A philosophy for all seasons comes with art, nostalgia, and, yes, plenty of snark.
‘W hat, Me Worry?” is the line that launched 550 issues of MAD, the current-events satire magazine. It’s the mantra of MAD, the fictional Alfred E. Neuman’s claim to literary fame, and the title of a show that offers a captivating look at MAD’s art, humor, and history. The show is at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. The Rockwell Museum is a temple to the artist whose illustrations defined an age, but it covers all manner of illustration art. It’s a place that does everything right.
First, that gap-toothed, freckled, floppy-eared, forever-young philosopher, geek, and cover boy beckons. His come-hither look is geek outré. Alfred is as well known as Whistler’s mother, Washington crossing the Delaware, and Mickey Mouse, but he wasn’t MAD’s mascot from the start. His puss appeared here and there in MAD starting in 1955, when what had been a comic book transitioned to what the trade called a slick, or a glossy magazine. It wasn’t until the end of 1956 that Alfred first ran as a pretend write-in candidate for president — he ran 15 more times — and got his first cover as MAD’s official mascot.
It’s no secret that MAD’s target audience was teenage boys. Part wiseacre, part devil-may-care, with intelligence behind his eyes, Alfred was a total optimist. Though not entirely original, he clicked as a symbol. The look and persona — the gap-toothed hayseed — first appeared in advertising in the 1890s. Years later, MAD’s editor and artists wanted a logo like the Jolly Green Giant. In Alfred, they found a logo, a brand, a mascot, and an “éminence fraîche.” “Alfred” could not have been a more archaic name for a generation packed with Michaels, Marks, and Garys. “Neuman” is possibly a riff on “new man” — what the narcissistic Baby Boomer teens imagined they would grow up to be. Is this where “save the world” mania was born? “E” is for enigma. Alfred is his demographic’s Zelig. He’s old and young, here, there, and everywhere, and the teen for all seasons.
Alfred is on the front cover of nearly all issues of MAD. Not only a presidential candidate, he’s the morpher in chief, too. He’s emerging out of the ear of Dallas’s J. R. Ewing in an issue with a spoof on a 1980s question of the year. In a cover with Alfred in New Orleans, water up to his eyeballs, he mocks George W. Bush for his infamous “Helluva job, Brownie” quip, after Hurricane Katrina, to then–FEMA director Michael Brown. In the cover illustration, Alfred looks worried, as he does in a cover standing next to suspected pedophile Michael Jackson, with Jackson’s arm around him. In the first cover after 9/11, his habitual missing tooth is filled with an American flag.
MAD is a humor magazine. Wry and goofy, serious and pungent, offensive to parents and drudges, and always of the moment, it’s a field guide to the Baby Boomer cast of mind. Terrifying? Remember: “What, me worry?” The Rockwell Museum exhibit goes down smoothly. MAD is a big topic, with hundreds of issues, lots of artists, thousands of storylines and works of art, and 60-plus years in American culture. Picking graphics must have been a fun but formidable job.
Aside from “Who’s Alfred?” the first gallery introduces us to MAD humor. A cartoon spoof on Mother’s Day cards shows Lizzie Borden sharpening her axe, John Wilkes Booth bolting from a stage door, and the pirate Blackbeard, flintstone pistol tucked in his belt, saber in hand, “Mother” tattooed on his chest, and a psycho smile on his face, all with “Happy Mother’s Day” as the minimalist text. Some of the cartoons have no text, such as a March 1958 cover with a painting looking very much like an Abstract Expressionist tour de force but, yes, painted by a chimpanzee.
“A MAD Guide to Party Conversation,” a 1958 cartoon skit, is meatier and, like many MAD stories, demanded surprisingly deep cultural knowledge. “Laurence Olivier is my neighbor,” a snoot with a Van Dyck beard brags in one of many dual-register cartoons. These often portray what people profess on the top register and, below, what’s actually true. Below is a cartoon of city dwellings, Olivier living in a swanky high rise, our snoot living in a tenement next door. Never the twain shall meet.
How many American teenagers knew Olivier from Olive Oyl? Knowing MAD’s constituency, and thinking of how blinkered today’s teens are, I’d say few, but it’s hard also to say that my generation — I date to 1956 — was as badly educated as kids are today. Of course, I knew who Laurence Olivier was when I was 13, and John Gielgud and Paul Scofield. They were movie stars. Then, cluelessness wasn’t a plague. This explains why MAD’s stories seem positively erudite. One starts with “Quid, Me Vexari” — in Latin, “What, are you going to let me worry?” — a concession to Vergil and Cicero as well as to a parent’s point of view.
MAD started in 1952 as a comic book that spoofed genres — science fiction, sports, and horror movies — rather than specific stories or events. “Humor in a jugular vein” was its motto. In 1955, the publisher made a move to retain the comic book’s talented staff, which was about to flee to better-paying jobs, and he expanded the size and format to make the publication a “magazine” rather than a comic. That’s how MAD escaped the Comics Code Authority, the trade-association censor banning scenes of torture, gore, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism, cannibalism, werewolfism, sexual abnormalities, salacious postures, and women with Himalayan boobies, oh my. As a magazine, it was far freer, not that any of these topics ever appeared. MAD seems tame, based on the Rockwell show. There are lots of dad jokes, puns, and retreads. South Park and Babylon Bee it wasn’t.
