[upbeat surf rock music]
Uh, I'm not familiar with this.
What is MAD magazine?
It was revolutionary.
MAD magazine, to me, represented
the epitome of humor magazines.
MAD magazine was the first place
that really mocked people hard.
[Bryan Cranston] It was anarchistic.
I'd never seen that kind of humor before,
that kind of irreverent comedy,
- and it really changed... - [popping]
- ...something in my brain. - I mean, MAD magazine
is the only magazine that I ever read cover to cover.
I never did my homework, but I read MAD magazine.
[Cranston] Most parents didn't approve.
They thought it was corrupting their minds,
and in a way, it was. In a good way.
[Cranston chuckles]
[Howie Mandel] I remember reading things
and just in my mind going, "Oh, whoa!"
That's why most people who had MAD magazines
at my age had to hide them.
[Joe Raiola] MAD is not good. Our readers are not smart.
MAD is cheap. The quality is poor.
It's stupid. That's our brand.
In comedy, it took people like MAD magazine
to establish that you are allowed to criticize people.
They weren't afraid of anyone.
MAD went after everyone.
[Judd Apatow] It inspired a lot of people
to want to make comedy.
No! Kelly Clarkson!
Surely you can't be serious.
I am serious, and don't call me Shirley.
[David Zucker] MAD was a textbook for us,
how to make fun of things.
[Mandel] MAD was a precursor to The Daily Show
and Saturday Night Live.
You see the parody of The Daily Show
in this month's MAD magazine?
You're on the cover of MAD magazine.
- This, uh, is a big deal. - [audience cheering]
That's, like, a better version of me.
I'll tell you the greatest thing
that I've ever achieved in my career.
I was on the cover of MAD magazine.
I adore MAD magazine.
[Raiola] When you talk about modern American satire,
- it starts with MAD. - [glass shattering]
The rest is, as they say, misery.
[laughs]
♪
[narrator] During the summer of 1947,
in what would become a defining moment in the world of satire,
President Truman signed into law the National Security Act,
creating, among other things, the CIA.
Also occurring at the time, a young William Maxwell Gaines
would make a decision that would lead to
covertly sabotaging our nation for years to come.
[melodic rock music]
Initially, Bill Gaines' career that he ended up in
wasn't really what he intended to be.
[Grant Geissman] Bill Gaines grew up in Brooklyn.
His dad was M.C. Gaines,
and he was on the very ground floor of
the comics industry.
[Bill Gaines] He had been in the advertising business,
and somewhere along the line, he was packaging 8, 16,
maybe 32-page comic books for advertisers.
One day, he had the inspiration of
putting ten-cent labels on these and sticking them
on a newsstand, and they sold out very quickly.
Coming out with the first comic book,
which was called Famous Funnies.
Really, Max Gaines was responsible
for jump-starting the comic book industry.
He had a sister company to DC Comics.
They were kind of separate companies,
but tied together in a business way.
He was responsible for getting Wonder Woman created,
Green Lantern created.
They established the Justice Society of America,
which way later in the '60s became the Justice League.
[narrator] Of all the superheroes Gaines championed,
one in particular would stand out above the rest.
[Geissman] He recommended to his buddies
at DC Comics a character called Superman
and published it as a standalone comic.
What he didn't realize is Superman was just
gonna be ginormous.
[man] Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird!
- [woman] It's a plane! - [man] It's Superman!
[various people] Superman!
[dramatic film music]
- Oh, let go, let go, let go! - [Superman chuckles]
[narrator] Max was sitting on a gold mine.
The Superman franchise alone would go on to generate
billions of dollars.
But Max threw it all away by selling his stake to focus on
what he believed would be a more lucrative genre.
[Al Feldstein] Educational comics.
Picture stories of the Bible.
Picture stories from world history.
♪
[Geissman] They were boring, and they were literally
designed for little kids.
[Feldstein] Nobody wanted to read that stuff,
and so he was starting to lose his shirt.
So Max Gaines's entertaining and educational comics
basically did not move on the newsstands.
Nobody bought them. Nobody was interested.
The company was about $100,000 in the red.
[narrator] An already difficult time for the Gaines family
would quickly turn to tragedy.
[Geissman] Bill's father was killed in a tragic
boating accident in August 1947.
Bill's mother insisted that he take over the company,
even though Bill actually hated comics.
He didn't like anything about the company his dad created.
He had a very strained relationship with his father.
[Gaines] To him, I was a bum.
I couldn't do anything.
I couldn't fix fuses,
and I wasn't much good at doing anything.
Stepping into the comic business was
absolutely the last thing he wanted to do.
[Annie Gaines Ashton] Bill's mother said, "Oh, please go
down to the business and try and make something out of it."
He took a look at all the comics his father
was publishing and thought, "These are pretty lame."
[Geissman] In the beginning, Bill only went into the office
to sign checks and maybe do a little paperwork.
But little by little, he started to kind of enjoy
being at the company.
He liked being around creative people.
One of the major changes came in 1948.
This guy called Al Feldstein walked into the office.
I showed him what I was doing,
which at the time was those Lana Turner sweater types.
[Geissman] Big boobs and, like, you know, short skirts.
And Bill's like, "I like these comics and I like this guy."
And he said, "Would you do a teenage book for us?"
[Geissman] Feldstein originally wanted to be a doctor,
but his father lost his business in the Depression.
There was no money for medical school.
He was about 15, and he found out he could make,
you know, $10 a page drawing comic books.
So he went where the money was, and he did have talent.
So that's how I started with Bill.
We became friends.
And he was very naïve and new to the business.
[Geissman] Al was a kind of a brash, energetic guy.
And Bill needed that.
He needed someone to come in and be gung-ho.
And Al was all of that.
The two of them started working together,
making changes, abandoning the kind of
kiddie comics that Max Gaines was publishing.
[narrator] Bill would veer from the educational
and focus on the entertaining.
The break came when Feldstein proposed
they try their hand at a brand new comic book genre.
I said, "Let's scare the pants off the kids in comic books."
[horror music plays]
[narrator] Just as his father had been an innovator,
Bill and his editor broke new ground by introducing their take
on horror and science fiction comics with a brand new style.
♪
[Geissman] Horror comics became super popular very fast,
and the money started coming in.
Now EC was finally making a profit,
and Bill was able to disprove his dad.
He did make EC a success,
something his father never could do.
[narrator] A young illustrator named Harvey Kurtzman
arrived at EC's doorstep showcasing his unique talents.
I was known as the funny cartoonist
in high school, the guy who used to do cartoons
for everybody, make everybody laugh.
[narrator] In true MAD fashion, Kurtzman's first assignment with
EC was a comic book that stood out.
[Geissman] They hired Kurtzman to do this comic
called "Lucky Fights It Through," which was
an anti-venereal disease little giveaway pamphlet.
You know, "Don't sleep with the floozy,
you're gonna get VD."
[Drew Friedman] He was very humble and quiet, shy.
He was like turtle-like. He looked like a turtle.
Harvey was one of the greatest visual talents ever.
[Frank Santopadre] It's amazing who was hugely important at
one point and has done so much and influenced so many things.
And if you wanted to draw the line from MAD,
if you could draw it right back like a fuse on a bomb,
it would reach Kurtzman.
[explosion]
[Geissman] Although Kurtzman did some work in the horror comics,
he hated horror comics. He thought they were awful.
Harvey pitched that he would do, like, an adventure comic on
his own, which morphed pretty quickly into like a war comic,
showing the actual real horrors of war.
He was a perfectionist, and it took him really
a long time to do these war comics.
He would go research and talk to veterans.
And they were fantastic comics,
but they actually never sold all that well.
He was putting so much effort in.
He wasn't making any money.
Feldstein was cranking out horror comics a story a day,
and Kurtzman was, you know, slaving over this stuff.
So I was doing seven books and Harvey was doing two.
And he was very much annoyed that I was making
three and a half times as much as he was, and he went to
Bill Gaines and he said, "I want to make more money."
So we had a big brainstorming session about
what Harvey would do for the third comic book.
So I suggested that we go to a-- a funny format.
Not a Daffy Duck or a Woody Woodpecker or whatever.
Why don't we do an adult humor magazine?
[Kurtzman] I was originally inspired by a couple of college
yearbooks that I came across, and this was a revelation.
The college yearbooks had been doing the kind of
satire and parody that I wanted to do for years.
[wondrous music]
[narrator] MAD number one hit the newsstands in August 1952.
It cost ten cents an issue.
Subscriptions were 75 cents for six issues.
Readers were met with a greeting.
"You are now holding our dream child in your hands.
We had a swell time creating MAD,
and we hope that MAD will have a long, successful life."
It featured four articles,
each essentially a spoof of EC's other comic books.
Harvey wrote, penciled,
and inked much of MAD himself, but he also selected
specific artists from EC's stable of regulars.
But brilliant Wally Wood was the best comic book
artist of his time.
John Severin brought his detail-oriented artistry
to the world of satire.
The lightning-fast genius of Jack Davis was amazing,
and he welcomed the transition from horror to humor.
[Jack Davis] The horror bit came very easy,
and it was kind of humorous,
and I made it humorous.
And for me, it just always flowed,
so it wasn't really a big shift.
[narrator] And there was one artist
perfectly suited for MAD, the zany Will Elder.
He started putting in what they called chicken fat.
Like all these little extra gags in the panel so you could
read the main story, and then you could actually
go back and pick up all these little things
that Elder would stick in the background.
[Kurtzman] Essentially, we did MAD for ourselves,
so it became a very personalized effort.
I came upon the MAD format because
it was something that I did easily.
I'd been doing it all my life.
[narrator] Harvey's focus on mostly parodying EC's
other titles didn't do much to attract new readers,
and MAD struggled to find its audience.
We used to chat, and I-- I would prod him.
I would say, "You know, there's a lot else out there
besides just making fun of what we're publishing.
Why don't you make fun of Americana?"
[upbeat classical music]
[narrator] With the Great Depression and World War II
disappearing in the rear view mirror,
Americans could move on to more important things,
like fancy ovens, snazzy cars,
and an exciting new place to live: the suburbs.
When MAD came on the scene, Elvis Presley
hadn't even yet appeared, so you really didn't even
have the kind of rock and roll rebellion yet.
