Mad (magazine)

Based on Wikipedia: Mad (magazine)

The Magazine That Taught America to Laugh at Itself

In 1952, a scrappy humor magazine launched from a cramped office in lower Manhattan with a simple mission: make fun of absolutely everything. Seven decades later, Mad magazine had shaped the comedic sensibilities of three generations, trained countless satirists who went on to create Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, and helped forge an entire nation's capacity for skepticism. Not bad for a publication that started as a comic book about a gap-toothed kid who couldn't stop grinning.

But here's the thing about Mad that most people miss: it wasn't just funny. It was subversive in an era when subversion could get you blacklisted.

Born Into the Age of Conformity

The early 1950s were not exactly a golden age for questioning authority. Senator Joseph McCarthy was hunting communists under every rock. Nuclear bomb drills taught schoolchildren to "duck and cover" under their desks—as if a wooden desk could protect them from atomic annihilation. Toothpaste advertisements promised happiness through whiter teeth. Everything was fine. Everything was normal. Don't ask questions.

Into this landscape of enforced optimism walked Harvey Kurtzman, a young editor with a knack for seeing through the carefully constructed facades of American life. Working with publisher William Gaines at EC Comics—a small outfit that had made its name publishing horror and crime comics—Kurtzman created something genuinely new.

The first issue hit newsstands in August 1952. Kurtzman wrote nearly the entire thing himself, with illustrations by a murderer's row of talent: Wally Wood, Will Elder, Jack Davis, and John Severin. These weren't just cartoonists. They were visual satirists who could make you laugh and think at the same time.

What Made It Different

Mad's approach was revolutionary in its simplicity. The magazine took things Americans loved—comic strips, advertisements, movies, television shows—and revealed the absurdity lurking beneath their polished surfaces. But it did so with genuine affection. The satire worked because the creators clearly understood and even loved the things they mocked.

Take the comic strip parodies. In one memorable piece, a character clearly modeled on Donald Duck suddenly becomes aware that he's trapped inside a cartoon. He notices he only has three fingers. He wonders why he has to wear white gloves all the time. The existential crisis escalates until he wants to murder every other Disney character. It's silly. It's also a surprisingly sophisticated meditation on constructed reality and the prison of genre conventions.

Another parody followed a character called "G.I. Schmoe"—an obvious riff on the heroic military comics of the era—who confidently tells a female enemy soldier that she'll naturally fall in love with him "since I am a big hero of this story." The joke works on multiple levels: it mocks the predictable plotting of adventure comics, skewers male ego, and draws attention to the invisible hand of authorship that shapes all narratives.

This was heady stuff for 1952.

The Great Format Switcheroo

For its first twenty-three issues, Mad existed as a comic book. This meant it fell under the jurisdiction of the Comics Code Authority, a self-censorship body the comics industry had created in response to public hysteria about comics corrupting American youth. The Code was restrictive, prudish, and deeply suspicious of anything that challenged conventional values.

In 1955, Mad did something clever: it became a magazine.

The switch wasn't primarily about dodging censorship, though that was a nice side benefit. William Gaines later explained that Kurtzman had received a lucrative job offer from Pageant magazine and had been expressing interest in trying a magazine format. Gaines, who admitted he knew nothing about publishing magazines, agreed to the change to keep his star editor happy.

"If Harvey had not gotten that offer from Pageant," Gaines said years later, "Mad probably would not have changed format."

The gamble worked—sort of. Kurtzman stayed for one more year before departing anyway. But the magazine format stuck, and it freed Mad from the Comics Code's restrictions forever.

The Feldstein Era: Going Nuclear

When Kurtzman left in 1956, a new editor named Al Feldstein took over and transformed Mad from a cult favorite into a cultural institution. Under his leadership, the magazine's circulation didn't just grow—it exploded. At its peak in 1974, Mad sold over 2.1 million copies per issue. To put that in perspective, that's more than twice the current circulation of The New Yorker.

