Pictured above: a typical Mad Magazine parody from the early seventies. This is a take-off on the opening of a faux counter-culture NBC drama called "Then Came Bronson" with Michael Parks as a Peter Fonda/Easy Rider type (without the drugs, of course.) If you hit the photo to enlarge it, you can see the concept is properly "sent up" with a vengeance.
Robert Lloyd's essay on "Mad Magazine" from the LA Times reminded me how much of my outlook on business, foreign affairs, presidential campaigns, movies and life in general was shaped by the artists behind that seminal publication. Starting when I was eleven or so, whenever a new addition showed up in the magazine section at the Sav-On Drug store in near-by Campbell, I forked out for it.
I stopped reading "Mad" a few years after that, but it "too late" you might say: the specter of Alfred E. Newman, who represented an entity that held no institution or celebrity or politician dear, was ingrained in my psyche. Heck they didn't even hold their own publication dear. The staff of the magazine referred to themselves as "the usual gang of idiots". And then there was the countenance of A.E. Newman himself!
What kind of a publication would put a hairy, goofy-looking, gap-toothed dweeb like that on its cover! (He usually appeared in a suit and bow tie, but the effect was the same.) Magazine covers were supposed to have either beautiful or powerful people gracing the cover. "Mad" was subversion raised to the level of commercial viability.
Oh, yeah, I didn't read it for a primer on subversion. I read it because it was funny.
Apparently, in some other anonymous corner of America, this fellow Mr Lloyd also was picking up copies of "Mad"at going through the same transformation. Here's a paragraph from his article that I can relate to in spades:
"The magazine instilled in me a habit of mind, a way of thinking about a world rife with false fronts, small print, deceptive ads, booby traps, treacherous language, double standards, half truths, subliminal pitches and product placements; it warned me that I was often merely the target of people who claimed to be my friend; it prompted me to mistrust authority, to read between the lines, to take nothing at face value, to see patterns in the often shoddy construction of movies and TV shows; and it got me to think critically in a way that few actual humans charged with my care ever bothered to."
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For the whole article, check out the link below:
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-ca-mad18mar18,1,1434893.story
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