[narrator] However, underneath this picturesque surface,
a darker threat loomed.
It was an era of tremendous repression.
[dramatic music]
The Red Threat, the Hollywood blacklist.
[Nick Meglin] The McCarthyism, and then people were
afraid of anything in print.
[announcer] Minus ten seconds.
[Tom Koch] The whole country was in a very conformist mode.
Eight, seven...
The atom bomb.
What could be scarier than that?
Five, four...
[Feldstein] The kids were being told to get under their seats
when the siren went off, and that they would be okay,
and the kids were saying, you know, "That's a lot of crap.
I'm gonna get turned into dust!"
- So they were starting... - [emergency alarm blaring]
...to question the adult world.
♪
[Jaffee] In an atmosphere like this,
it was so easy to ridicule things.
[narrator] With MAD on the brink of bankruptcy,
MAD went all in on connecting with the youth of America
by ridiculing the perilous status quo.
[Geissman] MAD took a few issues to catch on,
did not fly off the newsstand, but then on the fourth issue,
they hit on doing a specific superhero.
We lampooned, uh, Superman.
- [technician] Two, one... - [explosion]
[fast-paced music]
[Gaines] We ran a feature called "Super Duper Man."
[man] That's hilarious.
[Gaines] It was then. [laughing] You had to be there.
[Feldstein] And that was, like,
the turning point in MAD magazine.
[Geissman] And that was the first classic MAD story that
sort of paved the way for all future MAD parodies,
which actually DC was very angry about,
and they threatened to sue him.
That might've been the first time I realized,
oh, there's Superman, and then there's these people
who are gonna mock it and make "Super Duper Man."
It was the beginning of learning that, you know, there are people
who are gonna beat the piss out of you in this world,
who are gonna mock you and find the thing to make fun of.
MAD just pointed it out for us and gave us permission
to laugh at stuff.
People need to laugh to release pressure and anxiety.
Laughter is a direct hit.
We're looking at ourselves.
We're looking at atrocious things in
our culture in a funny way, in a way that makes you laugh,
like a funhouse mirror makes you laugh.
It doesn't make you an-- it shouldn't make you angry.
[chuckling]
[Zucker] There's always something to spoof.
Anything that's taken seriously is grist for the mill.
[Geissman] They did a parody of Batman and Robin
called "Bat Boy and Rubin."
And in the splash panel,
they put a little notice for the suits at DC.
"Hey, this is a lampoon. We're making fun of this.
"If you want to sue us, go right ahead."
And now do you just parody comic strips?
No, what else can we parody?
Advertisements.
You can parody movies.
[dramatic intro music]
[narrator] Harvey introduced what would
become a defining MAD feature.
The pull, the draw,
was the movie satires and the TV satires.
Everything else there was great and it was
terrific and it could be wonderful.
But at the end of the day, it was still filler.
It was the stuff that fit in between
the movie parody and the TV parody.
MAD was saying, yeah, movies are stupid.
[grunting]
And that was great. That was a revelation.
You could make fun of movies.
- [neighing] - Hi-yo, Silver!
[Feldstein] We did takeoffs on The Lone Ranger...
[comic gunshots]
[yelling]
...on Tarzan, and it worked.
People thought the stuff was hilarious.
MAD just pointed it out for us.
We don't have to take this seriously.
[man] This woman has to be gotten to a hospital.
A hospital? What is it?
It's a big building with patients,
but that's not important right now.
They figured out, how can we take a MAD magazine spoof
and make it work from beginning to end as a motion picture.
There's a scene with Leslie Nielsen and Peter Graves.
Captain, how soon can you land?
- I can't tell. - You can tell me. I'm a doctor.
That's right out of MAD.
I mean, not that those guys wrote it,
but it could have been something that they would have written.
[Quentin Tarantino] MAD magazine did most of the great movies
of the '70s and took the piss right out of them,
shoved a weed up their ass.
It didn't matter what the movie was.
They were never respectful.
[Cranston] To take something that was either revered,
admired, appreciated, and just beat it to death
and then drag it through the streets.
Like, oh, my God.
There are R-rated movies I've still never seen that
my only point of reference for them is the MAD magazine parody.
For the love of God, help me!
Movie satire is my favorite thing to write because
you just see the movie once and then you go from there.
[intriguing surf rock music]
[Apatow] If you made a movie, you would think, "Oh,
what are they gonna notice that we did wrong?"
But whether it's a great movie, a bad movie,
you can do a satire on it because you can
pick things out and just make fun of them.
There are some of those parodies that almost
exist as the last word on the movie.
The famous one for Rosemary's Baby,
that was actually great.
"I think there's a secret going on in this.
Let's figure it out."
It spells out, "This movie is boring."
They have Melissa McCarthy and she says,
"I bet if Meryl Streep had ferocious diarrhea in a sink,
they'd have given her the Oscar..."
[grunting, screaming]
"...just because she can crap with an accent."
[Meglin] I was literally thrown out of the movie
Love Story before the ending, because I couldn't stop
laughing when she was dying.
It was such a farce.
The movie was so stupid, and the audience is crying,
and I'm laughing, and that's the curse of being a satirist.
You laugh at the wrong places.
[Arnie Kogen] TV shows were tougher because you had to
actually write a story and compose a plot of some sort.
[Dick Debartolo] You have to watch at least five or six
episodes to get the character development and stuff like that.
I never thought I would go into humorous illustration.
That wasn't my thing.
I said, "Well, give me a script and I'll give it a shot."
The biggest challenge in these jobs was
the likeness of the characters. If you didn't
get the likenesses, the story wouldn't work.
- I love you, honey bunny. - And I love you, honey bunny.
Everybody be cool, this is a robbery.
[soft comic music]
What are you doing?
I need you to look at something in my butt.
For some reason, MAD did not get invited to a lot of previews.
[Angelo Torres] ABC had-- had a picture file.
They would go down there and help themselves
to all the pictures they wanted.
Until one day these people say, "Hey,
they're lampooning our work."
Cut them out, no more pictures.
[Mort Drucker] When I met Al Feldstein and Bill Gaines,
they were listening to a Yankee-Dodger World Series game.
And, uh, Bill Gaines said to me, after looking at my work,
he said, "The Dodgers win, you got the job."
[chuckling]
When I went to MAD, I didn't do any caricatures of anybody.
That wasn't what I did.
But, uh, a job came up, and they needed
someone who could do likenesses.
And from then on, I was doing movies.
[electricity crackling]
The weird thing for me was I lived down the street
from Mort Drucker as a kid.
And then one day we worked up the courage
to knock on the door.
And he's the nicest man in the world.
This was comedy that was speaking to
all the things that I was aware of.
It's pop culture and it took all the TV shows
I was watching and turned them on their ear.
[pop-punk music]
I started reading MAD at a very early age,
which explains why right now I read on a third-grade level.
I had one issue with this one, which looked exactly like
a school notebook so the junior could smuggle
it into class and read the comics.
I tell you, it was mad, mad, mad.
[Drucker] A lot of teachers and parents were caught
all of a sudden, you know,
how do you handle this magazine for your kids?
[Cranston] Most parents didn't approve.
They thought it was corrupting their minds.
And in a way it was, in a good way.
[Gottfried] It was always fun when you'd come across
some article or something they'd say where you'd go,
"Ooh, am I reading something bad here?"
It was wonderfully subversive.
[Mandel] I liked the fact that my parents weren't reading it.
I remember reading things and just in my mind going,
"Ooh, oh, whoa. If they ever saw that..."
[Weird Al Yankovic] I remember a couple of times
when I came back from school, my parents had already
read the issue and they were kind of like,
"I don't know if we should be giving you this."
[Cranston] I was not allowed to have a subscription.
I had to save some money, and when my mom wasn't looking,
I'd, you know, buy a MAD magazine or go off on my own.
I had to stash it.
Satire doesn't respect.
That's why most people who had MAD magazines
at my age had to hide them.
And anything you had to stash when you were a kid,
it must be valuable.
[DeBartolo] The thing that MAD did and why kids had to hide MAD
is that no one would think of making fun
of what the government was doing.
No one'd think of making fun of giant corporations.
♪
[Stan Hart] My readers had no age limitation.
You can't write 14-year-old humor
and an 18-year-old is gonna enjoy it.
But you can write 18-year-old humor
and a 14-year-old will enjoy it.
Here's where I give Al all the credit in the world.
When anybody said,
"But the kids, they don't even know that,"
he says, "It's okay, it's okay. They'll get it."
There were parts of MAD magazine that went over my head.
But things that go over your head
make you wanna lift your head up.
And that if you wanna be the audience that this
is, you know, meant for, gotta raise your game a little bit.
When you're that age, for some reason, it really speaks to you.
I don't know if it's the way that it deals with authority
figures or trying to figure out your place in the world
or dealing with the fact that everybody's lying to you.
[Tim Carvell] There's a point in your life where you
don't know people might be lying to you.
And then you suddenly discover something that says that to
you and it feels like you're getting the secret knowledge.
And I feel like that's what MAD was.
I do think the boys who grew up buying copies of
MAD magazine on their own, they're a certain breed.
It's like the generation where me and a lot
of my peers ultimately come from.
The Joe Dantes and the Judd Apatows and
the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrahams.
And I think there's a sense of humor,
there's a sensibility, there's a smart aleck-ness.
You know, as a little kid, you're angry.
You're angry that anyone's telling you what to do.
You're angry that the teachers want order.
So MAD magazine was always so exciting because
it was the one place where you felt like there's
other people out there really annoyed like me.
[narrator] Kurtzman's shrewd silliness really
spoke to MAD's young audience.
He grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home,
but he himself didn't understand it.
He would pepper early MAD with some of the more humorous
and absurd-sounding words that he heard from his parents.
Uh, that's veeblefetzer.
Veeblefesser. Veeblefetzer?
Furshlugginer.
Jose, do we have a furshlugginer?
Ah, furshlugginer.
[Davis] And that took off.
And MAD really took off as a comic book.
We'd go down to New Jersey and watch it come off the press,
and that was exciting.
[narrator] As its fan base grew,
so did its occasional detractors.
[melodic rumba music]
[Frank Jacobs] It was an entity unto itself.
Kids glommed onto it right away.
