been watching that. Or I'll bet I was watching Mr. Science Theatre 3000 instead. I'll bet that's what I was watching. Were you only allowed one comedy show? Okay, I had a lot of self-discipline back then and I was only I only allowed myself one comedy show. No, that's good stuff. So you got anything else about bad magazine? No, I mean it's that's the briefest of overviews it. This is one that you know we could go on for days, but We'll keep it in an hour. Yeah but we'll keep it in an hour.

Yeah, we'll keep it in an hour, and we'll always keep Mad Magazine in our hearts. That's right. Since Chuck said that's right, everybody. That means it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this lady trucker. For lady trucker. Lady trucker.

One more time. Hey guys, love the show and listen to it. At least three or four days a week, I was listening to the trucking episode on my way to work. Really loved it. I worked for a three P.L. third party logistics company and we are basically a company that rents truckers to move shipments for our customers.

Basically we're the middle man. The industry is currently only made up of 13.7% women, and there's a really cool organization called Women in Trucking. You can find them at womenintrucking.org. Their mission is to help bring more women into the industry and help them overcome any obstacles in their paths. The company I work for is designated a women in trucking company with over half

of our staff, including the owner being women. The women are so supportive of one another and make sure to help each other out whenever possible. It's a really great industry to be a part of and groups like this help to make that possible every day. I hope there are some young women out there who are listening to your episode and started thinking about joining this field. Trucking used to be just for men, but it's for us too.

Keep up the great episodes and that is Amanda from Pittsburgh. That's a lot of mandover to great email and yeah, shining some light into some quarters we weren't fully aware of in the hopes of lowering people to those new quarters. Yeah, so if that peaked your interest in your own woman, you can check out women in trucking.org or maybe read the article, how female truckers are changing the industry that is on dat.com and that might further peak your interest.

Because hey, you can make a hundred grand a year for my life. Well, thanks again, Amanda, and thanks to everybody who writes in on a regular basis or even one time We always appreciate your emails even if we don't get a chance to read them on the air or respond We hear you and we appreciate you. So never forget hashtag never forget that If you want to get in touch with us like Amanda did and like everybody else does you can send us an email email. Send it off to stuffpodcast.iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio,

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