The MAD Reader's Dirge
(sung to the tune of"My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean")

The movie by Siegel is boring;
The piece by Tom Koch can't be read;
Those pages by Berg we're ignoring -
His "Lighter Side's" heavy as lead.

Yecch, MAD! Yecch, MAD!
That's when protestors, agree, agree -
Yecch, MAD! Yecch, MAD!
That's when protestors agree.

The cover by Mingo's no bonus;
The Silverstone piece is a sin;
We simply can't stand Aragonés;
And Jaffee should be folded in.

Yecch, MAD! Yecch, MAD!
That's when protestors, agree, agree -
Yecch, MAD! Yecch, MAD!
That's when protestors agree.

We're up to our necks with Jack Davis,
With Dick DeBartolo as well;
From Torres to Clarke someone save us;
And please don't bring up Max Brandel.

Yecch, MAD! Yecch, MAD!
That's when protestors, agree, agree -
Yecch, MAD! Yecch, MAD!
That's when protestors agree.

Don't plague us with Kogen and Coker;
Don't ruin our day with Stan Hart;
Don Martin's at best mediocre;
And Drucker need courses in art.

Yecch, MAD! Yecch, MAD!
That's when protestors, agree, agree -
Yecch, MAD! Yecch, MAD!
That's when protestors agree.

We hope from Rickard you will free us;
And Woodbridge makes everyone curse;
As sick as we are of Prohias,
Those verses by Jacobs are worse.

Yecch, MAD! Yecch, MAD!
That's when protestors, agree, agree -
Yecch, MAD! Yecch, MAD!
That's when protestors agree.

... or so wrote MAD poet laureate Frank Jacobs in issue 161 way back in 1973. But of course, he was only joking. MAD was never a magazine to take itself too seriously, and was always trying to make fun of itself before other people got the chance. Nowadays that poem could be taken completely seriously by MAD's long-term fans, who have since been disappointed with what MAD Magazine has become. Why? Well, read on you crazy fershluginners, and I'll attempt to show you what's wrong with the current attitude behind MAD. How? The best way, by using evidence; i.e. MAD Magazine #410, the October 2001 issue. So here we go, pointing out the problems page by page...

COVER: A line-up of children 'mooning' out of the windows on a school bus, except for Alfred E. Neuman who is of course showing his face (see title picture above). The caption reads "Backs To School Issue". This appalling cover looks like a spoof of itself, especially since the Alfred's face/Alfred's butt confusion was previously used on the cover of #356. In a recent episode of The Simpsons a cover of MAD Magazine with Alfred flushing Bart Simpson down a toilet. Such unfunny ideas are now common at MAD, as shown with last month's 'Weakest Link' cover which featured no joke at all. On MAD's writer guidelines it says that "we will NOT, however, consider simple Alfred substitution gags – e.g. Alfred as Mr. Spock or Alfred as a Furby", despite the fact that last month's cover had Alfred as Anne Robinson with, as I said, no noticable joke.

#356 and #410

At the bottom of the page, it says that this issue will "Expose The Cracks" in such self-selling logos of The Simpsons, A.I., and Tomb Raider, appealing to the lowest common denominator. MAD used to spoof arty stuff like A Clockwork Orange and Being There, now it does topical satires on ten year-old television shows. Although to be fair, this is partially the fault of Hollywood, who haven't released an original movie for over a decade. In the seventies, the cover would have been the A.I. picture featured on page two. It's the A.I. logo with Alfred punched out except for his tooth! Imagine how great it would look in silver on a black background. Pure class.

The cover ends with a plug for the website.

MAD movie covers. Now THAT'S class.

INSIDE FRONT COVER: An advert for the Game Boy Advance, thereby protecting Nintendo from any further satirical attacks. I think it's worth repeating Bill Gaines' reasons for not accepting advertising, in this paragraph taken from Dick DeBartolo's ("MAD's maddest writer") entertaining memoir 'Good Days And MAD':

"MAD isn't run like a 'normal' magazine. MAD has never taken advertising either, and one day I talked to Gaines about his resistance to having ads. Not that I wanted to see ads in MAD, I just wanted to know why Bill didn't want advertising. He told me that he had tried taking ads at the very beginning of MAD as a magazine. But when he ran the ads he felt he had to let people know it was a real ad, so he did just that: The ads said "REAL AD". Then readers wrote in saying "Oh, now your advertisers will be sacred, and you won't make fun of them".
So in the next issue with ads, Bill had the MAD writers do satires on the real ads. But readers wrote in saying, "Oh, now you're giving your advertisers twice the space by adding the satires!". Bill told me he saw no happy solution, so he decided "No ads, period". And it's been that way for almost 35 years."

This is why true MAD fans don't want to see ads in MAD. More info on MAD's advertising can be found at The Daily Record. Anti-ad opinions can be found at Doug's MAD Cover site (which is where I stole most of my cover pics from. Sorry about that, Doug. Have a plug for your website).