[Jaffee] They were excited about anything that was going up
against this repressive atmosphere
that was growing so strong.
[TV clicking]
[narrator] MAD's subversive left-wing perspective
could be traced to the powerlessness
many Jewish Americans felt so soon after the Holocaust.
Satire was the outlet to take down those
who held all the power.
[Cranston] Humor cuts the bullshit away, but also
the societal value of satire is that it brings
everybody down off their high perch.
It's always important to have people
hold other people accountable.
It really is essential to call it out.
[Geissman] As good as he was,
Harvey never liked doing comic books.
Comic books were cheaply produced.
You know, they were color on the inside,
printed on newsprint paper.
And Harvey always thought he was slumming in the world of comics,
and he longed to be in the world of slick magazines,
like a proper newsstand magazine.
Kurtzman was really concerned about having
his work say something.
I mean, he did the greatest war stories ever.
And then he created MAD, which is something that's,
you know, thumbing its nose at everything.
Fortunately for MAD and fortunately for Harvey,
Pageant magazine came to him and offered him
the editorship of the humor section of Pageant.
And so he came to Bill, and he said,
"Look, I never liked doing comics,
and I've always wanted to work for an adult magazine."
And Bill said, "You want to work for an adult magazine?
Turn MAD into an adult magazine."
So Bill allowed Kurtzman to transition MAD from
a comic book into a magazine to keep Harvey happy
and to keep him from going elsewhere.
[Feldstein] And that's how the slick version
of MAD was born. It was born on issue 24.
[TV host] You ever hear of MAD magazine?
Used to be a comic magazine.
Last spring, though, they decided to, uh, become
a slick magazine, as they say in the trade,
specializing in parody, satire.
And they've done a pretty funny job, I think, now.
On the cover of this, it says-- Can you read that?
"An extremely important message from the editors.
Buy the magazine."
[narrator] Harvey used Pageant magazine's calling as
leverage to make MAD into the slick publication
he'd always wanted to do.
MAD was an instant success,
joining the whole line of wildly popular EC comics.
But success puts you in the spotlight.
About the same time, the problem with juvenile delinquency and
a lot of anti-comic book stuff was going on.
We were suddenly under fire,
and the Kefauver Committee was formed.
[suspenseful music]
[announcer] Horror and crime comics upset kids.
You can see the tension develop as the story gets more gruesome.
And if it's a bad one, the kid is a mass of
jangled nerves by the time he's through it.
Men are getting rich off the comic books
that teach kids this kind of activity.
I don't know how you like it, but it makes me kind of sick.
Every generation has sort of a guy or a movement like that.
They're against rock music.
They're against, you know, television.
They're against video games.
There have been anti-comics people ever since comics began.
[Santopadre] People who were going after comics as creating
delinquency and destroying the youth of America.
[reporter] Good afternoon from the federal courthouse
in Foley Square in downtown Manhattan.
WNYC is about to bring you the afternoon session of
the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency,
investigating the effect of comic books
on the increased rate of juvenile crime.
[narrator] On April 21st, 1954, a Senate hearing was convened
to discuss the causes of juvenile delinquency,
and a star witness was brought in.
[Geissman] This kind of ambitious
psychologist named Dr. Fredric Wertham,
who published Seduction of the Innocent,
and it had to do with how comics were subverting our children and
ruining their minds and causing juvenile delinquency.
[Dr. Fredric Wertham speaks words on screen]
[Feldstein] They decided that Bill should insist upon
being heard at this investigation.
And he very unwisely decided, "I'm gonna go in there,
I'm gonna volunteer to talk, and I'm gonna go in there
and defend my comic books on First Amendment grounds."
The kids have rights too.
They have a right to read this stuff.
My name is William Gaines.
I was the first publisher in these United States
to publish horror comics.
I'm responsible. I started them.
I don't think it does them a bit of good, sir.
But I don't think it does them a bit of harm either.
Because he voluntarily appeared,
he now painted a big target on his back.
Like he's the horror comics bad guy.
And they just skewered him.
...holding a woman's head up
and severed from her body.
[Feldstein] I just couldn't believe what was happening.
They crucified him.
They were looking for a scapegoat.
And they all read comic books.
And that was what was wrong.
Gee, I guess back then the Senate really
was looking for things to do.
[Feldstein] And so, uh, they decided that
they would pacify the public.
And they formed the Comic Book Code Authority.
And they appointed a Judge Murphy as the enforcer.
[Judge Murphy] No comics shall
explicitly present scenes of brutal torture.
Scenes of excessive violence shall be prohibited.
[Feldstein] You couldn't use weird.
You couldn't use crime.
You couldn't use horror.
All of our titles!
I for one do not believe, and never have believed,
that comics are the cause of juvenile delinquency.
[Meglin] Gaines fought 'em tooth and nail.
And he just said, "No, you're wrong,
and we're gonna do what we do."
And when they censored him and wouldn't let him do it,
then he ended it.
The bad publicity just proved to be too much.
And so Gaines, again, voluntarily decided
to throw in the towel on his horror comics.
I've taken this action based on a premise
which has never been proven.
However, I feel that the public must be served.
And we were put out of business.
[narrator] Facing bankruptcy yet again, Gaines was forced
to let his entire staff go, including Al Feldstein.
Despite the hopelessness, there was still one possibility.
[upbeat action film music]
[Meglin] Harvey comes to Bill and says, "Look,
MAD is not run by the Code."
Because it now was a magazine,
they couldn't touch it, couldn't censor it.
And that's why MAD became his one and only magazine.
It was just so wonderfully ironic that the thing that was
left standing from all of the huge catalog
of comics that EC was doing was MAD.
When they were so concerned about stamping out
everything that was dangerous,
and then they let the most subversive thing continue.
[Torres] They said, "To heck with everything else,
let's concentrate on MAD."
[Geissman] Harvey turned MAD into a magazine,
and it went along okay for
four or five issues, except Harvey was
an incredible perfectionist, and he kept missing deadlines.
Like, he would have artists redraw articles
that were perfectly fine.
Harvey wanted more money to spend on the magazine.
Gaines didn't have the money because
Harvey was missing his deadlines.
So the Gaines-Kurtzman
relationship became increasingly strained.
[Feldstein] He comes to Bill Gaines, and he says,
"I want 51% of the magazine..."
"And control."
And Bill says, "What is this all about?"
And he said, "That's what I want."
Bill calls up Lyle Stewart.
"Harvey Kurtzman is here, and he wants 51% of the magazine."
Lyle says, "Is he near a window? Throw him out."
[screaming]
[cracking]
[narrator] Hugh Hefner's new publication,
Playboy, was a major triumph,
and he wanted to expand his empire.
Hefner comes to Harvey and said, "I want you to do a sister
magazine to Playboy, a real slick version of MAD."
And Harvey went off the wall with that chance.
But he didn't have the guts to come to Bill
and say, "I'm quitting."
So he had to get himself fired.
So Harvey left to do Trump for Hefner,
and he took the entire staff, except John Putnam, with him.
The magazine only lasted two issues, and Hefner later
wrote in a letter, he said, "We gave Kurtzman
an unlimited budget, and he exceeded it."
Gaines was pretty distraught because he thought,
how can there be MAD without Harvey?
And his wife, Nancy, said, "Well, you know,
Feldstein had Panic, which was EC's imitation of MAD.
He did okay with that."
[Feldstein] I'm coming home from walking the streets
and doing, you know, stuff for Stan Lee.
I was back freelancing again. It was awful.
He's waiting for me on the Long Island Railroad Station.
"I fired Harvey. Come back to work for me.
Let's do something. What do you want to do?"
I said, "What do you want to do?"
I said, "You got MAD. Give me MAD. Let me do MAD."
[narrator] With issue 29, Feldstein officially
took credit as editor.
[Geissman] The one thing Feldstein had was he could
hit deadlines, and he knew the nuts and bolts
about keeping a magazine running.
And that's what he brought to MAD more than anything else.
[funky jazz music]
♪
[Feldstein] You know, we're in a corporate age
of corporate image.
There was the Green Giant,
then the barking dog into the megaphone.
Playboy had the rabbit.
I said, "We need a logo."
[surf rock music]
[Mandel] Alfred E. Neuman was like a magnet to me.
Just his little ears.
And it was like, "Pick me up.
Pick me up!
You're gonna love this!"
[Santopadre] A good Alfred cover is just the best hook.
You know, it just immediately gets you right
on the newsstand and lets you know what the magazine is.
Ballantine came to Bill
and wanted to reprint the comic books.
The editor up at Ballantine's
did this first paperback book of MAD.
The thing was called The MAD Reader.
And on the front cover, he put this face,
this gritty idiot kid with a gap tooth.
Harvey saw it and he started to play with it a little.
He named him Mel Coznowski or Mel Haney.
And when I took over, this kid captured my heart
because he kind of personalized and embodied the whole spirit of
the magazine that I wanted to do, which was kids were smart
and they had a certain kind of outlook.
Like, jeez, you know, I'm facing this terrible world.
To hell with it. What, me worry?
[Mandel] What, me worry?
Can't say that without doing this.
What, me worry?
[Aragonés] I don't worry. I'm going to be ahead.
I'm going to survive. I'm going to do better.
[narrator] As forever linked as Alfred is to MAD,
that dopey face actually traces back to long
before MAD landed on the scene.
[surf rock music]
While his true origin is undecided,
his distant relatives suggest a less cheerful tone
than that familiar, "What, me worry?" attitude.
As the 20th century rolled in, the kid was now
a spokesperson for miracle cures,
stage productions, and painless dentistry.
[Feldstein] Want a definitive portrait of this kid.
I put an ad in the New York Times,
"National Magazine wants
portrait artists for a special project."
Norman Mingo walked in the door and he said,
"What national magazine is this?"
And I said, "MAD," and he said, "Goodbye."
I said, "No, wait.
Let me show you what I have in mind."
I said, "I want you to take this 'What, Me Worry?' kid,
and I want you to plasticize him into a real boy
and have a little glint of intelligence behind his eyes,
but the I-don't-care kind of attitude."
And he did the definitive portrait
of what became MAD's logo with MAD number 30.
I, meantime, decided to call him
what I was using as one of my nom de plumes,
"Alfred E. Neuman."
And that's how Alfred was born.
After that, we used him on every issue.
