The Rockwell goes MAD

I DON’T REMEMBER when I discovered MAD, but I know which piece of theirs first shook me out of my suburban complacency. Titled “The National Safety Council's Holiday-Weekend Telethon,” written by Dee Caruso and Bill Levine, drawn by Mort Drucker (one of his earliest pieces), it presented a TV telethon in the Jerry Lewis tradition, although with a Dean Martin caricature instead, and it begged viewers to drive recklessly in order to add fatality numbers to the tote board in order to meet the Safety Council’s quota. The piece ran in the January 1959 issue, when I was not yet three, so I must have discovered it in one of the endless reprints that MAD issued over the years. Laughing at the macabre proved liberating.

Parody Triple Portrait
by Richard Williams

“What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine” is an unprecedented exhibition now running (through October 27, 2024) at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., bringing together original artwork and other related items chronicling the history of our most influential satire magazine.

MAD was created in 1952 when writer-artist Harvey Kurtzman persuaded EC Comics publisher William M. Gaines to launch a humor book – giving Kurtzman a break from the highly popular “Two-Fisted Tales” series he’d been exhausting himself creating. MAD was a four-color comic at first, where talented artists like Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, and, especially, Will Elder were given the liberty to be as crazy as they wished. It worked.

Five rooms at the Rockwell Museum are devoted to the magazine’s artists and pages, which also means that it’s capturing over 60 years of American cultural history. But how odd it is to see those pages – some of which I recognize quite well – enshrined, as it were, as oversized wall displays with careful lighting and dignified info cards. Somebody thinks this is art!

Not a view shared by teachers who patrolled the classrooms during my adolescent years. It became a game to see how cleverly a copy could be smuggled in with the goal of reading it at one’s desk. Why did it seem so subversive? Consider its time of origin. Kurtzman and company were ex-G.I.s, with the horrors of WWII about to be repeated in Korea. Conformity was the watchword, even as Joe McCarthy led his fellows in Congress on an ideological witchhunt echoed in the halls of Hoover’s FBI.

Covers of the earliest issues.
Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Rebellion was springing up alongside. Lenny Bruce, Tom Lehrer, Mort Sahl, and, eventually, Nichols and May sharpened satirical skewers even as the Goon Show explored surreal comedy in England. Comic books already were under attack, and Gaines was under a lot of heat to produce something that wouldn’t offend those self-appointed censors. But that’s not where Kurtzman took the project. The first couple of issues featured genre parodies: horror, gangster, Western, and such. But number four’s “Superduperman” gave a huge boost to sales, helped by the “King Kong” (“Ping Pong”) parody in issue six.

Room One at the Rockwell begins with a section devoted to the Kurtzman Years (1952-56), presenting an array of Kurtzman-drawn covers and choice inside material. There’s even a correspondence with Norman Rockwell on display, as the artist politely declined a commission to paint a definitive portrait of MAD’s new mascot, the grinning, gap-toothed Alfred E. Neuman. That job eventually went to Norman Mingo, who would paint more than 200 covers for the magazine.

MAD’s early success inspired Kurtzman to demand a majority ownership share in 1956. Gaines declined, Kurtzman quit, taking his favorite artists with him. Al Feldstein, who had been editing other EC titles, took his place. “1956 to 1964: The Feldstein Rebuild” sees the magazine settle into the format with which we’re most familiar, as a fresh crew of writers and artists devised the movie and TV satires and so much else that defined MAD’s gently subversive identity.

Mort Drucker memorabilia.
Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Covers, roughs, and finished pages line the walls; floor-standing display cases offer books and other ephemera, each amusingly explained by texts written by MAD alumni Sam Viviano with John Ficarra. And there’s a video screen in Room One (duplicated elsewhere) showing an interview reel. It’s introduced by exhibition co-curator Steve Brodner and features comments from Dick DeBartolo, Sam Viviano, Teresa Burns Parkhurst (with a wonderful tribute to John Caldwell), and other notables.

Room Two: “1965 to 1980: The Classic Era” sees the magazine zoom to a circulation of 2.5 million by 1973. (I helped. Especially when teachers swiped my copies.) Along with the wall displays, get your hands on the interactive covers and fold-in explorer, the latter featuring the work of Al Jaffee fold-ins, who drew them until he retired at age 99. (He died last year at the age of 102.) There’s also a video display of MAD’s cultural influences. A segment from the movie “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” was playing as I passed through (a title that prompted MAD to issue a collection called “It’s a World, World, World, World MAD”), followed by a clip from the TV show “Police Squad,” which introduced Leslie Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebin.

“You’ve changed,” readers would complain to the magazine. MAD’s editors believed that this was more of an indication that those readers had grown up – that MAD’s silliness no longer resonated. For me it was as the ’70s ended. I didn’t willfully abandon the magazine; I simply had other priorities. So it was a treat to look at Room Three: “1981 to 1992: The Torch Is Passed – Feldstein to Nick Meglin.” Here are the spoofs of “Miami Vice,” “Dick Tracy (Beatty version),” and “Dallas,” as smart-assed and superbly drawn as ever.

Shepard Fairey parody cover,
by Sam Viviano (2008)

A cascade of ownership changes was to follow, heralded by “1993 to 2009: The DC Years,” as that comics giant took over. But we can see had satires like “Harry Plodder.” Room Four brings us to “2009 to 2017: The Warner Bros. Years,” and that’s where this once-vigorous magazine is pummeled both by the publishing changes new owners imposed and by the popularity of so many other satirical entities, like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Simpsons.” MAD’s offices were moved from Manhattan to Burbank at the end of 2017, and none of the New York staffers joined in the move. The magazine now is a collection of reprinted articles with new covers and occasional new features.

But don’t despair! Continue into Room Five, where Mort Drucker is celebrated. He made his debut with MAD in 1957, and drew his signature movie and TV parodies for them for 55 years – when he wasn’t busy doing magazine covers, movie posters, and much, much else. When I was quite young and in thrall to the artwork in MAD, I answered an ad for the Famous Artists School. “Draw the lumberjack,” the ad exhorted, and this I did, and mailed it in. I received a questionnaire to help determine my worthiness to participate in this program, and, when asked to list favorite artists, I wrote “Mort Drucker, Bill Elder, and Jack Davis.” I wasn’t accepted. Here’s the kicker: Norman Rockwell was a co-founder of that now-shuttered school, and its papers are housed in this very museum! I’m sure that my lumberjack portrait isn’t among them.

The museum put together a catalogue brilliantly resembling a vintage copy of MAD, and I urge you to pick one up in the gift shop. It combines bits and pieces of vintage issues along with material written and drawn for this book.

This exhibition is only the visible part of the legacy of MAD. In the words of “Maus” creator Art Spiegelman, “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.’” Which we need now to do more than ever.