How influential was MAD? Ultra-nerd that I was, I never read it. The exhibition argues that MAD was central in defining for kids what the adult world was. Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, Saturday Night Live, and The Simpsons were inspired in part by its irreverence, though Jewish stand-up comedy has a long heritage in Yiddish theater.
Anti-establishment messaging wasn’t the norm in the 1950s, and neither was skepticism. The Second World War, the Cold War, and the Red Scare prescribed a culture of conformity. Mass military service explains part of this, as did the deification of received wisdom, much of which might be called propaganda. MAD, the exhibition suggests, nurtured a generation of critics and questioners. “Yeah, kid, we all know it’s bullshit,” the magazine seemed to propose.
MAD was subversive, here and there. There’s a section on “Spy Versus Spy,” a Cold War spy spoof by Antonio Prohías running from 1961 to 1967. Prohías fled Cuba for America after Castro’s regime accused him of spying, so it’s an irony in itself that he made a living from a cartoon series about spies. This isn’t an unambiguous take on good and evil like the spy spoof in the 1950s TV cartoon series The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. Both spies in the MAD series often cancel each other’s labors. Their Cold War intrigue is more tit for tat than life or death. Both are bunglers. There’s no right or wrong. “It’s all a game,” MAD suggests, which the Cold War certainly wasn’t.
Did MAD’s irreverence stimulate, at least in part, the anti-war movement in the late 1960s? MAD’s creatives seem to think so, but I wonder. I can only judge from the exhibition presented on the walls and the catalogue, but most of MAD’s pieces focus on popular culture, especially television and movies. There’s very little on the civil-rights movement, women’s lib, the bitter strikes of the 1950s, the Vietnam War, or the Watergate scandal, and nothing on Carter’s malaise, the 2008 and 2009 financial crisis, the War on Poverty, and many other issues.
No party or politician is spared. A 1994 story compared Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden to Beavis and Butt-Head — if anything, a generous take. One cartoon depicts caricatures of Rick Santorum, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Biden, and two or three others at a session of the Continental Congress. The Founding Fathers are aghast to see how low we’ve sunk.
Some of the intense MAD stories aren’t surprising. Spoofs of the cult hits Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Star Trek are dense with text drawing from minutiae or inside jokes. Some are funny, like “The Flying Nut,” treating the antics of Sister Bertille in the late-’60s TV series about a nun whose cornette is aeronautic, or “Put*On,” a parody of the 1970 movie Patton. Many are tiresome and indeed juvenile, but sentimentalists will like what they see.
“The MAD 20 Dumbest People, Events, and Things” was a yearly feature. The Roman Catholic Church sex-abuse cover-up made the list in 2002. Howard Dean’s scream, picked for the 2004 list, is a timeless classic, drawing as it does on Munch’s Scream. The Second Gulf War figured in 2006. I sprang for a copy of the January 1999 issue for sale in the very nice Rockwell Museum gift shop, so I could peruse the entire 1998 list. That’s more than 25 years ago, I thought. Do MAD’s ‘dumbest’ choices have legs? Monicagate was No. 1 in a story titled “Starr Wars,” with Bill Clinton holding a cigar lightsaber — the Death Cigar — and Monica dragging a blue dress. Most of the rest were lame, with spoofs of Ginger Spice, Viagra, and the Oscar acceptance speech of Titanic director James Cameron. I’d never heard of half the targets. Windows 98 gets a good skewering. “We don’t like Bill Gates, and neither should you,” the piece begins. I second the motion.
MAD was an independent publication until the ’60s when, alas, conglomerates absorbed it. Alfred indeed had cause for worry. Time Warner owned it for a long time, and, now, a creature called Warner Bros. Discovery has got it. MAD still exists but in retread stories, reprints, and special issues.
Donald Trump compared Pete Buttigieg to Alfred in 2020, suggesting both were geeks. Buttigieg didn’t get the reference, needing to google it. “I guess it was funny,” he said, which brings me to the limited durability of art driven by humor. Humor springs from a time and place. William Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress and Marriage à la Mode paintings were considered wildly funny in the 1740s, and the biggest laugh lines still work. But jokes referring to specific events or people from Hogarth’s day either don’t land or aren’t even noticed. Gags based on human nature, like love gone wrong, greed grown colossal, family foibles, and kids saying the darndest things, tend to last. Lots of MAD jokes seem stale, but for pop-culture aficionados of any age and Baby Boomers who can remember their teenage years, this salute to MAD is a winner.
Still, What, Me Worry? is a charming, nostalgic exhibition. It highlights the artists, writers, editors, and designers, balancing tributes to them with close attention to history. The Rockwell Museum’s galleries and spacious grounds always look great. The New Classical building, designed by Robert A. M. Stern, is home-scaled and comfortable. Though it just turned 30, it still looks fresh. Rockwell did his best work in Ye Olde Arlington in southwestern Vermont, where I live, but he moved to Stockbridge in 1953, dying there in 1978. Next to the MAD exhibition is a show from the museum’s permanent collection on Rockwell’s brand of humor. It’s light-touch humor about small-town gossips, feisty boys and girls, first dates, and kids clued in that Santa might not be real.
So much of popular humor in Rockwell’s time and during MAD’s early years was racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, or raw slapstick. Here’s to finding new ways to make us smile. It’s harder and harder to say “What, me worry?” without believing that the quip is gallows humor.