Mad Magazine Is Forever

If you're on the East Coast go pay tribute

Emily and I got out of town for the first time in the Lulu era. We took the baby with us, of course, but deciding on my in-laws’ house in central CT. for the 4th meant we had a few extra pairs of eyes to watch her with. I was rendered obsolete, meaning I had a few hours to myself. I generally enjoy seeing movies or going to see bands play on my own every so often, but the solo museum visit is my specialty. The only person I can go to one with is my wife, and that’s because we’ve spent 15 years visiting them together so she understands my scattered way of going “I want to look at this. Now this…all the way on the other side of the building. And then I want to go back to where we were and look again…” The ol’ ADHD mind never rages quite so much as when I’m in a place filled with art, so I’d just rather not burden anybody with having to deal with my annoying way of trying to take it all in. But driving an hour to Stockbridge, MA. to see the What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum felt more like a personal pilgrimage, something I had to experience by myself.

Mad has been an obsession of mine as long as I can remember. It’s in that class of things, along with the Marx Brothers, Bugs Bunny, and punk from the 1970s that I wasn’t around to experience the golden age of, but something about it grabbed me at just the right time. I bought newer issues, but I also lucked into a box of older ones from the ‘60s and ‘70s that a neighbor was throwing away but gave to me instead. Almost all the outdated references were impossible for my young, 1980s brain to understand, but there was something about the way the comics looked and how it was obvious even to a culturally uneducated kid that they were making fun of…everything. Any musician or movie star, politician or event was fair game. To me, it presented a level playing field. I looked through issues of Mad and realized everything is silly and should be treated as such. I’d learn there was time for seriousness as well, but to my young mind, it was the first real understanding of how absurd things are. I honestly think figuring that out early on saved me from going totally nuts.

Oddly, Norman Rockwell plays a similarly important role in my development. I loved looking at old Rockwell illustrations that would pop up all the time, usually framed as some “Gee, shucks, things used to be better” sort of lament. And yes, things he painted did look better; Rockwell’s world of runaway boys in sodashops and families gathering around dinner tables have an innocence to them, the sort that Baby Boomers and their parents could recall. Rockwell died in 1978, two years before I was born, so I grew up looking at his work and thinking about how things really did look better once upon a time. And they did. They looked good, but they weren’t for everybody. And Rockwell doesn’t hide that fact—just look at his 1968 painting The Problem We All Live With for a glimpse into the way he tackled big issues many Americans would still like to hide from. Rockwell is the perfect example of nostalgia’s double-edged sword, how things were better when he was alive and painting, but life wasn’t better, at least not for everybody.

There’s another downside to nostalgia that Rockwell’s work and legacy suffer from: his paintings and illustrations are so connected to good old-fashioned Main Street, U.S.A. whimsy that it’s easy to overlook how playful and sometimes downright silly his can be. That’s why I loved looking at all the Mad art occupying walls next to his; Alfred E. Newman copying Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait by Richard Williams with the source material to its right was one of the loveliest things I’ve seen in a museum.

But walking through the Rockwell Museum looking at the namesake’s art as well as old covers and comics from Mad also offered up a dose of hopefulness I wasn’t expecting these days when I can’t even bring myself to use my New York Times subscription because I sometimes just don’t have the energy to deal with the news. From everything I’ve ever heard or been told about Mad and its initial impact when Harvey Kurtzman, William Gaines, and the first set of "The Usual Gang of Idiots" started putting out issues in the early-1950s was how important it was to a segment of people who were bored with the boring times. You can say whatever you’d like about people who grew up in the prosperous 1940s and ‘50s before and after the war and rally against Boomers all you’d like, but I know for a fact I wouldn’t be the person I am if I didn’t come up on the stuff they created—specifically the ones who grew up reading Mad. The magazine’s influence is all over the culture I grew up idolizing, from the Ramones to R. Crumb, and Saturday Night Live. One of Anthony Bourdain’s first and life-long influences was Mad, and you wouldn’t have The Simpsons without the mag.

Thinking about all that as I walked through the museum, about how there’s always going to be something to rescue the people who want something else other than the bland and boring, combined with Rockwell’s belief that good would win out and, like Mad showed, that a little rebellion was good for the soul, was refreshing. Rockwell and Mad both had their golden ages during one of the most fetishized times in American history, the post-war era that’s the epitome of things were better, but conditions for people weren’t. From segregation to McCarthyism, the cookie cutter suburban mindset, and the culture wars of the 1960s, things weren’t great. They were, in a lot of ways, similar to today. Without even hitting on the state of politics and the fact that we’ve got two guys running for president who were both born before Mad even started publishing (a fact that should have anybody disqualified from holding political office), we’re in a cultural stalemate. As Hillary Kelly called it in an essay I happened to read right before I went to the Rockwell Museum, we’re living in “Stucktopia.” Kelly writes, “Mass culture has come to a standstill, with endless reboots and resuscitations. Thanks to knockoff mania and fast fashion, clothes and décor look like copies of copies.” Things are unchill, but also totally boring, basically. “We’re not stuck in our circumstance. We’re stuck in the ways of living that perpetuate it,” Kelly correctly points out.

I think about this topic a lot. And maybe it was because Kelly does such a good job summing it all up in her article that it was on my mind as I pulled up to Norman Rockwell parking lot. The article didn’t leave my mind through the visit, but what happened was interesting. I remembered the boring, politically messy, and mostly unfunny times Mad came out of, and then I thought of how there’s an undercurrent of eerie similarity running through our current timeline. I could have stayed right there with that thought and walked away feeling hopeless, but then I remembered everything that Mad influenced, and I started thinking that things will probably suck less sooner or later. At the very least, we’ll figure out a new way to laugh at how stupid everything is once again.

What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine is running through October 27th, 2024 and I highly suggest checking it out.

Also, this hat is fire. I wish I’d bought it.