The Mad magazine show at the Norman Rockwell Museum “WHAT, ME WORRY? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine ends October 27th. That’s just over a week from now. I felt a moral and spiritual obligation to see it before it closed and rushed over last week knowing I’d hate myself forever if I missed it. You should too!
I wasn’t disappointed. If I have any criticism it’s that one could argue it’s too much of a good thing. Sprawled across a half dozen rooms — I was too enthralled with the material to count but it felt like six or more — it’s so stimulating and rich in text and art that one could easily devote an entire day to the exhibition.
Also, it’s somewhat unusual for a museum show to provoke outright laughter but gusts of merriment erupted from all corners as people reacted to TV spoofs such as Mort Drucker and Dick DeBartolo’s The DaVinci Coma, Dave Berg’s takes on consumer culture, and, of course the ubiquitous images of Mad’s clueless yet all-knowing, sweet but subversive, gap-toothed clown prince mascot Alfred E. Neuman.
It’s also odd to attend a museum show that sends you away having answered a question that may have eluded you your entire life: “How did I turn out to be the weird, warped yet somehow upright citizen that I am?” I mean I love Leonardo. Ingres’s technical facility and Picasso’s protean output blow me away. But they’re hanging on a wall while I’m standing over here. Gazing at Mad’s cover art for the October 1962 issue — it’s a totem pole of indigenous carvings except for the one at the base — Alfred E. Neuman with a dog sniffing at it presumptively about to mark his territory — is like reading a strand of my own DNA.
I also found it appropriate that the show wasn’t segregated from the rest of the collection, including such Norman Rockwell masterpieces as The Problem We All Live With, depicting six-year-old Ruby Bridges being escorted by U.S. marshals on her first day at an all-white school, and Rockwell’s Four Freedoms. Because Mad was no less integral to the cultural moment than Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers. It held up a mirror that captured the tumult, the creativity, the hypocrisy and the naiveté of Post-War America.
I was pleased that the show dubbed the period when I was a Mad devotee The Classic Era. Distinguished by a combustible combination of sophisticated satire and sophomoric humor circulation soared to 2.5 million by 1973. By then I’d put Mad aside. But it wasn’t because, to quote Corinthians, “When I became a man, I put away childish things.” It’s because Mad taught me too well.
As I walked through the show I tried to remember that far back, when and why I dropped Mad, and what replaced it? I was puzzled until I entered the next room and spotted on a wall, printed in large letters, a quote from R. Crumb, the underground cartoonist that brought us such memorable characters as Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat and several others whose names aren’t suitable for a family audience.
I discovered one of Crumb’s comics in the iniquitous senior room at the Browning School in 1971 and have been collecting him ever sense. His brand of astute cultural commentary, shocking political incorrectness and virtuosic draftsmanship spoke to me because, I now realize, MAD had set the table, whet the appetite for a sensibility that questioned everything and considered nothing sacred.
“Artists are always trying to equal the work that impressed them in their youth,” Crumb’s quote read. “I still feel extremely inadequate when I look at old MAD comics.”
The exhibition also showed movie clips designed to highlight Mad’s cultural influence. I happened to walk by as a monitor was playing a scene from a seminal film, at least seminal for me — “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The epic 1963 comedy featured a cast that included Spenser Tracy, Jonathan Winters, Sid Caesar and Ethel Merman. It opened my eyes to humor on the screen; indeed, made me believe in my bones that humor was the highest form of human evolution. I still do.
It wasn’t until I saw the show that I truly appreciated that Mad magazine, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; Robert Crumb and me were all members of the same club. Groucho Marx, even if his best work well predated Mad’s debut in 1952, famously said that he’d refuse to join any club that would have him as a member. Mad magazine stood almost alone as an organization that would have gladly accepted Groucho and, I’m confident, he the publication, finding in it the kindred, kinetic anarchistic spirt of such films as Monkey Business and Horsefeathers.
Or should I say that Groucho and the Marx Brothers, among others, lay the groundwork, the rich if microplastic-infused top soil, in which genius such as Mad would one day sprout and flourish. In this fraught election season the show is enough to make me proud to be an American all over again and to fight for the freedoms that make it great.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found be found on Substack.
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