Once you finished elementary school, Mad magazine somehow slipped into your brain. Parents didn’t like it, but older brothers had been reading it in the 50’s. In those days, ‘funny books’ (aka comics) were only for little kids. No ‘book-length’ comics. Marvel was just getting on their feet–Spidey, F4, Daredevil. No X Men yet. Batman and Supermen ruled, with the JV team of Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, Aquaman, Flash, etc. You might pick up comics of I Spy or Man From Uncle but you didn’t want to be uncool. Now you were reading less comics, and more Mad.
Sadly, Mad is now a shadow of its former self. It was an exercise in satire and silliness, all wrapped up in a neat bow. And it was a kids’ magazine with a brand. ‘Brand’ was not a word used back then, but it existed. Just as sure as the Mickey Mouse ears, the Playboy rabbit, and Time Magazine’s crimson cover, Mad’s use of the Alfred E Newman face was immediately recognizable to anyone between 10 and 14. They pulled no punches, making fun of old farts, long hairs, ignorant parents, loud mouthed kids, and doddering oldsters. You’d love to see them taking the piss out of the latest smash movies, especially musicals (where they made up alternate lyrics to old time songs).
Make no mistake–this was caustic, insidious stuff. As you are passing from lunchboxes and recess to a middle school where they now call you ‘young adults’, Mad was something you read as you tried to find your way into this world as a semi-adult. ‘Revolutionary’ is a loaded word, but your consciousness was evolving and Mad was telling you to watch out–this serious adult word was full of bullshit and pompous morons who (in reality) didn’t have a clue, either.
“Did you see the new Mad?” became a monthly thing. Copies were passed around quietly and hidden behind textbooks and stashed in lockers. If found by a teacher or Foon, it was destroyed.
I had a love of Spy vs Spy, a cartoon where, like a Roadrunner cartoon, violence was reduced to comic proportions, as two birds waged existential war on each other month after month. This pointed the way to the cartoon violence of Mr Bill on Saturday Night Live.
On top of this, television added to our attitudes with Rowan and Martin’s Laugh in (a play on words for the tired 60’s phrase of ‘Be-In’, Sit-In’, etc.)
Starting with a general air of lunacy and silliness, it paid homage to the lightning-fast paced/sight gags of the great comic Ernie Kovacs, who died too young in a death-trap car (Chevy Corvair) .
But R&M had bigger targets in mind. Every week, they satirized politicians, the church, hippies (often through the half-mad gay icon Alan Suess), popular movies/tropes, and celebrities. Often, the show would set up a premise for a quick joke and recycle the premise several times with different punchlines. Rowan (a staunch Republican) relished the chance to talk about the war while Johnson was in office.
[Yes, you heard right–Country Joe is saying LBJ should drop acid.]
Having started with the anti-war jokes, Rowan had to keep it up after his pal Nixon got elected (Nixon gets skads of publicity for appearing once on the show to say four words). Catch phrases multiplied overnight and entered the lingo of millions of viewers–‘sock it to me’, ‘veerrryyy interesting’, Here come de Judge, ‘I’ll drink to that’, ‘Goodnight Dick’ and ‘The Devil Made Me Do It.’ The publishers of the Funk and Wagnalls dictionary found their names in constant irreverent use.
Each cast member had a continuing character that was featured every week in short solo segments: Suess had a hungover Kiddie show host, Rowan a hard-ass general eager to blow up everything, Henry Gibson the inane mod poet, and Arte Johnson the befuddled Nazi with a Lucille Ball crush.
The show also gave black comedian Flip Wilson his start, and revived the career of Pigmeat Markham. Lilly Tomlin got her show business start here, with three off the wall characters: the spoiled/precocious Edith Ann (a little girl seated in a 10 foot high rocking chair), an ‘ultra-conservative ‘church lady’ who found everything ‘distasteful’, and obnoxious telephone operator Ernestine, snorting at her own jokes while she ‘talked’ to author Gore Vidal.
Laugh-in had many bikini clad, pretty girls with jokes and catch phrases written on their skin in pseudo-psychedelic shades of pink, green, and purple.
The show spawned ‘it girls’. You may say–What??? Tune in next time.