Quotes of the Day

I wonder what I'd get on e-Bay for my first editions of...

"The MAD Reader," the first paperback collection of reprints from Harvey Kurtzman's MAD comic book; it also marked the first cover appearance of the Alfred E. Neuman "What, Me Worry?" character; Ballantine Books #93, 1954, 192 pp. Original cost: 35 cents (cheap). Value as an artifact of midcentury humor: priceless.

Also first editions of "MAD Strikes Back!" (the second paperback, 1955); "Inside MAD" (third paperback, 1956); "Utterly MAD" (fourth paperback, 1956); and "The Brothers MAD" (fifth paperback, 1958, and the last totally comprising material from the comic books). Also first editions of the first two hardback anthologies, "MAD For Keeps" and "MAD Forever." Also an original copy of the 1958 "Musically MAD," the first LP sanctioned by MAD, with liner notes by Al Feldstein, Kurtzman's successor as editor.

Ladies and gentlemen, and arrested adolescents of middle age, I offer a veritable corn-utopia of 50s "caricature," "lampoon," "parody," "burlesque" and "satire," to quote the illustrated icons on the cover of MAD when, with the July 1955 issue, it bloomed from a 10-cent comic to a 25-cent magazine.

Will I become very rich? Not as rich as I might have if — and after 40-plus years it still pains me to think of it — my mother had not thrown out my virtually complete collection of MAD comic books, from the first through 23rd issues. (MAD became a magazine with its 24th issue; I never did own the notoriously hard-to-get issue 5, of which MAD's printer ran off fewer copies).

You've heard these stories before. Adults careering toward a second childhood tell them about a movie star's autograph lost, a mislaid Topps bubble-gum card of Mickey Mantle in 1951 (his rookie year), perhaps a pet turtle that Uncle Hal flushed down the toilet. All these tales are meant to evoke a "My Dog Skip" nostalgia, soaked in rue, and they come with the moral that everything then, however ephemeral, was more precious than anything now. The impact of these childhood memoirs usually has the same effect on the domestic audience as one of the monologues spun by Homer Simpson's aged, addled father Abe: before they're over, someone — the listener or the teller — ends up snoring.

But my MAD effluvia has a more profound worth. You needn't have creaked into middle-age, or have read this stuff when you were a kid, or have grown up uttering the nonsense words "furshlugginer," "potrzebie," "axolotl" and "hoohah!" to befuddled friends and parents — in short, you needn't be me — to know that early MAD was the comedy goods. Open any of the sacred texts and be transported not back but up. TV shows of 1952-53 may seem primitive, pop songs of those pre-rock years may sound like pap, most of the movies then look sluggish and self-important ... but MAD the comic book is as fresh, by which I mean impudent, as ever.

WHEN THE KIDS TOOK OVER

For those of you who know MAD only in its comfortable magazine form, or by the Saturday-night Fox show that uses its name as a springboard for TV parodies, a little cultural and social history is in order. MAD, in its original form, started things, changed things. It represented a revolution in taste, an underground comedy movement, an education in illustrated satire. And for maybe the first time, it was discovered by, if not aimed at, kids — the readers of comic books.

Kids had saved their dimes to buy, and be entertained by, the Disney and D.C. and Classic comics. They devoured the bolder horror and war comics (Vault of Horror, Crypt of Terror, Two-Fisted Tales) published by E.C., the small outfit that gave birth to MAD. But when that comic book appeared, 50 years ago, they must have felt the seismic shift. An adult was talking to us, not talking down to us. Kurtzman wouldn't do that; his Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat titles were arguably the first anti-war comic books. Now, with the creation of MAD, he was letting us in on his comedy secrets — because no one else was listening.

MAD's only plausible forerunners were the splendid Warner Bros. cartoons perpetrated in the 40s and 50s by Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng, who worked in the same sort of cultural isolation that Kurtzman did. Michael Maltese, who wrote many of Chuck Jones' classic cartoons, remembered some visitor to the Warner cartoon collective huffing, "Well, for heaven's sake! Grown men!" Exactly: the Warners cartoon artists were grown men who, like Kurtzman, were trying only to make themselves laugh, and figured that, if they succeeded, somebody out there in the dark might laugh too.

