Mad magazine’s demise is part of the ending of a world
Mad’s April 1974 cover boiled the entire sensibility down into a single outrageous image: an upraised middle finger. The blowback was sufficiently intense that publisher William Gaines never went there again. But it wasn’t the readers who objected; it was our moms, dads, ministers, librarians. Our oppressors.
To
be subversive, however, requires a dominant culture to subvert. Mad was
the smart-aleck spawn of the age of mass media, when everyone watched
the same networks, flocked to the same movies and saluted the same flag.
Without established authorities, it had no reason for being. Like the
kid in the back of the classroom tossing spitballs and making fart
sounds, a journal of subversive humor is funny only if there’s someone
up front attempting to maintain order.
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The demise of Mad magazine
is hardly a surprise. Times are tricky for print publications in
general — all the more so for a title targeted with exquisite precision
at middle-school boys.
Because
life has, for the moment, scorned them, they return the favor, and for a
couple of generations, Mad was both a tutor and a tool of their
anarchy. Its cartooned pages confirmed their suspicions that parents are
hypocrites, that heroes have clay feet, that popular culture is a
ripoff and that a guy might as well laugh at existence because existence
is already laughing at him. “What, me worry?” asked mascot Alfred
E. Neuman, eternally hapless, perpetually 13.