[narrator] Between Mingo and fellow idiot Kelly Freas,
the spirit of Alfred and MAD was carved in wet paint.
[Harry North] Norman Mingo's expresses everything.
Innocent, feckless, stupid, lovable.
You know, the idiot saying something very wise.
[squeaking]
[Apatow] Because he never really spoke,
and there wasn't a cartoon
where we got to know him, he was always a mystery.
[Meglin] He was a schmuck that was on the cover.
[cheering]
[Torres] He was a harmless little nerd
who became the image of MAD.
Who would have expected that it would
have become an icon like that?
It wasn't designed to, it wasn't planned to,
it just was adopted.
The way we adopted him for the image,
the country adopted him as a symbol.
[Drew] I guess he represents the MAD morality.
[Gaines] He also represents an attitude.
And don't ask me what that attitude is,
because I don't know.
[Raiola] The fool is reckless. The fool is a moron.
And yet, the fool is divinely inspired.
There's a certain wisdom to the fool.
Alfred is the modern day incarnation of that.
Or... or he isn't.
[laughs]
[funky intriguing music]
♪
Read between the lines.
Don't believe everything you see and read or hear from
politicians or your mother and father or the press.
[Gaines] We don't try to accomplish
anything other than entertain.
But while we're entertaining, sometimes we'll slip in
the thought that they should be a little skeptical.
We pride ourselves in the fact that we have no philosophy.
We have no politics. We don't take sides.
[Ficarra] We have no morals.
- We have no scruples. - [Bill laughing]
We have no taste. We have no intelligence.
My political leanings? I think I'm lunatic fringe.
Politically, we didn't say many things that changed anything.
But we were in print.
And you gotta realize in the '60s, print had significance.
So politics joined entertainment.
And entertainment, as a result, joined politics.
You can look at a MAD article
from 30 and 40 years ago about politics.
And the inherent truths in that article about the hypocrisy
and phoniness of politics is still true.
[Burns Parkhurst] It's just a piggy time.
It's the opposite of the Victorian era.
What's the political policy at MAD?
It's whatever the individual writer thinks he should be
shooting down or poking fun at, as long as it was fun.
I think we were all smart enough to know that you had to
hit all sides.
You hit Democrats, you had to hit Republicans,
and vice versa. Nobody was spared.
I think I was the only conservative who wrote for MAD.
I mean, I would tackle things that others
didn't want to criticize.
[Apatow] When you're little,
you don't really understand politics.
So suddenly, MAD magazine is filled with
material about Nixon and Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
And that's how I learned about politics.
They took a bunch of quotes from the Watergate conspirators.
And then they took a bunch of quotes from the book
Alice in Wonderland and just paired them off.
That, to me, that sort of blew my mind.
[Meglin] I don't think we hit
anybody over the head with a hammer.
But I know we tickled them under the arm a lot with a feather.
And we truly always went after the man in the office.
- [pop-punk music] - [Raiola] Start with JFK.
And just flip past every cover of
MAD that featured a president.
They're very revealing about who we are as a culture
and who those presidents were to us.
And then later on, we adopted the slogan,
"Alfred E. Neuman for President."
You could do a lot worse. Like you always have.
[boing]
Alfred E. Neuman looked at her and said
something slightly derogatory.
As far as I was concerned, there was no line.
You couldn't go too far.
You couldn't be too soon.
They weren't afraid of anyone.
MAD went after everyone.
We ask every citizen to immediately report any
information regarding espionage, sabotage, or un-American
activities to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
J. Edgar Hoover, at the time, he was the FBI.
They named the building after him.
To secure his job, he found dirt on every president for decades.
And there was no term limits for J. Edgar Hoover.
From president to president to president, he's in.
He kept files on everybody that he thought
was an enemy of the country.
He was just a very dangerous person.
So when MAD magazine skewered him, he was pissed.
[Feldstein] J. Edgar Hoover had us on a list
as sabotaging American ideals.
We had done a takeoff of the board games.
And so we did something called Draft Dodger.
And when you pass Go, you got a Draft Dodger card.
You sent your name and address to J. Edgar Hoover.
Quite a few readers thought it would be funny to
clip that little thing out and mail it to J. Edgar Hoover.
[chuckles] And this did not amuse Hoover at all.
And he sent a couple agents to the MAD offices
wanting to know what the hell was going on.
And so these two guys show up and they-- they're very furious.
And they want us to promise
never to use J. Edgar Hoover's name again.
[Apatow] For some goofy magazine to just go right at him
was a really brave, wild thing to do because
he had real power to cause problem.
[narrator] MAD miraculously escaped its dangerous
tangling with J. Edgar Hoover.
Not even the cloak and dagger antics of
the FBI could put a stop to the magazine.
[comical whistling, explosion]
[mysterious, funky rock music]
Perhaps the most political stance
taken by MAD was regularly showing
the futility of war in simple black and white.
[Cranston] You never knew which spy
was going to win at any given issue.
For some reason, I always rooted for the black spy.
I-- I don't know why. He seemed more sinister.
♪
[Ficarra] Antonio Prohías, a big teddy bear of a guy.
[Gaines Ashton] He was a political cartoonist in Cuba.
And when Castro came to power,
he beat it out of there and almost immediately
found work at MAD.
[Ficarra] When Antonio came to this country,
I think he spoke five words of English.
"Chavi, I, uh, I don't go.
"And I, and they're not me."
And when he died, he spoke five words of English.
It was like a cleanser.
You know, you get into the longer stories,
and then, eh, I think I'll just finish it off with
a little Spy vs. Spy, and then I gotta do my homework.
You know, and-- Oh! Okay, okay.
♪
[Ficarra] The spies, they are undoubtedly our most
popular feature in the magazine to this day.
[pop-punk music]
[Apatow] I don't think I really understood
who wrote MAD magazine.
There was this sense of the usual gang of idiots.
And as a kid, you wondered who they were.
So when Harvey left MAD,
he actually took with him virtually all of MAD's artists.
So Feldstein came in and he had to start from scratch.
[Feldstein] It was a challenge.
I had a completely stripped staff and
a magazine to turn out.
♪
[narrator] Feldstein would buy unused scripts from popular
comedians of the day, but he also added to the staff
a key to MAD's style of humor, Nick Meglin.
I was just a funny kid from Brooklyn, and we all were.
[Meglin] I just started working for MAD
and doing just what I was doing,
finding the flaw, going for the gag and selling it.
And then I became MAD's first idea man.
That was my title.
[narrator] Meglin soon teamed
with Kurtzman's former assistant,
Jerry DeFuccio, to be associate editors.
[Gaines Ashton] Mr. Debonair, Champagne Jerry, he was called.
Because he always had little bottles of champagne
in his refrigerator for when he brought women up.
[narrator] The look and feel of MAD could be attributed
to Feldstein and especially his art director, John Putnam.
Lenny "The Beard" Brenner was brought in
for the magazine's physical production.
I read it for the first time and fell in love with it.
Not expecting that I'd end up working there.
[Raiola] They had their own brand of mental illness
that was different than the mental illness
that was going on in front of the office.
[Hart] I guess you're born with a deformation,
a cranial deformation, where you see things as being humorous.
Where other people think they're tragic
or important or have great weight.
I brought up some new material and Nick read it out loud.
I had just started wearing
contact lenses and suddenly I started to cry.
And Bill Gaines walked into the office,
and he said, "What's that man crying for?"
And Al said, "He's a writer."
Bill said, "Oh," and he walked out.
And Nick said that, "I think you're in."
I said, "What, he liked my material?"
And Nick said, "No, I think the crying bit did it."
[Jaffee] The only way you can make a living is you have to
keep your eyes and ears open all the time
for anything that offered, uh, potential material for MAD.
[Meglin] We had hundreds of submissions a week.
[Jacobs] I picked up a copy of MAD and looked at it and said,
"Yeah, I should be doing this stuff."
After about the fifth issue,
I thought, I don't want to read this. I want to write this.
I wasn't crazy about what I saw, but I saw it was nutty.
And I knew that I could probably do things for them.
I walked into MAD magazine and they said, "Put it on the table.
If we like it, we'll call you."
I hardly was home when the phone was ringing.
I'd go in for a script conference, and in the room
would be Feldstein, Meglin, and Jerry DeFuccio.
The pitch meeting was, oh, very painful.
If Consumer Reports put out a government issue,
like "Consumer Reports Tests Aircraft Carriers,"
"Consumer Report te--" No! "Tests Nuclear Missiles."
This leg fell asleep a week ago Friday,
and this leg went dancing all night.
Oh, God, that's funny.
That's a funny i-- that's a funny idea.
Think about it. You don't have to buy it, Al.
Let me think about it.
Obviously, there are times where
they're gonna say, "Well, we don't want this."
You know that's been thought about.
[Lou Silverstone] You had to bring your absolute best.
The comic books, you could, you know,
just dash it off, but MAD--
I used to do two or three versions
before I'd even bring it up.
You don't know whether you sold it or not.
I said, "Here are the stories."
And the first check I got from MAD was $75.
One of the biggest thrills of my life.
Next to my honeymoon.
Actually, better than my honeymoon.
[upbeat organ music]
[Ficcara] Dave Berg, crazy as a loon, but a nonstop workaholic,
would send in between 60 and 90 gags
to get an installment of "The Lighter Side Of."
My dad was a bit distracted with his career.
My mother was distracted buying shoes.
So Dave Berg, I gave him credit for raising me.
[Cranston] Issue in and issue out over the years.
I think my favorite still is The Lighter Side.
[narrator] The list of writers and artists who contribute
to MAD throughout the years is as vast as comedy itself.
The range of talent and style is quite extraordinary.
There was Paul Coker Jr.,
showcasing his wonderfully distinct style.
The tremendously versatile Bob Clarke.
George Woodbridge with his amazing sense of detail.
If you needed the funniest Rembrandt ever,
then Jack Rickard was the man for the job.
And then there was the one artist who became
synonymous with the very essence of MAD.
I was obsessed with Don Martin.
[Torres] Martin was nuts, as far as I'm concerned.
[Hart] Don Martin was a genius, you know?
I mean, a crazy genius, but a genius.
[Drucker] Don Martin created a style
that was instantly successful.
[Apatow] A lot of people getting hurt.
