The end of MAD Magazine?

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The left leaning kept me away even though I was given some copies for free.
 
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I remember when they raised the price to .40 cents. [Super Cheap!] I was outraged, but I still bought it.😊
At least my parents picked up the tab for Ranger Rick and the Weekly Reader books! Good times.
 
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There was unique humor and artwork in Mad which will not be forgotten, and its demise is a sad loss.

I started buying them again a couple of years ago and found the liberal/left slant was OK when it was clever but too often it wasn’t. There too much use of Trump and his supporters as soft targets

But I felt that it had started to improve again and I was getting more good laughs out of each issue.

Very sorry to see it go.
 
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One of my recent favorites. Dec 2017.

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A friend suggested “schadenclownfreude” 😂
Thanks for the interesting discussion!

Despite buying every issue for a few years in the 1970s I never knew that it classed itself a “magazine” rather than a “comic”.

Don Martin was my favorite writer. In recent editions “World of Tad” (a teenage blog).
 
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Interesting–I never thought of Mad Magazine as “left-leaning.”

When Democrats held the White House, there were just as many political satires making fun of them as there were for the Republicans. I remember seeing stuff about McGovern.

I always felt like Mad Magazine made fun of everything and everyone–no one was safe! In the 1960s and early 1970s, Mad often made fun of “suburban life” and the people who chose to leave cities and live in the burbs (hence the feature about commercial breaks and using them to accomplish tasks). But they also made fun of Hollywood, big city life, rich people, etc.

One thing that we didn’t see back then in Mad (at least I don’t remember) is anything racist against African Americans. If that’s “liberal,” then I’m all for it!

In high school, I adopted a lot of the “Mad Magazine” style in my English and other classes. In my senior year, our history teacher assigned us to write a piece that would help a soldier returning from Viet Nam to catch up on all the happenings in the U.S. during the 1960s.

I wrote the piece as a letter from the soldier’s mother, and I basically adapted the “What, Me Worry?” mantra with a different phrase, and utilized lots and lots of satire and sarcasm.

I waited until the last night to write it and thought I would probably barely pass.

instead, the teacher gave me A+ and hailed it as the best piece he had ever seen from a high school student.

When I read it today, nearly 50 years later, I am amazed at how I capture the feeling of the 60s in the piece, much more than if I had simply written a historical summary of the events of the 1960s.

Yay Mad!
 
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At its height, MAD was big enough to have an “Australian” edition, which was the US edition with a few Australian sections, and some of the jokes were “Australianised” (eg. a local celebrity with similar profile to the parodied US one).

At a guess, Australian MAD ran from about 1990 to 2015.
 
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fj2020 said:
I remember one issue of MAD that had a simple, tear-out record in it. When you played this card board record, it was basically a fast paced instrumental, interrupted every 5 to 10 seconds with burping sounds. Just the kind of thing my male junior high friends and I thought was hilarious!
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That was ‘It’s a Gas!’…probably a promo for the album, which featured such memorable selections as ‘Nose Job’, ‘When you gonna shave your legs’, and ‘She lets me watch her Mom and Pop fight’, all by a group called the Deltones.
 
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Well, I appreciated the magazine but I sure didn’t need it to learn about secular New York Jewish culture since I grew up in it. At the time I didn’t interpret it as anything but satirical, but later, I suppose, I found it a bit stereotypical. Now, however, I’m not opposed to stereotypes when they are genuinely humorous, and MAD qualified on that score. Still, I preferred Woody Allen films and Seinfeld.
 
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I still have the MUSICALLY MAD album. Which is totally different.
 
It started as a comic, and ran as one for the first 23 issues. Then, for a couple of reasons, it switched the b/w format and was a magazine.

I just realized that if, as I read, they will cover the entire history in their reprints, it’s possible I’ll see some stuff from the early years that I never got in reprints or in the paperbacks. I got a lot of lost Carl Barks stuff like that, checking Gold Key reprints.
 
I grew up in an age of comic books, and Mad was often one my brothers bought. I don’t think my parents ever looked at it or knew it wasn’t any different than Richie Rich or Huckleberry Hound comics. I loved it. There was a classic sequence that I never forgot and wish I could find: Alfred writing a “what I did on my summer vacation” essay in about the second grade and then essentially just augmenting the very same essay at each stage of his education through his Ph.D. As a sheltered Midwest Catholic girl, I was amazed at learning about New York Jewish urbane culture, and learned about this as well from early reading of Salinger. I had no idea up to then such people/culture existed…
 
I remember it being my first introduction to satire - and what it satirized (often viciously in a take-no-prisoners style) was the popular mass culture of the day: movies, television, pop music, advertising, fashion, etc. which made it easily accessible to a kid.
 
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This is very sad. I loved MAD and it feels like a part of my childhood has just died.😭
 
Limoncello4021 said:
As a sheltered Midwest Catholic girl, I was amazed at learning about New York Jewish urbane culture, and learned about this as well from early reading of Salinger. I had no idea up to then such people/culture existed…
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Same here, though 1960s network TV was far more New York-centric than it is now, and I picked up on some cultural references. What’s My Line? was a great show, on late at night, obviously targeted to adults (though it was entirely decent), and very, very urbane. I loved the formality and courtesy — even now I can watch it on YouTube and delight in the class and wit, the orderliness of it all. They couldn’t make a show like that today without all sorts of caterwauling, people interrupting each other, and so on. The early episodes where they wore formal dress and were addressed as “Miss Francis”, “Mr Cerf”, and so on, were the best.

Jeopardy probably comes closest to being a modern-day class act, this due in no small part to Alex Trebek.
 
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