There's a difference, though. The Warner (and Disney and Fleischer) cartoons might have had special aficionados among the pre-teen set, but they were part of the full program at any movie theater, not just on Saturday matinees; everyone saw them. The savvier film critics — notably Manny Farber, writing for The New Republic in 1943 — saw the intricacy and subversive brio of the Warner output. A few Warners cartoons, though not the great ones, won Academy Awards. They were small, shining cogs in the movie industry's machinery of distribution and self-congratulation.

Comic books had no Oscar ceremony. They didn't attract the attention of adults, unless a parent chastised his child for reading one, or rolled it up as an aid to corporal punishment. If comics weren't mindless fluff, keeping kids from reading real books (do you spot an Internet connection here?), they were the tools of Satan, suitable for banning and burning.

In 1954, comics made headlines thanks to Frederic Wertham's "Seduction of the Innocent," a book-length jeremiad linking comic books' lurid drawings and disrespectful attitudes to the rise in juvenile delinquency. Wertham, a revered psychiatrist who had been director of Bellevue's mental hygiene clinic, saw menace everywhere, and not just in Dennis. To him, Superman was a fascist icon; Batman and Robin were pedophile and catamite. Wertham was especially appalled by the E.C. horror comics line. He described, in lovingly horrified detail one story about a ghouls' baseball game where the ball, bat and bases were severed body parts. As I dimly recall, a panel from the story appeared in his book (how did he get the reprint rights?), allowing Wertham simultaneously to fulminate and titillate. "Seduction" was the equivalent of an anti-sex book with lots of sex in it.

Wertham's screed, excerpted in Reader's Digest and the Ladies' Home Journal, had a quick, crippling effect. It stoked censorious Senate hearings into the insidious sway a band of quasi-pornographers held over little Jimmy and Janie. Some parents burned comic books in town squares. Publishers, who had only been trying to make a buck, now ran scared and tried to save a few. They created a Comic Book Seal of Approval, suggesting that every comic now had the equivalent of a G rating, but that ruse fooled no parents, attracted no kids. So the publishers gave up: they eviscerated the content of some titles, junked others altogether. E.C.'s publisher, William Gaines, killed off all his comics except for MAD.

That should have done it, finished off the children's crusade. Of course it was only the beginning. Kids lost the comic-book battle to win the pop-culture war. They forgot about Gaines' tales from the crypt (until they were exhumed in the 70s as a Hammer horror anthology and in the 80s as an HBO series) and attended to Elvis Presley's tunes from the hip. The innocent would now be seduced through their ears, and they would pay more than a dime for the privilege.

Rock 'n roll, which was too big to censor, soon spawned an entire youth culture — movies, TV shows, discos, cool new drugs — and kids had the cash to support it. I'm not sure how those young boomers got the money to buy all this naughty stuff (did we mow more lawns? log marathon babysitting shifts?), but they were suddenly the largest demographic sector of record buyers and moviegoers. They became a new and crucial leisure class, the focus of every advertiser's lust, every merchant's greed. Elvis wasn't the king, his teen audience was. And, for better or worse, still is.

"DORMANT GOOKUM!"

How did MAD fit into this hear-and-see change? By becoming for the brain what rock 'n roll was to the groin: a pulse for irreverence, suspicion, internal insurrection. The laughs that Kurtzman's humor provoked in curious boys (MAD was a guy thing, mostly) were the intellectual equivalent to the screams Presley elicited from pubescent girls. Connecting with the MAD Zeitgeist meant plugging into the wide world of culture — since to understand the joke, you had to know what was being mocked.

For kids of my age and temperament, MAD comic book was our 32-page university, and Kurtzman (who wrote virtually every story in those first 23 issues) was our inspired professor. His cover promise of "Humor in a Jugular Vein" undersold the product. Poking fun at movies, TV shows, comic strips, newspapers and the Army-McCarthy hearings, MAD was the entire body politic in comedy terms.

Among MAD's targets was itself. It knew it had an image problem: it was a comic book, the detritus of pop culture. So, beginning with issue #11, Kurtzman started concealing MAD's true nature in the guise of other magazines (Life, the Atlantic Monthly) and respected artists (Da Vinci, Tenniel, Picasso). One cover was disguised as a schoolroom composition book, another as a massive Johnson Smith and Co. catalog ad — surely the highest number of words ever to appear on the front of a magazine. ("About a year's worth of writing went into that cover," Kurtzman later said.) One cover had a connect-the-dots motif: "Look gang! Another surprise! In this issue ... you draw the cover!"

