Douglas Adams once observed, “Anything invented before your fifteenth birthday is the order of nature.  That’s how it should be.  Anything invented between your 15th and 35th birthday is new and exciting, and you might get a career there.  Anything invented after that day, however, is against nature and should be prohibited.”  He probably was not thinking of Mad Magazine. Or maybe he was.  I don’t know.  I wasn’t there.

The Mad Magazine age is twelve.  You have a budding sense that you may actually know everything.  On top of that, the notion first tickles your cerebellum that everyone else is really dumb- particularly those adults- the ones over there- in the corner- waiting for you to put down this newspaper and read something that’s good for you- not this mental floss that corrupts morals and causes hair lice.  The kicker though is that this revelation has come to you alone.  And you are so alone; so very, very alone.

So, let us not cast aside the things of our youth, particularly the things that made that youth a tinge more bearable.  Let us leave them out on the kitchen table.  And remember to look askance when any pre-adolescent opens those Mad-dening pages.

Mad Magazine crawled out of the horrifying crypt of EC Comics in the 1950’s.  Originally a comic book created by Harvey Kurtzman, it became a slick magazine when Kurtzman told his publisher, Bill Gaines, that he was leaving EC for the better world of full-size mags.  Gaines wanted his one-man editor/artist/writer to stay with the family business, so he offered to publish a magazine.  As an extra bonus, the recently implemented Comics Code no longer applied to the bigger Mad.  After five full-sized issues, Kurtzman was lured away by another little emperor of the publishing industry, Hugh Hefner.

Mad Magazine prospered however.  By the 1970’s, every smart aleck in the back row of his middle school class secretly longed to join the “Usual Gang of Idiots,” as the Mad masthead has always labeled the staff.  Nowadays, you either accept Mad for what it is or you would have to be offended by finding one in the hospital waiting area while your great-grandchild is being born in the next room.  And let’s not ignore what Mad Magazine has always done best- not total iconoclasm- it helps tear down the idols of our childhood.  How those idols are replaced is beyond any magazine’s scope.  Well, other than Teen People, but that’s always been an exception.

October, 2005