One thing that I am happy to have is a sense of humor, and I love making people feel good and love making people laugh. Some say drama is easy, and comedy is hard. It can be. A lot of my close friends are all very funny, and after playing on an improv comedy team for nearly ten years, it's something that has come a little natural to me. However, comedy, like most things, takes a lot of practice and failing to learn how to have comedy make sense. One big, and scary as all get out, secret to comedy is to be able to look inward, and make fun of yourself and your shortcomings, and then sharing them, and that is something so hard to do.
I am really into comic books and nerd stuff, obviously. I've always loved superheroes and comic books, and growing up, I had a few comic books, but growing up, we had cable tv, and I usually just watched superhero cartoons or movies. I watched the Christopher Reeves Superman films so many times when I was little that they are probably the most watched films I have seen. I also loved the Rocky movies when I was little, which surprises me because the Rocky movies aren't about superheroes or cartoons, and they are dramatic, and especially the first Rocky film from 1976, that won the Best Picture award at the Oscars that year was one of my favorites to watch. But, I want to go back to talking about the comic books.
Like I said, I had a few comic books growing up when I was little, and I was into the DC superheroes the most because I had more exposure to them over the Marvel superheroes. Nowadays, with the movies and TV shows, Marvel reigns supreme, but I digress. I usually got Superman comic books. However, there was another publication that was my favorite to get at the Seven-Eleven gas station over any other comic book. That was MAD Magazine.
I grew up with a lot of pop culture. Like I said, I had the comic books, but I watched a lot of movies and tv and liked music quite a bit. When I was little, I would get excited to see a movie, or had seen one and liked it, and then a couple of months later there would be a new MAD Magazine with covers making fun of those movies and tv shows, or musical celebrities, and I would always choose MAD over normal comic books. The funny thing is, is that MAD got it's start when there was a Superman parody making fun of the Man of Steel called Super-Duper Man. It took MAD a couple of years to become what everyone who remembers MAD fondly to be. The original first issue, I say original first issue because in 2018, they were relocated to a new office, and they made a joke on the cover of the first magazine published at the new location as the "first issue", was released in the early 1950s and made fun or horror and and science fiction comic books that were popular at the time. It wasn't exactly dirty, but MAD was definitely for people old enough to understand the type of pop culture it was making fun of and turning it on it's side and gently beat the snot out of it.
It started out as a "comic book", but issue 27 released it as a "magazine" over a "comic book" format because magazines could get away with a lot more edgy material than comic books, which had the Comics Approval Code that MAD would clearly violate. Like I said, it wasn't really dirty, just had more adult humor and gross humor. There was a short comic strip in one issue I had called "The Zit". It showed a kid popping a zit, and in each comic frame, the kid slowly imploded, and his guts were all over the bathroom. I remember the issues I had when I was little. My favorite one had Roger Rabbit on the cover jumping into the cartoon taxi cab- Benny, whose face was changed to look like MAD Magazine's mascot, Alfred E. Newman.
Every issue had a main parody of either a movie or tv show, and then there were "columns" that appeared in every issue, like The Lighter Side of MAD that would take a subject like, let's say school, and would then come up with nine or ten comic strips making fun of that subject. There were fake advertisements. In fact, there was a fake advertisement for Circuit City in one issue, and Circuit City actually had every employee from each established store go out and buy up all of the MAD Magazines from stores that carried MAD, and then they were shredded. Circuit City went under about ten to fifteen years ago, while MAD was still in business. True story!
MAD was actually pulled under the DC Comics umbrella of publications, and as of now, DC is having a very hard time staying in business because people are reading digital versions of everything that is normally in print. Even my film reviews that are in actual in print newspapers are wanting to start having things digitally posted. DC has been struggling, and are now producing less then they ever have. It broke my heart when I read earlier today that after 67 years and over 500 issues, MAD Magazine has been discontinued. They are still claiming they will be releasing issues of MAD, but the content will just be reprinted into "collection" issues. For example, they released one a couple months ago that made fun of popular music from over fifty years. They still want to release things, but the actual content won't be new, just re-printed.
For Christmas in 1999, when I was a senior in high school, I got a MAD Magazine CD-ROM set with seven discs that included every issue of MAD Magazine from issue one in 1952 through December of 1998. I still have it, and even though computers have changed, and CD-ROM programs are outdated, they still work. I love that set, and I occasionally pop one into my computer and read me some classic MAD Magazines.
The top three institutions that helped me form my sense of humor were The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, and MAD Magazine, and I am so sad that new material won't be produced anymore. Especially in the streaming age when more pop culture is shot out of a media cannon at all of us every second of every minute of every hour of every day.
I was so happy to learn that Hulu has produced 13 brand new episodes of Animaniacs, which I love as well. They do a lot of pop culture parodies as well, but I keep hoping that maybe someday, someone will say, you know what, let's do a MAD Magazine run every other month for a year, or, let's do one big issue of MAD every year making fun of the pop culture that was released. I would buy it, and I am sure many others out there would buy it too.
I have to write a small paragraph here saying that I loved their monthly columns like The Lighter Side of MAD, Spy Vs. Spy and the MAD Fold-in back covers that had artwork with a question, and then you would fold the back cover in half, and then artwork would look like something else, and the words and letters in the question folded together to make a joke. No one does satire like MAD Magazine, and never will. I will mention that FOX Television had MAD TV, which was like Saturday Night Live, and it had some fun recurring characters, like Stuart and his mother, or the actual animated Spy Vs. Spy cartoon segments. It wasn't always good, but there were some really funny things that came out of it. Nickelodeon also had a MAD animated show that was like Robot Chicken on Adult Swim, but a lot cleaner than Robot Chicken.
Also, in the 1970s, They released a MAD Magazine Board Game. I actually own one, and for a few months, it actually sold the second most games only to Monopoly for the most board game units sold. The board game is a classic. It gives you a lot of money to start with, and then the object is to LOSE all of your money to win the game. The artwork is fantastic, and hysterical. My favorite part of playing the game is reading the directions on how to play the game out loud to everyone at the table. "If you cheat, you're a loser person, and even in this board game, cheating is a big no-no". It also has "Card" cards, which are cards, like Monopoly had, but they have the word "Card" on them, and so the directions refer to them as "Card cards". The board looks like Monopoly's board, but it's so funny to look at and read, and the instructions on the Card cards are really silly.
Anyway, I just wanted to do a special blog for MAD Magazine because it's an American Institution. It's heartbreaking to me to know that new material isn't being created, especially in a year like 2020 where it seems like just about every single thing that happens is ripe for the plucking for the artists and writers of MAD Magazine. It was said that the writers actually had a drum-set in their writing office, and someone would play rim-shots when someone came up with a stupid joke, which happens all of the time in comedy. It's amazing to me that a group of creative, and usually misunderstood artists and writers could produce a monthly magazine issue full of amazing, and sometimes gross, humor for over 67 years.
MAD Magazine, I am so sorry to see you go. I will still read and reread your library of incredible and silly humor that helped me develop my sense of humor. If anyone from MAD actually reads this blog, please put out another, newer media digital format collection to have and share with my friends, family, and my son and nieces and nephew. Your craziness helped me feel not so crazy when I actually probably was. R.I.P. MAD Magazine. I will miss you, but What? Me Worry? Not a bit!
No comments:
Post a Comment