R.I.P. Alfred E. Neuman (1952 - 2019), or how "Mad Magazine Told the Truth About War, Advertising, and the Media."

"(Mad founder Harvey) Kurtzman didn’t inherit his parents’ (left-wing) politics, but his background left him hostile to conventional American culture, which he regarded as filled with lies."

Don Martin may have been my personal favorite, but Mad was a many-splendored piece of work for a very long time.

Here's Don Martin's classic National Gorilla Suit Day, soon to be a DNA fundraiser.

One Fine Day in Front of Jimmy's Music -- with apologies to the late, great Don Martin.

The Nation gets it.

‘Mad’ Magazine Told the Truth About War, Advertising, and the Media, by Jeet Heer (The Nation)

Patti Smith: “After Mad, drugs were nothing.”

... Born in the troubled era of McCarthyism, Mad is dying in another squalid political epoch. Mad was arguably America’s greatest and most influential satirical magazine, a strange claim to make of a publication that was mostly read throughout its existence by children and teenagers, but still justifiable.

Mad was often rude, tasteless, and childish—which made it all the more potent as a tributary of youth culture. The kids who read Mad learned from it to distrust authority, whether in the form of politicians, advertisers or media figures. That was a lesson that successive generations took to heart. Without Mad, it’s impossible to imagine underground comics, National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, The Daily Show, or Stephen Colbert. In the historical sweep of American culture, Mad is the crucial link between the anarchic humor of the Marx Brothers and the counterculture that emerged in the 1960s ...

Here's Don Martin's classic National Gorilla Suit Day, soon to be a DNA fundraiser.

One Fine Day in Front of Jimmy's Music -- with apologies to the late, great Don Martin.

I missed National Gorilla Suit Day this year. Actually I've missed it every year for decades because when you're 6' 4" and 250 lbs, it's hard to find such a costume of any sort.

Just now, after picking myself up off the floor after dissolving in the deferred laughter of 40+ years, Diana accuses me of regressing to childhood. Maybe, but a resistance leader needs a good clean laugh, especially in New Gahania.

As all gorilla suit aficionados know, National Gorilla Suit Day is the invention of the late Don Martin, once known at "MAD's Maddest Artist;" the holiday featured prominently in his 1963 paperback collection, "Don Martin Bounces Back" in which he told the tale of the aforementioned Mr. Bestertester's opposition to the festivities and the carnage that is visited upon him as a result. The story features people in gorilla suits, gorillas in people suits, gorillas in gorilla suits, and some of each in various other disguises, in a 56-page extravaganza full of Martin's trademark absurd violence and giggle-inducing sound effects.

I may have spoken too soon.

One Fine Day in Front of Jimmy's Music -- with apologies to the late, great Don Martin.

Don Martin's cartoons will live forever.

His people are big-nosed schmoes with sleepy eyes, puffs of wiry hair, and what appear to be life preservers under the waistline of their clothes. Their hands make delicate little mincing gestures and their strangely thin, elongated feet take a 90-degree turn at the toes as they step forward. Whether they’re average Joes or headhunters, Martin’s people share the same physique: a tottering tower of obloids. Martin puts the bodies of these characters through every kind of permutation, treating them as much like gadgets as the squirting flowers and joy buzzers that populate his gags: glass eyes pop out from a pat on the back; heads are steamrollered into manhole-cover shapes. All of this accompanied by a Dadaist panoply of sound effects found nowhere else: shtoink! shklorp! fwoba-dap! It’s unlikely Samuel Beckett was aware of Don Martin, but had he been he might have recognized a kindred spirit.