A lot of people getting hit in the balls.
He always had those funny sound effects
that were like weak flum-bang.
Or icky locky doo.
♪
[Duck Edwing] He would request gimme gags where the jaw
falls down and a tongue rolls out like a carpet.
[Gottfried] The faces with the nose over the chin
and the feet that would curve upward.
[Edwing] So where'd you come up with the idea for the feet?
He said that I used to watch Charlie Chaplin movies.
And always wore shoes that were too big.
And when they lift them up, they would flop down.
[rock music playing]
I was casting about for an idea for to do an article.
I think it was a Life magazine,
and it had a spread, which I called a fold out.
I said MAD could do black and white cheap fold-in.
I still look at it and go, I don't know how they do it.
[Jaffee] Al Feldstein came back
almost immediately and said to me,
Bill says it's okay, let's go with it.
If the kids fold the page and mutilate the magazine,
they'll buy a second one to save in pristine condition.
The first thing I used to do when I opened up
the MAD magazine was, I would go right to the fold-in.
And even though my dad said, "Don't fold it,
you'll ruin the value of it," I would fold it anyway.
[Cranston] Of course I'm gonna fold it.
Even on a collector's item magazine,
I'm not gonna not know that.
I hate him. You know why I hate him?
I hate him because my photograph would be
the back cover and every covers-- back cover
I've ever done had to be folded because of his fold-ins.
They ruined my photograph.
And then I would comb through the margins to see
Sergio Aragonés's drawings.
Before they have little sayings on the borders.
And I couldn't understand what they were.
So I figured I will, why not have cartoons there?
That everybody can understand.
So I physically drew them the same size
and paste them up on top of the sayings.
And they says, well, we probably will
run this until he runs out of ideas.
It's been 40 some years, and I'm still doing them.
[Charlie Kadau] My gosh, it was such a great mix.
It was a great team. It was an all-star team.
How do you beat that?
[Hart] It was a perfect storm of zanies, you know?
[Geissman] On the early mastheads of Mad magazine,
they would list all of the writers
and all of the artists.
And I think they got sick of doing that every issue.
And finally, they just said, "Contributors,
the usual gang of idiots."
Call it a day.
[Aragonés] The gang of idiots.
Teachers would say, "Drew, what do you want to be
when you grow up?" And I said, "I want to be an idiot."
And literally in the middle of all this insanity,
this bizarro world, was Gaines.
He's a ringleader. He's making it all possible.
[announcer] Now let's meet the man with the MAD, MAD, MAD,
MAD, MAD magazine.
[cheery music]
[host] Number one, what is your name, please?
My name is William M. Gaines.
Bill Gaines.
[Larry Siegel] Bill Gaines was
one of the greatest nuts who ever lived.
He was absolutely out of his mind.
[Meglin] Bill Gaines was a walking, living contradiction.
[host] I, William M. Gaines, am a trash dealer.
I actually pay money to groups of talented writers and artists
to turn out what I consider top satire, but which I refer to
in my magazine as trash, rubbish, and garbage.
I started out being terrified of Gaines.
[Jack Davis] I was always afraid of him.
He used to have a crew cut, and he was big.
He grew this beard and his long hair.
[Raiola] He's like a guru. He looks like a guru.
He's got stringy hair like a guru.
He's shaped like a Bartlett pear.
I'm almost 70 and I feel I still haven't grown up.
[Gottfried] I remember him saying...
[gasping]
And that always stuck with me.
I must say one thing.
When he gave me MAD, he let me do what I wanted.
And he published that magazine as a fan.
I used to give him the finished book and he would read them,
and I could hear him cackling and laughing in the office.
The only time he saw the magazine
was right before it was going to press.
And there was no greater thrill for Nick and I
than to give him the issue and then hear him laugh.
Out! Out! Outen sie from the place there, out!
[Meglin] Bill had an unerring eye for quality.
Whether it was art that he couldn't draw
or writing that he couldn't write,
he spotted it when he saw it.
[Siegel] He was not a funny man, but he appreciated humor.
He even appreciated bad humor.
[Jaffee] Bill Gaines did set the tone, and he had
a certain number of prohibitions.
No sex, no vulgarities, no gratuitous insulting of people.
[Jacobs] He knew instinctively what just might appeal
to the reading public.
I think Bill just fell in love with the business
and fell in love with his people.
He does really great stuff.
[Siegel] Al was very much responsible
for putting it together.
But Bill was the heart of it.
He was the heart of the magazine.
He was the very essence of MAD magazine.
[door creaking]
[narrator] As a comic book, MAD regularly
ran advertisements to aid publishing costs.
But with the transition to a slick magazine,
Gaines developed a different attitude.
[Gaines] I've always been against ads.
It's a good thing to publish, if you can,
without any outside help so you're not beholden to anybody.
[Apatow] They fought to not have advertising.
They knew that if they took advertising, they couldn't
make fun of certain corporations or certain people.
But these people just said, "We don't care.
We're not gonna take anyone's money.
We're not gonna allow anybody to water this down."
That's just basically saying no to money.
We long ago decided that we can't make fun of
Pepsi-Cola and take money from Coca-Cola, that kind of thing.
[man] Could we do it the other way?
[laughter]
- That's a good guess. - Did you ever think about that?
Think, Bill, think!
[narrator] And MAD skewering the world of advertising
was a full realization of its true spirit.
[Schild] At this time, most of the photographs
were back pages, uh, spoofs on advertising.
MAD magazine was the one place
where you realized that all this behavior that you watch,
all this media you see, all these commercials,
maybe deserves to be looked at a second time.
[Schild] They would come up with some idea for a photograph
and then they would give me a little sketch,
and they would ask me to interpret this.
The shoots were all problem solving,
not just getting a prop, lighting it and shooting it.
It was creating it from scratch.
You cleaned the kitchen sink!
[Schild] There was a commercial where this lady,
she's flying throughout the house.
[announcer] Get out of the kitchen fast. Get Ajax.
[Schild] We did a shot,
this girl is flying through the house,
but the door was closed and she went through the door.
So here I had to create a whole set and have a woman
coming through the door.
Not only this, Al Feldstein wanted
the best possible quality, because he had a slick magazine.
And because models are very expensive,
we used all of MAD's staffs.
We used friends.
We used whatever we could get in order to create that shot.
We took a tomato can, then we took another can
on top of it and hit it. And of course I got splattered.
[Meglin] As funny as the image is,
it works better if on first blush
it looks like the original.
[Arnie Kogen] Breck, blecch, brilliant.
Hysterically funny.
[Meglin] You'd be surprised how many people
took our ads seriously.
This was another reason we couldn't get advertising
if we wanted to.
[coughing]
[Raiola] MAD legendarily spoofed cigarette ads.
MAD has always been anti-smoking.
We sort of knew it was bad for you
before the Surgeon General did.
♪
[Gaines] I hope MAD, among other things,
is responsible for a lot of kids giving up smoking.
[Jaffee] I would do things like how to
make cigarette smoking healthier.
It was just to show you how funny these things can be.
[Ficarra] We have just hammered cigarette makers and boy,
MAD has proved to be right.
♪
[narrator] As MAD's readership erupted
in the early 1960s, so did its profit.
Great for Gaines and even better for the IRS.
Bill and his family hastily decided to sell
their baby to avoid a huge tax bill.
[Geissman] So Gaines said, "Okay, I'll sell the magazine."
But the deal was, the new corporate owners
couldn't even set foot in the building without permission.
And Gaines was able to run the magazine
totally as he saw fit.
It was stipulated in the contract that there'd be
no corporate interference of any kind.
[narrator] MAD evolved along with the '60s counterculture,
and managed to stay both relevant and edgy,
even in this new era.
[Mandel] It always felt like it was,
like, unsupervised journalism.
[rock music]
[Cranston] Hippies and flower children and--
and pots, and rock and roll concerts.
This is all new in the '60s. It just exploded.
All these things that we take for granted now.
The pill, you know, it's like, oh my God. So you can-- Yeah.
And you don't have to-- Right. And it's like, wow.
And MAD magazine took that on, too.
They didn't seem to have a filter.
MAD just picked a subject and went right into it.
[Carvell] There would be jokes in them about Vietnam,
which was not a topic at age nine
that I really knew a whole lot about.
From context, you could sort of reverse engineer.
Oh, there was a war called Vietnam
and people were against it.
[Tom Koch] I think it was easy to make fun of hippies
in that whole generation because they were funny.
We were all kind of maturing.
And so we were following what was going on in the country and
making fun of the stupidities and things that were going on.
[Yankovic] Back then, you have to realize,
my only conduit to comedy was like, primetime television.
Sitcoms like Gilligan's Island,
and, uh, Beverly Hillbillies.
How soon will this mess be ready, Granny?
What did you call my vittles?
It wasn't the kind of, uh, comedy that
one would see from MAD magazine.
They were talking about real world things,
you know, things that my parents were talking about,
things that I saw in the news.
Nothing else comedically was hooked, in my mind, in reality.
[Apatow] When you read the magazine, you could feel
the values of the people who were making it.
Underneath the surface of it was a group of people
who wanted the world to be a better, kinder place.
And through humor, they would point out
the ridiculousness of families and relationships.
[Hart] One of my favorite pieces that I did
was called "Broken Homes and Gardens,"
a magazine for kids of divorced parents.
[Apatow] "America the Beautiful-- Revisited."
You know, the song "America the Beautiful"
with images of poverty, polluted skies.
You know, it's a challenge to the whole idea of America,
that America is fair, that America is clean,
that America works for everybody.
I think when you're young,
it wakes that part of your brain up
that says, oh, maybe I can't completely trust the government.
Three panels, Tarzan swinging on a vine.
The second panel, he's passing a Black guy
swinging on a vine going the other way.
And when he gets back to his grass house,
he puts a "for sale" sign on it.
"Life from the Broadside," all the cases,
the female was the one getting the short end of the stick.
That's something that still goes on.
[North] I don't think as artists and writers,
we want to go over the edge of certain things.
And even though you poke fun, you satirize, you have to have
some standard underneath it to which you adhere.
Otherwise, it's total anarchy, isn't it, really?
We did expand the boundaries of good taste,
but we didn't violate them totally.