Feldstein assembled what would become the legendary "Usual Gang of Idiots"—the tongue-in-cheek name Mad gave its stable of regular contributors. Don Martin brought his distinctive visual style of rubber-limbed characters and absurdist sound effects. Mort Drucker became the master of celebrity caricature, his movie parodies instantly recognizable. Antonio Prohías, a Cuban exile, created "Spy vs. Spy," a wordless comic about two identical secret agents locked in eternal, pointless conflict—a perfect Cold War metaphor. Dave Berg chronicled suburban American life with gentle mockery. Sergio Aragonés filled the magazine's margins with tiny, elaborate visual gags.

And then there was Al Jaffee, who invented the "fold-in"—a back-cover image that transformed into a completely different picture when you folded it. Jaffee kept creating these for Mad until he was 99 years old.

The Mascot Nobody Asked For

Alfred E. Neuman deserves special mention. The gap-toothed, jug-eared, eternally grinning face that became Mad's mascot wasn't created by the magazine. His image had floated around American advertising since the late 1800s, appearing on everything from painless dentistry ads to political postcards. Nobody knows who originally drew him.

Mad adopted the image in 1954 and gave him a name and a catchphrase: "What, me worry?" The phrase captured something essential about Mad's philosophy. In an era of nuclear anxiety and social conformity, here was a kid whose response to everything was cheerful indifference.

Alfred appeared on nearly every cover, usually with his face replacing whatever celebrity or character was being lampooned that issue. He became so recognizable that in 1960, a write-in campaign made him a presidential candidate.

Teaching a Generation to Question Everything

Mad's influence extended far beyond entertainment. For millions of young readers in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the magazine provided something they couldn't find anywhere else: permission to doubt.

Consider what America looked like to a young person in 1955. Adults insisted that nuclear war was survivable if you just ducked under a desk. Advertisements promised that the right toothpaste would make you popular. Politicians spoke in platitudes. Parents demanded respect for authority without explaining why authority deserved it.

Mad said: wait a minute. Look closer. That doesn't make sense.

In a famous 1977 retrospective, Tony Hiss and Jeff Lewis wrote in The New York Times that Mad "was magical, objective proof to kids that they weren't alone, that in New York City on Lafayette Street, if nowhere else, there were people who knew that there was something wrong, phony and funny about a world of bomb shelters, brinkmanship and toothpaste smiles."

The magazine didn't tell readers what to think. It taught them how to think critically—to look for the small print, the false fronts, the gap between what advertisements promised and what products delivered. Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times later wrote that Mad "instilled in me a habit of mind, a way of thinking about a world rife with false fronts, small print, deceptive ads, booby traps, treacherous language, double standards, half truths, subliminal pitches and product placements."

Activist Tom Hayden, who helped lead the anti-war movement in the 1960s, put it simply: "My own radical journey began with Mad Magazine."

The Political Tightrope

Despite its subversive reputation, Mad was never partisan. The magazine mocked Democrats and Republicans with equal enthusiasm. Publisher William Gaines was a conservative Republican. Editor Al Feldstein was a liberal Democrat. The writers held views across the entire political spectrum.

"Mad was wide open," Feldstein recalled in 2007. "Bill loved it, and he was a capitalist Republican. I loved it, and I was a liberal Democrat. That went for the writers, too; they all had their own political leanings, and everybody had a voice. But the voices were mostly critical. It was social commentary, after all."

The magazine didn't spare the counterculture, either. While many assumed Mad would embrace the hippie movement, it satirized Vietnam War protesters just as gleefully as it mocked the war itself. "We even used to rake the hippies over the coals," Feldstein said. "They were protesting the Vietnam War, but we took aspects of their culture and had fun with it."

This even-handedness gave Mad a credibility that more obviously partisan publications lacked. If they made fun of everyone, their criticism felt honest rather than agenda-driven.

The Corporate Labyrinth

Mad's ownership history reads like a case study in mid-century American corporate consolidation—and it's genuinely bizarre.

