I have so much nostalgia for things like print magazines. "Mad" was great when I was young. Maybe I wouldn't enjoy it much anymore - it feels like the endless onslaught of memes and webcomics fill this slot for me.
And yet, print magazines are still available. I will pick up a new issue of "2600" every once in a great while if I'm at a B&N and it catches my eye.
We emigrated when I was very young, and a Mad book was the very first English book I came to own as a young boy.
I have no idea what it was called. It was around A5 or maybe A6 in size, about 100 or so pages, and it was all about dungeons and executioners and prisoners.
It was dark, silly, and once my English improved to the point where I could understand it, it was down right hilarious!
Who can forget Al Jaffee's fold in's?
Some issues were meh...
Other issues were really fantastic.
They were a part of my teen years on Jamaican bookshelves as I spent the money my dad gave me for lunch on each month's MAD magazine.
Then as I moved to the USA back in the early nineties, they were still there, a bit harder to find, until it was rare to see them on the shelves anymore and you had to go to specific street-side magazine stands in NYC.
For my 8th birthday I was gifted about $30 total from a few relatives, juuust enough (iirc) to buy an annual subscription to MAD Magazine. My mother talked me out of it (or basically told me I wasn’t allowed).
One of the very few regrets in my life.
In due course, I’m very keen to teach my (toddler) daughter about money etc - but not at the expense of blowing some cash on childhood frivolities (especially ones that give joy for a whole year).
When I was 11 I had already been collecting the Swedish edition of Mad for a while when I came across a copy of the American original. Back then they had a five year subscription option that I sprang for, so Mad Magazine really accompanied me from late childhood to early adulthood.
My favourite was probably Don Martin and Sergio Aragonés, but Al Jaffee would be a solid third. Art wise I think Harvey Kurtzmann is still hard to beat.
Back in the late 60's and early 70's (born in late 50s) one of my fondest memories is walking or riding my bike (banana seat, of course!) down to the local 5 & 10 each month to get my copy of Mad Magazine. The fold-in would be the very first thing that I would do with a new copy.
Al Jaffee is a national treasure and an excellent smart ass! He and the Mad gang taught me to question authority and make fun of the mighty. Also, while Al is a very gifted illustrator, his style always seemed approachable and very much inspired me to get into drawing. Guys like Mort Drucker were freakishly good and I knew instinctively that no one (or very few) could ever be that good, but Al's talent (and Don Martin probably as well) always seemed human and well-rounded to me. I totally loved the guy.
I still have a stack of the old Mad paperbacks and "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions" is still a favorite.
Pardon the "Snappy Answer...," but the NYTimes Sunday Crossword not only has Al Jaffee as the keystone theme answer, but all the other main answers are humorous inventions in his comics that in fact became reality years later. In particular: Automatic Redial on telephones (1961), Spell Checkers ('67), Snowboarding ('65), Three-blade razors ('79), and Graffiti-proof Buildings ('82).
I haven't independently verified these, but I do recall other items that appeared as jokes in Mad, and later turned up for real: "Shpratz(sp?)", a spray to give your car the "new-car smell"; also an unnamed device that would keep your car from running if you weren't paying attention to the road (as depicted, for instance, because you were ogling someone you were passing on the sidewalk, though come to think of it, maybe it just snapped your head back to face forward).
I do The NY Times crossword every day. As stated it’s very much not a coincidence. The puzzles tend to be timely. They also tend to build on each other so doing them regularly make the weekend puzzles more doable too.
Note for anyone not familiar The NY Times crosswords build in difficulty through the week. Saturday is actually the most technically challenging. Sunday’s is the biggest. Thursday’s usually have some sort of trick you need to figure out like a rebus square (takes multiple letters in a single square) or answers that wrap around.
I grew up in Germany but my parents subscribed to multiple US magazines to help us learn English. "Mad" was the one we always fought over. I didn't get a lot of the cultural references but still loved it.
I feel like Mad was great when Donald Knuth was contributing to it, but had begun to lose its touch when I got around to reading it. I thought it was hilarious at the time, but... I was 12 and the humor was ostensibly adult. Or rather it was old hippie humor from people who didn't understand social currents that arose since the 1960s, like video games and hip-hop... and didn't want to.
Mad was at its best when doing pure gags and things like Snappy Answersto Stupid Questions and Spy vs Spy. And Al Jaffee was one of its funnier artists. I loved the Fold-Ins in particular, and they inspired me to design my own.
The first 23 issues were insane stream-of-consciousness comic books. Anything you liked about the the tv show Police Squad or the movies Airplane!, The Naked Gun, etc., was basically just early Mad. Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Basil Wolverton at his manic best. Legends.
The stuff you're talking about, the pure gags, the Spy vs. Spy... some of it was great, most of it was mediocre, but the main thing it did was let them make every magazine a digest. You could have a mix of new content and old every month.
I vividly remember buying a copy of Mad Magazine in the early 90's that included one of their moronic movie spoofs. You know, carnival-style big head caricatures, everybody just has a new name that's a poop joke?
In 1992, that spoof was of the movie Love Story, released in 1970. Half the jokes in the Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions at that time were about key parties and leisure suits.
That's why you perceived it as "old hippie humor from people who didn't understand social currents that arose since the 1960s, like video games and hip-hop... and didn't want to."
They were just reprinting old content with a little new stuff sprinkled in.
And yet, print magazines are still available. I will pick up a new issue of "2600" every once in a great while if I'm at a B&N and it catches my eye.
Congratulations to Jaffee, and to "Mad".