[Siegel] I took a takeoff on Hogan's Heroes, which is,
you know, about the guys having fun in a German prison camp.
It was so idiotic.
And then I did a page about Hochman's Heroes.
It takes place in a concentration camp.
And they're having fun and they're laughing.
So we got all kinds of letters.
Ah, rabbis were writing and saying,
oh, my God, how could you do that?
And I would say, that's not making fun of them.
That's making fun of the idiots who make fun of stuff like that.
[Richard Williams] MAD, I don't think worries that much,
you know, about, "Will the public like this?"
I think they have a certain attitude and almost like
a mission about what they want to do and what they want to say.
[narrator] MAD was forever pushing boundaries.
It was the magazine's identity and key to its success.
However, eventually, all that boundary pushing
led to some true pushback.
If there'd been bathroom humor on a cover,
that would have caused a big problem.
If there had been, uh, cursing on a cover,
using the F word, whatever,
that would have caused a major problem.
But there wasn't.
But, um, that one cover caused a problem.
I'm proud of some of my cover ideas,
but that one was the result of
a very bad cover conference where we were up against it.
MAD, number one magazine of good taste.
And everybody broke up and said, "That's the cover."
And I said, "No, it's not. That's a joke. Don't do this."
[Jacobs] That caused a major problem.
Distributors returned copies.
Not only did they go with it, but they changed the line.
"The number one ecch magazine."
The line they went with made absolutely no sense,
and killed the gag.
Our worst-selling issue in those years.
They did have problems pulling back a cover or two
at the last moment because something terrible had happened.
[Richmond] There was a cover that John Caldwell did years ago
that they canceled and pulled back the issue
at great expense and replaced it.
And that was right after 9/11.
♪
We've almost never been sued. We just get threats of suits.
I don't think people realize how difficult it is
to establish precedent on what you're allowed to do in comedy.
You need the company to go, I don't care. Let 'em sue us.
We got letters from Bill saying that, if any of you
are sued for anything you write that I publish,
don't worry, you will be defended by our lawyers.
[Meglin] We made an Alfred $3 bill.
Damn it if it wasn't so good.
There were some machines in New York that accepted it.
So the FBI came and we had to sign that
"We will never replicate U.S. currency again."
Whatever, whatever.
Of course, we did anyway because
it was another idiotic threat from the FBI.
[narrator] In 1964, MAD was slapped with
a potentially catastrophic lawsuit.
[Meglin] We did a "Sing Along With MAD" songbook,
which were takeoffs of standards.
Irving Berlin was particularly hurt
that anyone would take his songs and make fun of them.
[Feldstein] And so Irving Berlin and nine composers sued us.
[Siegel] MAD was sued for a violation of copyright.
[Jacobs] They sued for a dollar, a song, an issue.
And that would have amounted to, I don't know,
something 25 or 30 million dollars.
It could have killed the magazine.
[Meglin] It was crazy from the beginning.
You know, what the hell is anybody stealing?
These are my words.
It says to the tune of, well, maybe people
who sing it can't carry a tune.
There wasn't any actual music included.
There wasn't sheet music. There wasn't a soundbite.
It was just sort of like, in your head.
Most people would just say, "I don't want to pay
for a lawyer to deal with this. Let's just change it."
It took a place like MAD magazine to say,
"Yeah, we're gonna go to court and fight
for the right to make fun of you.
[Jacobs] And the suit went to a lower court, and MAD won.
To a higher court, MAD won.
To a third court, MAD won.
Finally reached the Supreme Court.
[Meglin] And the judge said something like, "Mr. Berlin,
if you were to win this suit,
then anyone who sang 'Easter Parade' in the shower
would have to send you two cents royalty,
because you don't own iambic pentameter."
[Yankovic] Rightly, the Supreme Court decided,
"Well, this is not an infringement of copyright."
[Jacobs] So MAD won, and it was a landmark case.
It became that satire, not with a malicious intent,
is an art form.
Which meant that was it.
Anything could be parodied.
♪ Like a surgeon ♪
I owe them a debt of gratitude because,
I mean, that was sort of the basis for my career.
♪ As I walk through the valley where I harvest my grain ♪
♪ I take a look at my wife and realize she's very plain ♪
It inspired a lot of people to want to make comedy.
This is the Daily Show--
MAD was the precursor to everything that we love about,
like, The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live.
MAD magazine was the blueprint to comedic satire.
[narrator] In the years following
the Supreme Court's ruling,
MAD's readership climbed to all-time highs.
[Brenner] It just started selling and selling,
and we did two million copies.
And that made it the glory years.
When we went from the 450,000 copies six times a year
to two million eight, eight times a year
with the 11 foreign editions
and paperback books and annuals and stuff like that.
We were a cash cow.
- Are you a rich man? - Yeah, I'm a pretty rich man.
Was that important to you?
Uh, well, now that I'm rich, it's not important. It was.
[narrator] With MAD readers far and wide, its skewering
of American culture made MAD the influencer for teens.
They were mad about MAD.
Our best teacher's Mr. Wilson.
Once in English class, he read us a whole big thing
out of MAD magazine.
As an illustration of modern satire?
No, he just thought it was funny.
[Feldstein] If we were influential at all,
I think we're influential in the comedy industry.
[Apatow] You know, if I think of Steve Carell in the opening
of The 40-Year-Old Virgin peeing with a boner,
leaning up against the wall so that he can make the angle work.
To me, that's just like a frame in a MAD magazine.
Everybody I ever met when I came out here
and started working for television,
didn't matter who it was, the heads of studios.
I said, look, I was on the Carol Burnett Show.
I won three Emmys. I did an off-Broadway show.
And they all said they found out I wrote for MAD.
They said, "Oh, my God, MAD, MAD."
That's all they talk about.
[Siegel] Everybody read MAD magazine.
Anybody growing up, I mean, there it was.
[Silverstone] I said, "Well, we must be doing
something right, we're banned in Russia."
[Meglin] The people who have said they read MAD shocked us.
We expected more from them, frankly.
[Hart] It was very nice. All of a sudden, I was somebody.
[narrator] MAD was everywhere.
These people are doing some real goofy things,
because they're playing MAD.
♪
Good morning, everybody. I'm Alfred E. Neuman.
Get me Kaputnik and Phonebone.
I want to see their drawings for the New Kids on the Blech.
Wow. I will never wash these eyes again.
[narrator] MAD even landed on Broadway.
[Siegel] Mary Rogers, the daughter of Richard Rogers,
decided that she'd like to do a MAD variety show.
[Hart] The whole show had a flavor.
It was crazy but controlled craziness.
MAD lends its popularity and name to Hollywood.
The 1980 release of Up the Academy.
[announcer] MAD magazine presents Up the Academy.
[narrator] The film was a complete flop
in the eyes of critics and audiences alike.
Yeah, no, Up the Academy is not very good.
I mean, even though I do really like
Ron Lieberman's performance, because it's a very specific
performance of the film, because he's parodying
Ben Gazzara's performance in the movie The Strange One.
And if you've seen The Strange One,
it's a very specific parody of that performance.
So that aspect of it is actually quite good.
Never got to see it, and I'm told not to.
[Raiola] We used to joke, Airplane,
instead of Up the Academy, we wish MAD's name was on that.
[Tarantino] They pissed away
the concept of MAD magazine presents.
It should have been Airplane.
Paramount should have made a deal with
MAD magazine for Airplane, and everybody would have benefited.
[Santopadre] Looking at the statue of Alfred E. Neuman
from the ill-advised MAD movie, Up the Academy,
William Gaines scraped off the P,
and now it says MAD magazine resents Up the Academy.
♪
He was incredibly cheap and incredibly generous.
He was such an oxymoron of himself.
My first memory of Bill is when he offered me and Charlie a job.
He said to us, "John and Nick
tell me that you guys are very talented.
I don't believe them.
I propose to pay you, therefore, as little as possible."
And he meant it.
I just have to pick up my paycheck.
In case you didn't know, we get paid scale.
I am the cheapest publisher in the world.
When he looked at his telephone bill,
if it didn't match, he'll go berserk.
[Ficarra] He would tie up the entire department
of the magazine looking to see who spent 67 cents
on a call to Congers, New York.
It was Nick, by the way.
[Raiola] He had these things called Bill's Bills.
He'd walk around every month with these
little pieces of paper in hand about if you'd spent
15 cents to call your chiropractor in Scarsdale,
he'd track you down and make you pay for the call.
He was cheap.
[Ficarra] And in that same day, then take you to a meal
for four of us would be $700.
[Aragonés] Bill Gaines was a man that he would invite you
to a dinner and spend the most insane amount
of money on wines and food without any hesitation.
Walk into the restaurant and shout, Buon gusto!
Another dish of calamari!
Oh, I want some pasta with garlic and oil!
[Brenner] The amount of food we eat
could have fed a third-world nation.
Called him the fat fuck.
[Jacobs] He hated exercise of any kind.
So if he had a meeting in Manhattan,
if it was downhill, he would walk.
And then he would take a taxi back.
[reporter] Now, I heard a story that as a part of
the Warner Communications empire,
you, as a senior executive,
have to take a medical every year.
And the story that I heard is that you send somebody else.
Well, you're really blowing it, aren't you?
Lenny Brenner loves physicals and he's in good health.
And it's much better that he goes than I go.
[Siegel] Bill hated to write. He had stamps.
He had stamps with all messages that fit
whatever mood he was in, you know?
I'll stamp this on the piece of paper that they mail me,
and I'll mail it back to them with a couple of remarks.
This saves me a piece of stationery
and it saves me having a secretary.
[Raiola] There's something about this man is truly, truly insane.
I like to think that I'm the insanest one on this tab.
[Brenner] Well, he set an atmosphere that
I'm sure everybody who works today would love to have.
It was, you know, like Disneyland had opened
its gates and we could go wherever we wanted, you know,
where Mickey puts on a suit or Goofy takes a pee, I don't know.
[DeBartolo] You come in late, you leave early,
you take three hour lunches.
I mean, that is just what MAD is all about.
Being as nutty as we want, being as crazy as we want.
♪
[narrator] As cheap as he was, Gaines always broke out
the checkbook for an opportunity to see the world.
[Ficarra] A lot of people think that MAD offices
are just filled with all the writers and artists
working together when in fact it's not.