In 1961, William Gaines sold his company to Premier Industries. What did Premier Industries make? Venetian blinds. Yes, the magazine that taught America to question authority was briefly owned by a window covering manufacturer.

Around 1964, Premier sold Mad to Independent News, which was owned by National Periodical Publications—better known as the publisher of DC Comics, home of Superman and Batman. So the magazine famous for its early Superman parodies became a corporate sibling of the Man of Steel himself.

Then things got complicated. In 1967, Kinney National Company bought National Periodical Publications. Kinney had started as a parking lot business. In 1969, Kinney acquired Warner Bros. A parking scandal led to corporate restructuring, and by 1972 the entertainment assets had become Warner Communications. Eventually, National Periodical Publications was renamed DC Comics, and Mad came along for the ride.

Through Time Warner and then WarnerMedia and then the AT&T acquisition in 2018, Mad somehow survived every corporate reshuffling, even as it lost its cherished office at "485 MADison Avenue" (the magazine always styled it that way) and eventually relocated from New York to Burbank, California.

The Advertising Question

For nearly fifty years, Mad refused to run paid advertising. This wasn't just a quirk—it was fundamental to the magazine's identity and credibility. How could you mock advertisements while simultaneously accepting advertising dollars?

The policy finally changed in 2001, with issue number 404. The compromise allowed the magazine to introduce color printing and better paper stock. But something was lost. Part of Mad's moral authority came from its refusal to participate in the commercial ecosystem it so gleefully criticized.

The Decline and the Legacy

By the 2000s, Mad faced an existential problem: success had made it irrelevant.

The skeptical, media-literate worldview that Mad had pioneered was now everywhere. Saturday Night Live had been running for decades. The Simpsons—created by people who grew up reading Mad—had revolutionized animated comedy. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were doing political satire on cable television every night. The entire internet was drowning in snark.

"When Mad first came out, in 1952, it was the only game in town," longtime contributor Al Jaffee observed in 2010. "Now, you've got graduates from Mad who are doing The Today Show or Stephen Colbert or Saturday Night Live. All of these people grew up on Mad. Now Mad has to top them. So Mad is almost in a competition with itself."

Simpsons producer Bill Oakley put it more starkly: "The Simpsons has transplanted Mad magazine. Basically everyone who was young between 1955 and 1975 read Mad, and that's where your sense of humor came from."

The New York Times wrote in 2009 that "Mad once defined American satire; now it heckles from the margins as all of culture competes for trickster status."

The Final Years

Mad ended its sixty-five-year run in New York City at the end of 2017. The staff relocated to Burbank, but none of the New York team made the move. New leadership brought new contributors and a fresh approach—the rebooted magazine even earned its first-ever Eisner Award nominations in 2019.

But the economics were unforgiving. After issue number 11 of the new Burbank edition in early 2020, Mad shifted to a model of mostly curated reprints with occasional new content. Newsstand distribution ended. The magazine that had once sold over two million copies became available primarily through comic book shops and subscriptions.

New material still appears occasionally—including parodies of contemporary targets like Elon Musk's Twitter tenure—but the golden age is clearly over.

Why It Still Matters

Here's what's remarkable about Mad's legacy: it taught three generations of Americans to think critically about media, advertising, politics, and culture—and it did so through the least threatening medium imaginable: joke magazines sold to teenagers.

The skills Mad cultivated—questioning authority, reading between the lines, noticing when you're being manipulated—have never been more essential. In an age of deepfakes, misinformation, and algorithmic manipulation, the ability to look at a piece of media and ask "what is this really trying to do?" is perhaps the most important cognitive skill a person can possess.

Mad didn't invent skepticism. But it made skepticism funny, accessible, and appealing to young people at exactly the moment when American culture was demanding conformity. It proved that you could laugh at the powerful without being cruel, question everything without becoming cynical, and take nothing at face value while still finding joy in the absurdity of it all.

What, me worry?

Actually, yes. But also: laugh. That was always Mad's real message.