At its inception, MAD parodied what was closest to it: other E.C. comics. Even the publication's supertitle — "Tales Calculated to Drive You..." — was a riff on Tales from the Crypt. Some of those early pieces are classics. "Mole!", illustrated by "Melvin" (Bill) Elder, was a parable about a convict who could dig his way out of any jail with any implement at hand: a spoon, the warden's toothpick, his own nostril hair. In the same issue (#2) was "Gookum!", illustrated by Wallace (Wally) Wood, about an extraterrestrial blob-like substance that consumes the world. At the end, as I recall, it turns out to be a dream; and someone attempts to pacify the dreamer with a cool desert. "Good Lord!" he screams when the shimmering raspberry Jell-O is placed before him. "Dormant Gookum!"

Kurtzman quickly expanded his target range from original stories to the parodies that made MAD famous. The turning point was issue #4 lead story, "Superduperman!" As drawn by Wood (who knew comics heroes from the inside, having worked on Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates strip), Superduperman had a studly smirk as the Man of Steel and nearly visible halitosis as Clark Bent, whom his beloved Lois Pain dismisses as a creep. The opening panel set the tone for MAD's glory years. It was populated by a cast of dozens and vacuum-packed with gags, including the artist's self-promo ("When better drawings are drawn... they'll be drawn by Wood. He's real good"). But Kurtzman didn't let the minutiae distract him from telling a tangy story with a twisty moral. At the end Clark reveals his true identity to Lois Lane — who is not impressed. "Hands off!" she snaps. "So you're Superduperman instead of Clark Bent! Big deal! Yer still a creep!"

MAD was soon so popular that a dozen imitations sprung up: Cracked, Crazy, Nuts, Frenzy, Sick, Madhouse, Bughouse and E.C.'s own Panic ("Humor in a Varicose Vein"), edited by Feldstein, who was also the editor of the horror comics and would assume control of MAD when Kurtzman left. None could match the original, though Panic came closest, in part because its artists were the three MAD mainstays: Elder, Wood and Jack Davis. Each had a distinctive seductive style. Davis' was fine-lined, with coltish babes and sharp-jawed heroes; Wood's had dramatic shading around his heroes, so muscle-bound they were stoop-postured; Elder, Kurtzman's old pal from Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, drew spot-on comedy, clarifying and enhancing every gag Kurtzman put on his storyboards. All were in their 20s. For MAD's artists and readers alike, it was a great time to be young.

"CURB YOUR MORTAL!"

I came to MAD with issue #14: Aug. 54, with Mona Lisa on the cover, a copy of MAD pressed against her bodice. Immediately I was hooked; I was a MADdict. It appealed to my impish sense of humor — primed by such cathode comics as Ernie Kovacs, Sid Caesar and Fred Allen — then seized and enriched it. I felt like someone who had been humming a few bars of a beguiling, mysterious melody and found someone who had turned it into a symphony. I not only bought every new MAD as it hit my local newsstand, I ordered back issues from the E.C. offices at 225 Lafayette Street. I also sent for "The Complete E.C. Checklist," a mimeographed collation of story titles and artists for every E.C. comic. (Its author, Fred von Bernewitz, later had a bustling career as an editor of TV commercials, documentaries and low-budget films, including six early comedies by Robert Downey, Sr.)

By the time MAD "graduated" from comic book to magazine, I had my nearly complete stash. But I can't say I understood everything in those sacred texts. I realized that "Melvin" (as in the Tarzan parody "Melvin of the Apes!") was a funny name, because Jerry Lewis was often called it. On other MAD arcana, though, I was so ignorant I didn't even know I was ignorant. "Potrzebie," which I pronounced as "potters-by," is actually a Polish word ("po-TREBZ-yeh") meaning desired. The Corliss family was Yiddish-deprived, so "Ganefs!", the title of one early story, meant nothing to me. As for "furshlugginer," one of Kurtzman's mantras, I innocently pronounced it "FURSH-la-JINE-er" (to rhyme, more or less, with "smersh vagina"). I must have been 30 before I learned the word was Yiddish for wacky, and was pronounced, more or less, "fish-LOOG-in-ah."