It's just the editorial staff, and the writers
and artists live all over the world.
[Gaines Ashton] You know, Don Martin lived in Florida,
Paul Coker lived in Kansas,
Sergio's in California.
We knew the editors, I knew a couple of the writers.
I never met the artists.
[Ficarra] So Bill thought it would be good to bring all
the guys together to sort of bond them together as a family.
We have had many, many MAD trips over the years
now where I take the staff on treks all over the world.
[DeBartolo] He would just say, "Bring your luggage
and be at the airport at such and such a time."
And we would just go.
[Brenner] First MAD trip was to Haiti on this premise
of delivering a subscription to our only subscriber there.
We looked up in our subscription list that we had one subscriber
and we all went to his home and asked him to resubscribe.
[Arnie Kogen] We went to South America
and Puerto Rico and Mexico.
[Davis] Went to Russia. We stayed right at Red Square.
[Silverstone] Al Jaffee and I went to Berchtesgaden,
and here we were, two Jewish guys.
We had bacon and eggs at Hitler's pad,
and it was really cool.
[North] We just sort of walked around after Bill and
went to these fabulous dinners and were very rude in these
very expensive hotels, which I'd never otherwise go in.
It was just a fabulous time.
[Kadau] At 6:00 a.m., we get a phone call,
and it's from Bill Gaines.
And he says, "You can see the Matterhorn.
Look out your window now."
Because he took us there so we could see the Matterhorn.
And goddamn it, he was gonna show us the Matterhorn.
[Aragonés] The trips were always a way to have
his family, who were the MAD guys, all together.
When we went to Mexico, that was amazing.
I had my mother cooking a big paella for the whole gang.
Suddenly my American family
visiting my blood family in Mexico.
So it was a great moment for me.
[Schild] We arrive at this boat and you have Viva Maria
in flowers on top of this boat.
And here beautifully done with flowers, colorful,
"Fuck you, Bill."
He just cracked.
Bill loved that sort of thing.
[DeBartolo] One day we were in Bora Bora,
watching this incredible sunset in the ocean.
You can see 500 feet down.
And I turned to Bill and said,
"Why did you drag us to this hellhole?"
[Arnie Kogen] You had to write a certain amount of pages
to get on these trips.
You needed 20 pages to go to Haiti.
I did not have enough pages.
I said, "Isn't Kogen coming?"
Gaines said, "No, he only has 18 pages."
About three years later, Bill Gaines' mother died,
there was a funeral.
And they said, "Are you going to the funeral?"
I said, "I don't have enough pages."
- Let us go in first. - Oh, sure.
- Sure thing. - Then four of you...
[Meglin] One of Bill's favorite movies
was A Night at the Opera.
I'm here to mop-up.
Just the woman I'm looking for. Come right ahead.
[Meglin] And in it was a stateroom scene where
Groucho and Harpo and Chico Marx start off.
And then all these people come in
and there's like 200 people in a stateroom this big.
[overlapping chatter]
And Bill Gaines took us to a cruise up and down to Bermuda.
And of course, he had his own stateroom.
- [chatter] - And we got people.
There was a woman with a baby carriage and a baby,
and we got her to go in it.
And every time there was a knock on the door, he'd belly laugh.
He would go crazy. And who else was gonna come in?
And we had staff and all.
We had about 80 people in that room.
Just one of those great little moments.
- [all] Hey! - Giving Bill Gaines a thank you
for his favorite scene in the movie.
We brought it to life on one of his MAD trips.
How about a rousing rendition of Fuck You, Bill?
Great articles came out of the trips.
♪
A lot of the Don Martins that you saw
were things that happened either
on the trip or as a byproduct of the trip when we used to
give these books to Bill, like these tribute books.
[Ficarra] Sometimes they were so funny
that they would wind up in the magazine.
[Jaffee] When Bill Gaines created The MAD Trips,
what he did was turn the office staff
and the freelance staff into a band of brothers.
[Schild] And to watch them and to listen to them,
their experiences and the work they've done, the way they live,
uh, how they felt about how the world is.
That was the greatest part.
[Kadau] It was just a great way to keep that MAD spirit alive.
[reporter] Alfred and his talented creators
are facing one problem at the ripe old age of 30.
They're losing some of their audience.
If some found it mildly subversive in the '50s,
today's parents grew up reading MAD
and tend to take a kinder, gentler view of the magazine.
[Gaines] There used to be a lot of antagonism
towards MAD from parents.
And now that the average parent
is a grown up MAD reader we've lost that antagonism.
Once the teachers accepted it and they used to
discuss an article or whatever it was in MAD,
then MAD made it, you know, they were accepted.
I think it's the kiss of death that we have
parental approval at this point.
- We've never sought it. - I would rather be...
something that kids read with a flashlight
underneath the bed at night.
[man 1] You mean like Playboy?
[man 2] No, like the congressional record.
[Aragonés] MAD kind of stayed the same.
It was funny, but it wasn't edgy
like some of the other magazines that were available.
[Kadau] Bill ran the magazine like no other company
in the history of the world.
And he knew expanding and doing more
would mean more work for him.
And he didn't want to do more work.
Feldstein was interested in
a little more change, I think, than Bill.
[North] The editor has to be the brake.
You've got to be the accelerator
and you've got to hopefully work together.
But you've got to keep pushing it down and testing the bounds.
Otherwise, you know, a magazine dies.
[narrator] For 29 years, Al Feldstein gave MAD its identity
during its meteoric rise in both popularity and influence.
But sensing the world passing MAD by,
Feldstein was ready to step aside
and let some other idiots run the show.
Bill probably had some sleepless nights.
Who am I gonna replace Al with?
Luckily, John showed up and Bill decided
to give it to both John and Nick as co-editors.
[Geissman] Which actually worked out great because it was
kind of a yin and a yang in a way.
Ficarra was more like, like Feldstein was
a nuts and bolts guy. He could hit the deadlines.
You know, Ficarra even says, I don't think Nick ever had
a schedule in his office the whole time he was editor.
But he was funny.
[Ficarra] I started reading MAD immediately,
was just so captivated by it that I tried to sell articles.
And I probably got rejection letters.
And really, it was Nick Meglin who I owe my career to,
who fished me out of what we call the slush pile.
And first person hired in 26 years.
It was tough because I thought that the magazine
needed some sprucing up, that it was still sort of
relying a little bit on its laurels.
They wanted to honor what was there,
but they also wanted to create their own version of it.
But it was difficult to make big changes then,
because there was still an old guard.
Do you have a permit to be in here?
You can't come in here, man.
[man] Oh, please don't throw me out.
Charlie and I were hired in January 1985.
I don't think of that as an especially
great period for MAD.
I think that MAD was getting a little stale.
[Ficarra] Some of the change started to force itself.
Don Martin left.
Some of the guys started to age out or slow down.
So it also forced us to start looking for new talent.
We do a lot more politics.
The language is coarser.
It was a convergence of a lot of things happening.
Bill was pushing off more and more of
his publishing responsibilities.
[Gaines Ashton] He was getting sicker and sicker.
He couldn't sleep very well.
He kept waking up, not being able to breathe.
And he'd completely lost his appetite.
I would call him and one day I called and I said,
"Bill, you know, I'll pray for you,
and I'll send you energy, and you can get well again."
He said, "I know you will and I know I will."
And I said, "But Bill, if you don't make it,
can I have that new TV you just bought?"
And so my last thing I ever heard from Bill
was Bill laughing loudly.
William Gaines, the founder and publisher
of MAD magazine, died in New York yesterday.
Mr. Gaines created MAD as a comic book in 1952.
MAD became a magazine in 1955.
And Alfred E. Neuman first appeared a year later.
Forever lampooning life's sacred cows.
What? Me worry?
♪
[Meglin] He was such a delight and so much fun.
And, uh, a maverick in every sense of the word.
And lot of guts to do
what he did, to publish the magazine
and stand behind it
and everything he did through the years.
Bill ran his company like a family.
[Ficarra] Bill was very shrewd and he was also very lucky.
And that's a pretty good combination.
I profited by MAD in this respect.
I worked for one of the greatest men that ever lived.
♪
It's losing your captain, the comedy captain.
And it could never be the same.
MAD really lost its biggest fan and really its guardian.
Part of his deal was, you know, the corporate
owners can't come in here and do anything unless I say so.
And when he passed away, all of that disappeared.
When he died, there was kind of
sort of a little fight between Warner Publishing
and DC Comics as to who was gonna take us over.
And then a couple of years later, it was DC Comics.
MAD magazine is ready to move.
They'll be moving next week.
- [man] Annie, how are you? - I'm okay.
Hey, I'm here just for memories.
They're here. But, you know, I'm sorry.
All the covers are off the walls now.
- Everything's down. - Oh...
When DC Comics took us over, I sat in that meeting
with tears rolling down my face.
You're being absorbed into the corporate culture.
- A lot of uncertainty. - Yeah.
A lot of fear and loathing.
The magazine is turning into everything that Bill hated.
Don't quote me on that. In fact, this is not really me saying it.
- That's right. - Someone else saying it.
Someone was gonna come in to take Bill's place.
And it's true. Someone did. They hired about 117 people.
[Kadau] We had new management.
And they wanted us to reinvent MAD.
So they charged us with reinventing MAD.
How can this be expanded, developed, sequeled,
prequeled, spun off?
Profit maximized?
It was truly the end of an era.
Oh, nuts.
What is the big deal about computers?
[reporter] MAD magazine is turning 40 this year.
And editors say circulation has fallen off from
a peak of two and a half million in the early '70s
to one and a half million readers today.
Newspaper circulation is down. Everyone's circulation is down.
[Ficarra] We're now living in the age of video games.
And they're bursting, you know, with color and vibrancy.
And there's MAD, looking like the same magazine
it did for 30 years.
[Raiola] We used to complain that the magazine layout
was printed in Mexico in 1957.
[Sam Viviano] Everyone thought that it was some kind
of deceptive plot on the part of our overlords
to turn MAD into this huge cash cow.
But it was simply that
we want to be able to do this magazine in color.
We realized that it would cost a lot more.
John said, "Well, you know, this is the 21st century.
Why don't we, uh-- Why don't we start taking ads?"
