I don’t remember when I picked up my first issue of MAD. But by the time I was 10 years old, in 1971, I was a rabid fan, waiting religiously for each new issue. The peak of my MADness coincided with the magazine’s greatest success. Its bestselling issue ever, No. 161 (September 1973), was one of my prize possessions: The cover, a spoof of The Poseidon Adventure, showed a drowning Alfred E. Neuman with his skinny legs sticking out of a life preserver. MAD taught me all about pubescent snark, but also about hippies, beatniks, advertising executives, the military-industrial complex, sex, pollution, politics, and other grown-up subjects. Most of all, it showed me that wisecracking could be a royal road to cultural literacy. (Cartoonist Alan Moore recalls that, after discovering MAD as an 8-year-old in the early ’60s, he astonished his parents with his banter about Caroline Kennedy, Fidel Castro, and Jimmy Hoffa.) MAD’s cackling satire was aimed in every direction, including its own writers and artists, known as the Usual Gang of Idiots, as well as its snot-nosed readers, who were mostly kids like me.
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