This is kid-cult stuff — the verbal equivalent of secret passwords, Masonic handshakes and Captain Midnight decoder badges. It just happens that my boyhood fad was a great and penetrating magazine. The silent film pioneer D.W. Griffith had said his mission was "to make you see." Kurtzman's mission was to teach kids to look: look closely, with wonder and skepticism, at the world around them; and look closely at MAD. The typical MAD panel was as dense as a Hieronymous Bosch dreamscape, magnificently cluttered, recklessly generous with jokes, as if Kurtzman thought he'd never run out of them. Because of him, we read everything more closely, with a jaundiced eye, searching for hidden idiocies, subtle contradictions. We passed Kurtzman's course. Mission accomplished.

The full MAD parody-panoply is on display in "Mickey Rodent!", the Kurtzman-Elder Disney demolition that is reprinted in the collection "Mad About the Fifties." Strolling in the foreground of the opening panel is Mickey himself, with a four-day stubble on his face and a snapped mouse trap on his snout; his left arm has a TV screen, smashed in the middle, with "Howdy Dooit" sunrays visible. (That's an inside joke: in a previous issue, parodying "Howdy Doody," Mickey was seen at the edge of the opening panel, grasping and shouting, "That's MY sunray from MY movies behind his head and I wannit back!") Around him a melodrama unfolds: Horace Horszneck is being dragged off to jail "for appearing without his white gloves." The animal chorus behind him clucks, moos and barks their annoyance with "Walt Dizzy's" rule about wearing white gloves at all times... "In this hot weather too!" "And it's so hard to buy those furshlugginer three-fingered kinds!"

At the edges of this frame and throughout the seven pages of "Mickey Rodent!" are snapshots of a world where mice evolved from men. We see a dog in a jacket holding a tiny crouching blond boy on a leash; more naked humans in a pet shops; a circus poster for "Fritz the Boy-faced Dog"; signs reading "Curb Your Mortal!" and "Beware of Human!"; a movie marquee showing the feature "3 Ducks in the Fountain"; more signs, one urging bloodhounds to "become a donor" (actually, "donner" — spelling was never E.C.'s forte), another advising rabbits to take a correspondence course and "learn to subtract"; and a clothing store with a sale on cow slips, horse collars, turtle-neck sweaters, alligator shoes, cats pajamas, monkey suits and dogs pants.

The story worms its way into the Disney logic, then makes a shambles of it. Why does Darnold Duck (Donald) wear a sailor jacket but no pants? Why must Pluted Pup (Pluto) remain mute, when all the other animals speak? (For that matter, why does a mouse have a pet dog?) Then there's Mickey's girlfriend Minny Rodent — a congeries of unsettling contradictions. As Darnold muses: "Somehow ... the idea of a mouse, with lipstick and eyelashes and a dress with high-heeled shoes; a mouse, ten times bigger than the biggest rat ... this idea has always made me sick!"

Art Spiegelman, creator of "Maus" and erstwhile contributor to The New Yorker, has called Kurtzman "the single most significant influence on a couple of generations of comics artists." No question that the underground comix artists of the 60s were suckled on, and took inspiration from, his rude and capacious world-view. Some of Kurtzman's own artists expanded into darker territory. In Wally Wood's lushly scabrous "Disneyland Memorial Orgy," a 1967 parody that ran in Realist magazine, Walt's creatures behaved exactly as barnyard and woodland denizens might. Beneath dollar-sign searchlights radiating from the Magic Kingdom's castle, Goofy had his way with Minnie, Dumbo the flying elephant dumped on Donald Duck, the Seven Dwarfs besmirched Snow White en masse, and Tinker Bell performed a striptease for Peter Pan and Jiminy Cricket. Mickey slouched off to one side, shooting heroin.

Those who had grown up with Kurtzman's MAD surely looked at this wonderfully obscene fresco and thought, "We were there at the beginning." In the beginning there was Harvey. And we, his children, simply by being his disciples and spreading the word, had became the first generation of kids to validate and popularize a comedy genius. I consider myself — well, warped, of course, by reading MAD — but mainly incredible enriched. Even if I never get a penny from my old MAD books.

And Mom, I forgive you.

COMING SOON: The Church of Harvey

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss on the golden anniversary of MAD, the ultimate comic book