Friday 8 October 2010

Potzrebie! Fershlugginer! Ganefs! Hoo-Hah! What, me worry?

In the unlikely event that these words and phrases mean anything to you, you must, at some stage, have been a reader – even a devotee - of MadMagazineMad was probably my first introduction to printed satire (as for other kinds, I may have been allowed to stay up to watch That Was The Week That Was before reading my first issue.)

Although I was a fairly regular reader, it wasn’t the contemporary magazine itself which excited my interest in the 1960s: rather, that was the Signet paperback collections of material from the very earliest editions (1952-1956), when Mad was an irregularly-published comic book. To escape the great “Comic Books Rot The Brains of Our Young” uproar of the early 1950s, Mad turned itself into a regularly-published magazine in 1956. 

After the switch, the magazine still had good stuff in it – the movie parodies and Don Martin’s cartoon strips in particular - but even in my early teens in the 1960s I got a bit tired of the monotonously liberal nature of the messages being preached at me – hey, if we, like, just, kinds, tried to, you know, see it from the other guy’s point of view, we’d sorta get along so much better (rather like Star Trek, with jokes). By 1967 it was beginning to resemble a Democratic Party hand-out for “kids”. I probably stopped reading it when I was about 15, having become addicted to Private Eye. The only thing I really missed about Mad was its gap-toothed mascot, Alfred E. Neumann who somehow gave teenagers - and Presidents -  permission not to be brilliant at everything (or anything, come to that).



But by then I had amassed a decent collection of those retrospective paperback compilations of the best early stuff: The Mad Reader, Mad Strikes Back, Utterly Mad, Son of Mad, etc. There was nothing in the least bit preachy about the material they contained: superb artwork (each energy-packed panel stuffed with hidden jokes and incomprehensible catch-phrases), some genuinely funny writing, and, while there were few references to politics, an intriguingly catholic array of popular culture targets. 

There were movie parodies (The Caine Mutiny, High Noon, King Kong), cartoon strip parodies (Little Orphan Annie, Mandrake the Magician, Archieetc. – none of which I’d ever heard of, let alone read, and yet the parodies were funny in themselves), poems (I read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” for the first time in Mad), classic books (Sherlock Holmes, Robinson Crusoe), TV (Dragnet, The Lone Ranger – this was when TV had only just reached some US cities), social habits (the awfulness of cheap restaurants, the ghastliness of supermarkets), and advertising.

The fact that I didn‘t understand two-thirds of the references simply made it all the more fascinating (when I finally saw the TV crime series Dragnet, it actually out-parodied the parody). And the fact that the monochrome versions of the artwork offered in the Signet compilations were often heavily smudged to the point of impenetrability didn’t matter either – I had no idea the originals were beautifully crisp, and often vibrantly-coloured, masterpieces. 

The tone of those early Mads was good-hearted and apolitical – genial parody, rather than satire. But the tone – street-smart, knowing, Jewish, New York – was a million miles away from the gung-ho movies, squeaky-clean Funny Papers characters and the neatly-coiffed, perfect nuclear families portrayed in mid-Fifties American main-stream media and marketing. Mad belonged with Rock’n’Roll, hotrods and pick-up trucks, cheap horror movies and science fiction short stories rather than Easy Listening, plush-suspensioned Cadillacs, Doris Day movies, and New York Times bestsellers.

But, despite all appearances to the contrary, Mad wasn’t in the least bit dumb: in fact, it encouraged its readers to question everything to the point of destruction, without telling us what to think. It inculcated skepticism as a habit.  In fact (and I say this without approval) I’m not sure Mad didn’t contribute in a major way to the emergence of the late 1960s counter-culture. 

I met William M. Gaines, the magazine’s publisher, in 1977, when he attended a sales conference in Leeds. I was responsible for publicity for the UK company which distributed those Mad paperback compilations (they’d all fallen apart by then, and the first thing I did upon joining New English Library was to replace them). I had been expecting a sharp-suited, razor-sharp New Yorker, but met, instead, an ageing, overweight, bearded hippie who wore sandals (with socks!) and used a cane to propel his considerable bulk around. He seemed a very nice, amiable, relaxed old gent. I had always assumed from the contents of the 1960s Mads that Gaines was a card-carrying left-wing Democrat, and his personal appearance reinforced that impression, but it turns out, according to the mag’s original editor, Albert B. Feldstein – who was a card-carrying left-wing Democrat – that old Bill was actually a full-fat Republican capitalist. (Despite which, in the early, struggling days,  he paid all his contributors with a personal cheque the instant they handed in their work: a unique experience for most of them. So, on the correct side, politically, and a bit of a saint to boot.)

As I had seen Gaines’s name on Mad publications for fifteen years, meeting him was a rather surreal experience, akin to being introduced to the Wall Street Journal. And, yes, I bored him by telling him how much his magazine had meant to me over the years: he smiled benignly and seemed vaguely pleased – I expect he’d been hearing the same sentiments for two decades by then.

Just to give credit where it’s due,  the most notable artists during Mad’s Golden Age were Bill Elder and Wallace Wood – absolute and utter geniuses, both. Harvey Kurtzmann wrote most of the witty words.

I thought of Mad the other day while watching a very funny animated movie currently running on Sky Movies – Monsters v. Aliens (yes, I know it doesn’t sound promising, but I defy anyone to watch the sequence where the US President tries to make contact with the aliens inside a recently landed spaceship by playing Axel F on a synthesizer without laughing – that, and the line “Evidently, they do eat lead”.) I couldn’t help wondering what sort of debt the animators owed to Mad’s Golden Age. 

Pretty big, I’d imagine. The same goes for practically all intelligent American TV and movie comedies. I read an article a few years ago claiming that every character in the funniest US sitcoms is now basically Jewish, no matter how WASPish their origins are supposed to be, because most of the scriptwriters are Jewish.  I have a feeling it’s as much to do with all the scriptwriters having grown up reading Mad. Certainly, producer ofThe Simpsons, Bill Oakley seems to thin so: "The Simpsons has transplantedMad Magazine. Basically everyone who was young between 1955 and 1975 read Mad, and that’s where your sense of humor came from. And we knew all these people, you know, Dave Berg and Don Martin– all heroes, and unfortunately, now all dead. And I think The Simpsons has taken that spot in America’s heart."

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