The magazine's impact
Though there are antecedents to Mad’s style of humor in print, radio and film, the overall package was a unique one that stood out in a staid era. Throughout the 1950s Mad featured groundbreaking parodies combining a sentimental fondness for the familiar staples of American culture—such as Archie
and Superman
—with a keen joy in exposing the fakery behind the image. The approach was described by the New York Times
' Dave Kehr
:
Bob Elliott
and Ray Goulding
on the radio, Ernie Kovacs
on television, Stan Freberg
on records, Harvey Kurtzman
in the early issues of Mad: all of those pioneering humorists and many others realized that the real world mattered less to people than the sea of sounds and images that the ever more powerful mass media were pumping into American lives.
Appropriately, Bob and Ray
, Kovacs, and Freberg would all contribute to Mad.
Mad is often credited with filling a vital gap in political satire in the 1950s to 1970s
, when Cold War paranoia
and a general culture of censorship
prevailed in the
Mad 30 (December 1956), the first issue to prominently feature one of Norman Mingo
's paintings of Alfred E. Neuman
on the cover.
Mad was long noted for its absence of advertising
, enabling it to skewer the excesses of a materialist culture without fear of advertiser reprisal. For decades, it was by far the most successful American magazine to publish ad-free. (In its earliest days, the comic book had run the same advertisements as the rest of EC's line, and the magazine later made a deal with Moxie
soda that involved inserting the Moxie logo into various articles. Other than that, the only promotions were house ads for Mad's own books and specials, subscriptions, and so forth. These always included the promise that Mad would never make its mailing list available to anyone to exploit.)
Mad's satiric net was cast wide. The magazine often featured parodies of ongoing American advertising campaigns, the nuclear family, the media, big business, education, publishing, and other concerns. In the 1960s and beyond, it satirized such burgeoning topics as the sexual revolution
, hippies
, psychoanalysis
, gun control
, pollution
, the Vietnam War
, and drug abuse
. The magazine gave equal time, generally negative, to counterculture drugs such as cannabis
as well as taking a savage approach towards mainstream drugs such as tobacco
and alcohol
. Although one can detect a generally liberal
tone, Mad always slammed Democrats
as mercilessly as Republicans
. The magazine also ran a good deal of less topical material on such varied topics as fairy tales
and nursery rhymes
, greeting cards
, sports
, small talk
, poetry
, marriage
, comic strips
, awards shows
, cars
and many other areas of general interest.
In 2007, the Los Angeles Times
' Robert Boyd wrote, "All I really need to know I learned from Mad magazine," going on to assert:
Plenty of it went right over my head, of course, but that's part of what made it attractive and valuable: Things that go over your head can make you raise your head a little higher.
The magazine 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; it warned me that I was often merely the target of people who claimed to be my friend; it prompted me to mistrust authority, to read between the lines, to take nothing at face value, to see patterns in the often shoddy construction of movies and TV shows; and it got me to think critically in a way that few actual humans charged with my care ever bothered to.[1]
In 1994, The Humanist's Brian Siano discussed Mad's eye-opening qualities:
For the smarter kids of two generations, Mad was a revelation: it was the first to tell us that the toys we were being sold were garbage, our teachers were phonies, our leaders were fools, our religious counselors were hypocrites, and even our parents were lying to us about damn near everything. An entire generation had William Gaines for a godfather; this same generation later went on to give us the sexual revolution, the environmental movement, the peace movement, greater freedom in artistic expression, and a host of other goodies. Coincidence? You be the judge.[2]
Pulitzer Prize
-winning art comics maven Art Spiegelman
said "The message MAD had in general is 'The media is lying to you, and we are part of the media.' It was basically... 'Think for yourselves, kids.'" William Gaines offered his own view; when asked to cite Mad's philosophy, his boisterous answer was, "We must never stop reminding the reader what little value they get for their money!"