PAGE 1: Contents page one with various pictures from the articles. There's also a cartoon by Tom "Pull My" Cheney of the 'Grand National Throw Like A Girl Championship'. MAD never used to accept one panel cartoons, just articles. They're not The New Yorker. National Lampoon magazine, which Cheney used to write for and which DID accept one panel cartoons, once printed a 'Run Like A Girl Championship' cartoon. It's now out of business.

PAGE 2: Second page of contents, with more pictures. It features two jokey panels. One is This Month In History, a fake calender with jokes like "8th October 1978: Satan gives Kenny G his first saxaphone". Pointless, but usually worth a chuckle (I giggled at "26th October 1984: Donny and Marie Osmond divorce"). The other is the Alfred E. Neuman quote. A MAD favourite, it's been in every issue since MAD first became a magazine in the fifties.This issue: "Every dog has it's day - but that day still consists largely of sniffing butts!". It seems they're running out of ideas.

PAGE 3: An ad for Fortess, a new game for (now here's a coincidence) the Game Boy Advance. Nintendo must really have been worried by last January's Dreamcast parody.

PAGE 4 - 5: Letters And Tomatoes Department: A chance to prove that the readers are as stupid as the writers. This once humourous page is now a page full of gimmicks. Here they are:

Alfred E. Neuman Look-Alike Contest: They do this every year and never pick someone with one eye higher than the other. Scarily, the runner-up is a woman.

The Answer MAD: MAD answers a letter from another magazine, with uninteresting results.

Make A Dumb Wish Foundation: People write in with bollocks and get an insult for a reply.

MAD Celebrity Snaps: "Featuring someone you've never heard of", in this case three people from the American version of Survivor.

MAD Mumblings@AOL.com: Beyond description. Twats on AOL with names like "LilSmurf89" and "Goodbick" say things like "What's the proper burial for a Hershey's Bar?" and "I wish I could live in a fairy tale, but I already do". And these are the ones that get printed! Imagine what must be rejected.

MAD Cemetery Snaps: This is a new low. Invade the grave of someone you should respect with a camera and a copy of MAD to win a one-year subscription. If the corpse is featured in the issue you're holding, you get a three-year subscription. Right, I'm off to find Bill Gaines' grave, I have a few things to take up with him.

And another ad for the website.

PAGE 6 - 11: The first spoof of the issue is of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. And since most of the jokes are about Angelia Jolie's breasts, the spoof is called "Lotta Crotch: Bazoom Raider". Writen by MAD music spoofist Desmond Devlin and drawn by newbie Tom Richmond (who is excellent, by the way. He has the caricaturing skills of Mort Drucker and the 'can-copy-anybody's-style' skills of Sam Vivanio, who is now sadly editing the articles rather than drawing them), this spoof is for the most part uninspired, with, as I said, too many tit jokes. (I must admit at this point that I have not yet seen Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and so much of the jokes may be wasted on me). The opening double-page spread has a couple of good visual gags, including such MAD in-jokes as Arthur the avacado plant and Flip The Bird appearing in the background. Prince is in the corner choosing names from the hieroglyphics. The best joke on these pages: The butler saying "The robot has Madam in his metallic clutches. I haven't seen Angelina Jolie's limbs so entangled since she took her brother to the Oscars". It's also the first time Chris Barrie has appeared in MAD. No appearance by Leslie Phillips yet. Ding dong. There's a funny panel on the next page:

LOTTA: I miss my father.
OTHER GUY: I love transistors.
BUTLER: Pip pip! Veddy good!
LOTTA: Okay, that's more than enough character development! Let's get on with the rest of the movie.

...OK, so it's not that funny. The best bits of this parody deal with the plot inconsistances, and that's not a good sign. Page 10 has an amusing reference to The Fugitive:

VILLIAN: Give it up, Lotta! You're alone on this waterfall!
LOTTA: Not exactly!
HARRISON FORD: I didn't kill my wife!
TOMMY LEE JONES: I don't care!

...followed by more breast references. It ends with a typical MAD twist ending (i.e. not funny) with other computer game characters coming to beat Lotta Crotch up. More examples of Richmond's talent for mimicry as he draws perfect pictures of Sonic The Hedgehog, Donkey Kong, and Pacman, among others. Richmond also deserves a salute for the sign reading: "OVER 4999 YEARS WITHOUT AN APOCALYPSE".

One line in this piece is "Why don't people who make movies like this do serious jail time?". The same could be said about people who make movie parodies.

PAGE 12 - 13: "Only A True PETA Nut...". PETA is an American version of the RSPCA. 'American' in this case meaning 'dangerous and extreme'. Written and drawn by the extremely tasteless ex-National Lampooner John Caldwell (his best article in my opinion is 'Condoms For Dummies'), this has a few good lines but nothing exceptional, although it's saved by Caldwell's fantastic pictures. The best joke: "Only a true PETA nut will fret more about the dairy cow that produced the milk than the missing ten-year-old pictured on the carton" (some proper satire there, Private Eye take note). The worst joke: A pathetic reference to the new Star Wars film, presumably just to look topical.