[bloodcurdling screams]
Suddenly, everybody was complaining,
"Oh, Bill Gaines is turning in his grave,"
which we all thought was funny because Bill was cremated.
Now, of course, the big joke in the long run is that
we still have almost no advertising in MAD,
because advertisers are kind of
afraid of being in a magazine where we're making fun of them.
[Raiola] There was pressure to get to a month deal.
So we actually graduated
from eight to nine up to 12 issues a year,
like all those respectable publications,
churning out the comedy more.
[narrator] Through the 2000s,
MAD continued to be the megaphone for satire.
But declining readership became an undeniable fact.
We went to this rise, to this dramatic
cutback, cutback, cutback.
MAD was actually cut to four times a year.
Because of how tenacious that staff is,
how tenacious we all feel
about the worth of what we're doing
and what MAD is,
we certainly weren't gonna walk away from it.
We were gonna fight like hell to keep that magazine alive.
We're being entrusted with this thing that's
bigger than us for a little bit.
You know, you want to leave it better than you found it.
And you want to set it up so that 80 years from now,
there's other 80-year-olds writing,
talking about how much they like MAD.
[Viviano] You're always trying to live up to that legacy
because we all grew up with MAD, too.
[game beeping]
[Meglin] The other thing is, and this is a sad comment,
we're going into a non-print, non-reading society.
Harvey Kurtzman could put in a very dense, copy-heavy article
over five pages and expect the reader to read it all.
The kids are not buying
not because of the quality of the magazine,
because when they discover it, they laugh a lot.
It's because they are not reading.
We're in a different world now.
Everything's accessible,
and I don't think you can compete with that.
We're not a magazine world.
We're a video world.
Everyone in the country has their own channel.
You know, their Instagrams and their TikToks, and people
make their own version of satire and MAD magazine themselves.
MAD magazine has sort of the same problem
that I've always had.
In the past, I've done albums every few years.
["White & Nerdy" by Weird Al playing]
And it's hard to be as fresh as the morning's headlines
when you're not doing something every day.
♪ You know I'm fat, I'm fat ♪
Something that we'd put in a magazine that wouldn't show
in print for three months was on Saturday Night Live
that weekend.
When The Daily Show came in, it was on that night.
Hey, did you see the parody of The Daily Show
in this month's MAD magazine?
No, I didn't see that.
Tore you a new one, buddy.
There's so much comedy, and there's so much satire,
that I think it can't help but not have the same presence.
It really is a tradition that has
been handed down, that's been inherited.
And it's always a tricky thing about MAD.
On one level, you want to honor the tradition.
On the other level, you want to annihilate it.
You don't want to be stuck with it.
You want to be able to reinvent it.
MAD has been accused of becoming, you know,
more edgier and crass.
[Jacobs] You take an issue from 1965,
compare it to an issue of 2010.
You see a big difference.
Obeying the rules of taste has gone out the window.
It's gone out the window because of necessity.
[Cranston] You look back on it then, it was remarkable.
Now it seems tame.
Look at the world.
Look at culture. I mean...
people show their underpants now,
so they had to change.
[Friedman] An example would be man boobs.
And sure enough, it's like, well, you know, I like drawing
man boobs because I use my neighbors to pose for me.
I could understand it in a way,
but we turned out, you know, clean stuff.
And later on, it began to get a little more suggestive.
That just wasn't my bag.
[Flanders] It's undeniable that the original
gang of idiots was insanely talented.
People definitely get caught up in this nostalgia of it.
And I think sometimes that sort of blinds
or blurs the quality of the material now.
They asked me if I wanted to try out for
Spy vs. Spy, and I almost nearly promptly said no.
I really don't want to do this,
so, I know, I'll do it in stencils and spray paint.
And they're sure to say no very quickly.
And then I can go home.
That turned out to be, like, the key.
You know, the philosophy here has always been,
"I'm gonna ride the horse until it drops."
Why would anybody want to not be here?
It's relentlessly fun.
But I knew eventually that something would happen.
[narrator] In 2017, MAD moved from
its New York City birthplace to Los Angeles,
where it relaunched with a new issue number one.
Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles,
MAD was involved in a true Hollywood tale.
So I'm doing this movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
And it deals with a character named Rick Dalton that was
a star on a late '50s, early '60s western called Bounty Law.
So the idea of it is it was MAD magazine did a takeoff,
called it Lousy Law, and put him on the cover.
That would be a thing on his walls.
It was simply a set design prop.
So we got in touch with MAD magazine.
And they go, "Yeah, that would be really, really cool."
We want it to look like it was done by Jack Davis.
And I even did say I wanted Alfred E. Neuman
to be picking his nose.
And it should be, like, the finger
up to the knuckle, like, that deep in this.
It looked great. And then an issue came out,
and it had the Lousy Law parody.
And it had my cover, the cover I designed.
And as, like you said, as a person who comes up,
you know, as a person who grew up with MAD.
- Uh-huh. - As a person who grew up
with MAD, I came up with the title.
Forget the Oscar. That is the most--
this is-- this is my Oscar.
And then it turned out that
that was the last original issue.
Alfred E. Neuman finally has something to worry about.
MAD magazine will soon disappear from newsstands.
MAD magazine will no longer be
a permanent fixture on newsstands.
After more than six decades, a cultural touchstone
is vanishing from newsstands.
This week, we learned that MAD magazine
will cease publishing new material after its fall issue...
After 67 years of ruthlessly mocking the world,
a bedrock of American comedy,
the cult satirical magazine MAD is shutting up shop.
Wait a minute.
Does that mean...
I designed the last official original issue
of MAD magazine ever to be published?
Uh, yeah, I guess you did.
Take that, Judd Apatow.
I can take that.
[Raiola] Its cultural influence was unmistakable.
It was visible because of how unique it was.
And MAD, to a degree, became a victim of its own success.
[reporter] The upcoming issue will be the last one
available on newsstands.
After that, MAD magazine will be reprinting
old material with new covers.
[Ficarra] I don't know what the future holds for MAD,
but I will say that there is something about MAD
that people like to hold in their hands.
[Cranston] MAD just picked a subject and went right
into it and cut right into the heart of it.
And anything that does that is foundationally honest.
[Geissman] MAD magazine wouldn't have lasted 70 years
if it wasn't the best satire available, the best writers.
It was great.
[Kadau] It really was a circus.
It wasn't like any other magazine
being published at the time or since.
It's like a family, a big old effed up family.
MAD created an atmosphere for a kind of
humor that did not exist before.
MAD is part of that long tradition in the arts.
You can't just brush it off as being nonsense.
I think it's really important stuff.
[farting]
It's an name brand.
It's the Kleenex, if you will, of comedy.
MAD magazine was the template for satire and comedy.
Millions of kids read MAD and go, "Oh, I know what to do now.
I can be funny."
So many TV writers, comedians,
TV shows were influenced by MAD,
and those things wouldn't have happened without MAD.
For a lot of us, MAD magazine inspired us to do what we do.
When I made the cover of MAD magazine,
it was like I was in Valhalla.
It was almost like, you've made it!
A star on the Walk of Fame, notoriety, a sold-out theater.
It was all nice.
But being depicted in MAD magazine?
Are you kidding me?
I'll tell you the greatest thing that I've ever
achieved in my career.
I was on the cover of MAD magazine.
To me, that was it. And of course, I'm saying hello--
- You know what's in my office? - What?
MAD magazine, the cover.
I've got it blown up to the size of this window,
and it's all that matters to me.
It's the most important thing.
How crazy is it that we both feel that way?
[Santopadre] MAD has this particular place for
pointing its finger at what's actually going on.
[Mandel] Parody, satire, and irony don't change.
[Peter Kuper] We desperately need that kind of viewpoint.
Raising people's expectations and talking up to people
is just a better way to go.
I think it's extremely valuable to society.
I really do. That kind of humor.
My wish for the future is that MAD magazine,
in whatever form, finds its way into the ether
and help usher the iconic voice of MAD into this millennium.
[Jay Kogen] A little bit of doubt is a good thing.
And look at the world around you
and don't take things at face value.
[North] No matter how serious life is and dreadful,
make fun of it. Enjoy it.
[Raiola] Rolling Stone called MAD
the best political satire magazine in the country.
That's what MAD is.
You work on it and you feel deeply embarrassed...
and fiercely proud.
[Jaffee] People have been doing satire one way or another
throughout the ages.
The only difference is, uh, most of them wound up
in dungeons, and we wind up on the newsstand.
♪
By the way, I'm at a meter, so make this quick.
I'm parked at a meter. Okay. All right.
You're doing a documentary on MAD, the importance of MAD.
And I for one, sorry,
but I don't think MAD was terribly important.
That's a hell of a thing to say.
If you're presenting some sort of a seemingly endless story
by John or Nick or Joe or Sam,
you can intercut this.
[snoring]
Every time there was a storm,
the antenna for my television would get knocked over.
I'm terrified of heights.
And one time I'm up there
and I hear footsteps coming up the ladder.
And it's my son's voice, who says, "Where's Mom?"
And I said, "I've killed her
and I'm stuffing her down the chimney."
It was a stupid question, and I gave him a snappy answer.
"Wait a minute.
There is something here."
When I felt I wanted to write for MAD
at some point in my life, which shows my career has been
like a dead flatline ever since.
We've gone to Gargiulo's, which is near Coney Island,
it's an Italian restaurant and had a tremendous meal.
And when we're finished, Bill says, "You know what?"
I said, "Yeah, we're going to Nathan's for hot dogs."
I was driving, so I had to go with him.
Besides, I like hot dogs.
Many times, I spent the whole night at the MAD offices.
They would lock me in because they had to go home
and they have to put the alarm.
So I would stay the whole night at MAD just reading.
I would stay there. They had a couch.
And I really didn't have that much of a place
to stay in the beginning.
So I spent the whole night reading
and then sleep half the day.
I was here at the time and I became ill.
And that job was almost exclusively done
in a hospital ward.
And I had all the doctors and the nurses
and everybody was-- and the patients all coming in
and out to look at this stuff I was doing.
It was really a bit unwelcome.
I don't-- You know, I'm one of these artists
that like to draw quietly.
You know what? I don't like thinking of MAD as a brand.
It's a voice. It's an attitude.
It's a way of seeing the world and interact--
[snoring]
♪