Mad Magazine. Who Loved It As A Kid? (Or An Adult)

I used to love it~! My first issue was the "Star Wars" parody in 1977, when I was 7 years old....thereafter I bought each new issue and tried to find as many of the small paperback books I could find. At a book fair at school I purchased "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions", which I thought was hysterical. I also loved the "Super Specials" with the reprints, flexi-discs, etc.

I read and re-read those paperbacks so many times that I have much of them memorized...I still can recall all the words to "This Road Is Under Construction" (song to the tune of "Eve of Destruction") 30 years later.

I read through a copy at a newstand a year or so ago and I didn't recognize it at all. ADS??! I guess it hasn't been the same since Gaines passed....he was a hell of a guy, one of my small handful of "comics" idols.

Loved Don Martin and Al Jaffee...Dave Berg I thought was okay...and Paul Coker, who did a lot of work for MAD, did a lot of design work for Rankin/Bass...if you know his art style you can see it all over some of their holiday specials.

 

Anyone remember Mad Goes Hi-Fi?

http://www.hifisoup.com/2009/10/mad-magazine-goes-hifi.html


Edit: Just saw this was posted above, but this link is very "readable". This is from January of 1958.

 

I think I learned how to read by perusing my brother's Mad Magazines when I was 5 or 6.... Used to look forward to their satires of current movies and TV (Star Dreck, etc.). Sometimes they were better than the movies themselves! The paperback reissues of the early MAD comics were pure genius especially the work of Will Elder who drew those parodies of ARCHIE (Starchie) and Howdy Doody - loved the jokes and visual puns he would place in the background - it led the way to kind of humor used in the Airplane and Naked Gun movies!

 

potrzebie

 

My older brother used to hand me down his issues of Mad back in the early 70's. I absolutely loved Mad.

Ernie Kovacs used to contribute to Mad back in the 50's ......

 

Used to get it every issue in the 70s/80s.
Haven't seen an issue on the newsstands in ages.
Didn't even know it was still being published.
Guess where some of my 'warped' sense of humor came from?
Loved "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions" (which I still use).


Darryl

 

I sometimes bought Mad Magazine as a kid in the early 80's, but more often bought Cracked Magazine. I thought Cracked was better than Mad.

 

Can't agree with that, but certainly the current Cracked.com site is a lot funnier (and informative!) than the current version of MAD!

People have been mentioning National Lampoon: I was first exposed to this when I was about 10, when an aunt bought me a copy of NL's 10th-anniversary anthology in the belief that it was a comedy mag similar to MAD. Which it was not. Hoo boy, was it not. I think that one book shaped my comedy perspective than all those hundreds of issues of MAD I bought! It was a bit pricey for me as a kid though and by the time I could afford it regularly, it was going downhill and my interests were changing.

 

An older cousin first turned me on to Mad magazine when I was 9 or 10, so this would be 1963-1964. Some of the humor was over my head, but one of the issues he gave my (one year younger) brother and I had "Mad's Halloween Carols", the title alone I found outrageously genius. Singing to the tune of "Deck The Halls" such lyrics as "trip the old man with a wire, ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha" kept us up hours after having gone to bed.

 

I used to have a few special issues, an all movie parody double issue from the late 80's, a collection of assorted music based stuff from various issues and an all color parody of Pop Up Video that used screen caps from music videos and the graphics from Pop Up Video but the captions made fun of the artists and videos. I wish I still had all those.

 

Used to love it but haven't read it in years....

Just kept getting worse and worse and I finally gave up...

 

Absolutely Mad is an inexpensive way to read through the archive.

Curiously, and though it may sound like heresy to a MAD fanatic, Cracked is still around:

http://www.cracked.com/

 

Must have made you Mad!

Mean humor is easy. The easiest, with "gross out" humor being generally easy as well. It's the specialized humor that's hard and takes particular talents.

 

I used to love reading MAD because it was very smart humor. It sounds like it's gone downhill since I stopped reading about 15 years ago.

 

I bought Mad from 77-80 and saved every copy I ever bought. Spy vs. Spy was my favorite.

 

Back in the late 60s and early 70s, I used to purchase nearly every Mad Magazine and paperback book. I didn't really find "Spy vs. Spy" too funny, but most everything else seemed quite funny at the time. I haven't revisited it in years though, and have no idea what happened to the collection.

 

Suitable for wrapping fish.

 

........Or lining birdcages!

 

It's been dumbed down to the lowest possible denominator, really an insult to even the dimmist of wits. Truly pathetic and unfunny.

The original really wasn't aimed at kids imo, and I remember having to "grow into" some of the humor as I collected it over the years. Of course there were hilarious things that people of all ages could appreciate as well.

There was an article in the early '70s called "Get It Out Of Your System Land" that was priceless.
The artwork depicted a black panther and a KKK guy walking out of the "park" with their arms over each others shoulders, laughing.

 

From Dee Long (of Klaatu): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxJGz9uvBX0

 

Betcha I know what store you're talkin' 'bout,Chippers!!!

 

Does it have all the flexis from the Specials?-If so,how do they sound???

 

That's about when I stopped buying it.But before that,I bought every issue (and still have the majorty of 'em) from '79-'95.And a whole bunch of 60s & 70s issues I've scored over the years.It went rapidly downhill after Bill Gaines passed....
Now-every once in awhile,I'll read it at the supermarket,and see how much WORSE it's gotten since I stopped buying.Ads? Color? No thanks.PLUS--IT'S NOT FUNNY!!!--AND,as far as I know,besides Dick DeBartello(his book-"Good Days & MAD"-is a must!!)-everybody's gone(most of 'em dead...)

 

Exactly. It was never difficult to detect the political leanings of MAD's writers back in the day, but they were always ready to call any emperor on his nudity, regardless of who he was. Now, they seem more bitterly party-political, which really undercuts the humour...such as it is these days.