I used to pay attention to the humor of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, but I don’t so much anymore. I guess my tastes in their sorts of observational comedy have changed, or maybe it’s their humor that has done the changing. Still, I respect their talents, and so was happy to read they grew up in the Al Jaffe world of Mad humor. Me too.
Al Jaffe, writer and artist for Mad Magazine as well as other comic publications died a little over two weeks ago, April 10, to be precise. He was 102 years old. He holds the Guinness World Record for the longest career as a comic artist and contributed to Mad consistently for 65 years. He came up with the fold-in back cover gag and continued working on that feature for the rest of his time at the magazine. He has been awarded just about every recognition a cartoonist can receive. And he made kids and adults everywhere laugh. An honorable legacy, to be sure.
It is hard for me to pinpoint at what age I first read Mad. It must have been in late elementary, 6th grade maybe, because that was the year I tried to make my own version of a humor magazine, Norman’s Nut House. My love affair with Mad was a source of entertainment as well as an education. It was how I learned much about the modern world.
When I discovered compilations of earlier Mad magazines in book form I saw that I could go back in time to the 1950s and learn about events and concepts in the recent political and cultural past. One Mad book title, for example, The Organization Mad, linked me to a 1956 best-selling book The Organization Man which examined the relationship of the individual to corporate organization. I didn’t actually read the book, but I did take away the idea that big organizations were not always compatible with the individual human being. That idea was clearly and constantly satirized in the pages of Mad.
I also picked up information about current events. Almost every issue would satirize in a longer form a current movie, TV show or some other up-to-the-minute cultural moment. One parody that stayed with me was “East Side Story.” It told the story of rival gangs in New York City except the gangs were out of the United Nations with one gang, the Communist Bloc, going against the gang of NATO powers. The story even had satirical lyrics to the original “West Side Story” songs. To my young mind, this explained the Cold War as well as a classroom full of social studies books.
For me and my neighborhood friends, Al Jaffe also created one of our favorite recurring features, “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.” What can I say? We were young, teenagers, and natural smart alecks. This feature was a goldmine.
From Jaffe’s book of the same name: A man walks in from outside drenched and dripping. “Is it raining?” some genius asks. Answer #1: “No, I rode home in a water truck,” Answer #2: “No, I’m practicing to be a water sprinkler” Answer #3: “No, I’m drenched with liquid sunshine.” We youthful wiseacres could run with this format all day.
I learned a lot about the world from writers like Al Jaffe and the others at Mad. I learned that much of The World is absurd, and it’s usually not wise to take everything It offers—politics, current received wisdom, cultural trends—at face value. I learned that one good and useful response to today’s many constant crises is laughter leavened with a dose of skepticism.
Yes, as I get older I have come to understand many things are serious. But I hope I will always keep in mind that some things are not as fear-filled as they are meant to seem. As Mad mascot and cover boy Alfred E. Neuman might say: What, Me worry?
Norman Knight, a retired Clark-Pleasant Middle School teacher, writes this weekly column for the Daily Journal. Send comments to [email protected].
