1. Mad magazine was primarily read by kids between 9 and 14 years old. It was also the most important satirical magazine in American history. Let me explain.
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4. The abrasiveness of Mad stood in contrast to the more dominant form of American comedy, led by The New Yorker, which from 1940s-1950s was becoming increasingly low-keyed, subdued, cerebral, understated, button-downed.
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5. In the sweep of American cultural history, Mad was the crucial link between the anarchic immigrant humor of the Marx Brothers in the 1920s/1930s & the insurgent counterculture of the 1960s and beyond.
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6. The decision of Mad very early on to focus on media and advertising was crucial: in an increasingly media-dominated society, Mad picked the right target. Not taking advertising from 1957 to 2002 allowed MAD to go after people (cigarette companies) other media avoided
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7. Patti Smith: “After Mad, drugs were nothing.” Without Mad, it's hard to imagine underground comics, National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, the Simpons, the Onion, Stephen Colbert. Mad was the seedbed of an entire genre of media-focused satirical comedy.
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8. More thoughts on Mad's legacy here: https://www.thenation.com/article/mad-magazine-media-politics/ …
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End of conversation
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Jesus, it really prefigures Network, which prefigures pretty much everything!
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I STILL remember, vividly, their West Side Story-themed satire of the entire Cold War: “when you’re a Red, you’re a Red all the way, from your first Party purge to your last power play.”
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Interesting that many key folks in the original MAD crew - Davis, Wood, Severin - were a rare redoubt of non-Jewish creators in the industry at that time.
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Yep. Kurtzman was great
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Was there an alternative possibility to it being ethnic? Is whiteness somehow less ethnic than other ethnicities?
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