It was more obvious 40 years ago, but we in America live in a MAD culture, a land of mockery, parody and running gags aimed at the institutions, pop trends, entertainment and “Americana” that we once thought of as “sacred cows.”
Generations grew up with MAD magazine, “Humor in a Jugular Vein” as it was billed in the early days. And many of those of us who grew up with it came to make a mocking mark on the culture in their own vein, from the ’60s, when that first generation of kids who grew up on it started pursuing careers in comedy, sketch and humor writing or cartooning, to today, when cultural mockery has spread from “Saturday Night Live” to “The Daily Show” to Tik Tok, Youtube and beyond.
“When We Went MAD!” is an affectionate documentary history of this magazine, taking us back to the prehistory — publisher and founder William M. Gaines was the son of pioneering comics publisher (“Wonder Woman,” “Green Lantern,” “Hawkman”) Max Gaines — on through the magazine’s 2019 demise, with a Quentin Tarantino “Time Warp Final Issue” conceived to provide set decor for “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.”
MAD was conceived as a venture in juvenile humor from a company (EC Comics) that had devolved from its “Education Comics” mission — with illustrated stories from The Bible as one of their titles — into tween/teen horror comics like “Tales from the Crypt” and “Vault of Horror.” The horror titles and violent “Two-Fisted Tales” had gotten EC into trouble with Congress during the “juvenile delinquincy” panic of the 1950s, an earlier version of the culture’s later panics — fear of TV, rock music, video games and social media’s impact on children.
The idea in house was to write for older juveniles so that the mag would appeal to younger ones.
“Things that go over your head make you want to life your head up,” writer Desmond Devlin reasons.
“When We Went MAD!” hits the red letter dates in that early history that gave the magazine its style, its mission and its cover-boy, Alfred E. Newman. Politics and social mores, movies and TV and pop culture phenomena were targets that worked their way into the comic book that transitioned into a “slick” (monthly magazine with better paper, sharper images) to hang onto an early editor.
“MAD went after EVERYone,” one and all marvel as Gaines & Co. assembled staff and contributors who came to be known as “The Usual Gang of Idiots” as they were credited on the masthead.
Early readers became aspiring writers, and the irreverent style was established with that blend of old art and gag writing pros and youth culture alumni who turned the magazine into a major force in America in mid- ’60s through the ’70s.
The testimonials here— Bryan Cranston, Howie Mandell in interviews and Jerry Seinfeld, Howard Stern and others in archival clips from TV appearances, are filled with performers and personalities needing “no other honor” in their lives after their show or shtick earned them a MAD Magazine cover.
Bernstein’s documentary revels in Baby Boomer nostalgia and the magazine that mocked much of what Boomers still get nostalgic over. And we get a hint of just how “out there” the mercurial personalities and wise-crackers who wrote it, drew and joked MAD up could be.
The man behind it all — Gaines — was a hands-off publisher who didn’t see any issue until it hit his desk at publication, with a staff that lovingly hated him awaiting his first belly laughs. Gaines is remembered as a bon vivant, generous cheapskate and “one of the biggest nuts who ever lived.”
But the genius of the magazine was its instinctive wrong-footing of the reader. Nothing was sacred. Capitalism and socialism were mocked in equal measure, politicians were punctured and smoking and faux “patriots” and “gun nuts” were relentlessly ridiculed.
“The curse of being a satirist,” former editor Nick Meglin opines, is “you laugh in the WRONG places.”
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