PAGE 14 - 16: "The Simpsons By The Numbers". Only included because The Simpsons spoofed the MAD offices in a recent episode (as MAD proudly proclaimed in their last issue), this is a pointless satire on nothing. The best line: "Number of Simpsons writers who went on to bigger and better things (counting Conan O'Brian): 0%" (although the "%" is extranious). Worst line: Several jokes about how the artists on The Simpsons don't draw very well. The whole article gives the game away with it's last number-cruncher:

Satirical swipes at MAD: 42
Deserved satirical swipes at MAD: 42

..showing it's all a big showbiz in-joke. For the record, here's a list of MAD 'swipes' in The Simpsons, with lots of info taken from the fabbo Simpsons Archive:

Episode 3F10 (Team Homer) starts with Bart and Milhouse at the Comic Book Store looking at the comedy magazines: MAD, Cracked, Punch, Sick, Sniff, and Poot. They pick up MAD:

BART: My God, the MAD Magazine Special Edition! They only put out seventeen of these a year!
MILHOUSE: Boy, they're really socking it to that Spiro Agnew guy. He must work there or something.
BART: Let's do the Fold-In.
MILHOUSE: OK. [reading] "What higher power do TV evangelists worship?"
BART: I'll say God.
MILHOUSE: I'll say Jesus.
[They 'fold it in'. "THE ALL MAJESTIC INSPIRATIONAL MIGHTY DOLOMITE MTNS. ARE A SINGULAR EXAMPLE OF GODS GLORY" turns into...]
BOTH: "The Almighty Dollar"?! [with a large picture of a 'dollar' sign]
OWNER: You fold it, you bought it.

Later, Homer flips through it:

HOMER: Ooh, "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions"! I'm great at these. Ask me if something smells funny in here, boy.
BART: Does something smell funny in here?
HOMER: I don't think so... stupid! [laughs to self]
MARGE: [walking in] Homey, you want pork chops?
HOMER: No, I want roast beef, you clod! [laughs some more]
BART: Look at this: "Special Insert: Iron-On MADness!" [reads iron-ons] "Ban the Bath"..."Don't Trust Anyone Over Ten"..."Sock It To Me!" [laughs to self]
MARGE: Hmm. Those magazines create a dangerous amount of laughter.
HOMER: [trying to do Fold-In] "The Al-ighty -ollar?" [laughs] Oh, I get it!

Bart later uses the iron-on transfer that says "Down With Homework" which causes a revolution to occur at his school. He is sent to the principal, Seymour Skinner:

SKINNER: So we meet again, MAD Magazine.
BART: How do you know it's from MAD?
SKINNER: [walking to his window] The year was 1968. We were on recon in a steaming Mekong delta. An overheated private removed his flak jacket, revealing a T-shirt with an iron-on sporting the MAD slogan "Up With Mini-Skirts". Well, we all had a good laugh, even though I didn't quite understand it. But our momentary lapse of concentration allowed Charlie to get the drop on us. I spent the next three years in a POW camp, forced to subsist on a thin stew of fish, vegetables, prawns, coconut milk, and four kinds of rice. I came close to madness trying to find it here in the States, but they just can't get the spices right...

I love that line.

The next big MAD reference wasn't until 4F22 (The City of New York Vs. Homer Simpson). The Simpsons go to New York to pick-up Homer's car (don't ask) so Bart visits the MAD offices:

BART: Excuse me, is this MAD magazine?
SECRETARY: No, it's Mademoiselle. We're buying our sign on the installment plan.
BART: [laughs] Seriously though, my name is Bart Simpson. My father has a subscription. I'd like the grand tour please.
SECRETARY: Listen kid, you probably think lots of crazy stuff goes on in there, but this is just a place of business.
BART: Oh, OK.
[Just as Bart is about to leave, Alfred E. Neuman comes out]
ALFRED: Get me Kaputnik and Fonebone. I want to see their drawings for "New Kids on the Blecch!" [Bart's jaw drops] And where's my fershluggener pastrami sandwiches? [closes door]
BART: Wow! I'll never wash these eyes again!

Funny, yes. Haynes Lee of SNPP notes that in the office there is:

" - guy chasing MAD dirigible with net.
- White Spy with bomb (blew up another White Spy?!).
- MAD artist Jack "The Lighter Side Of..." Davis
- Don Martin type character on pogo stick (he left years ago). Fonebone and Kaputnik are two Don Martin characters.
- man (MAD artist Angelo Torres?) walking on ceiling using suction cups.
- "Blech" is a favorite MAD euphemism.
- I think this is the first time Alfred E. Neuman talked?!"

[NOTE: Roger Kaputik is a Dave Berg character.]

Some oddities:

In episode 8F15, MAD is among confiscated magazines at the school.

In episode 9F20, one of the female prisoners has a MAD fold-in tattooed on her back ("What sort of slime would I marry?")

In 1F22, Bart reads a MAD magazine.

Episode 5F02 (Treehouse of Horror VIII) featured a segment called "Fly vs. Fly". It used the same "Spy Vs. Spy" font.

There was an episode called 'New Kids on the Blecch' (CABF12) that went out in February 2001 which featured thousands of MAD references. But I haven't seen it, and SNPP doesn't have any guides to it yet. Sorry.

[UPDATE: I'm probably never going to see it either due to the recent events in America. The screengrabs show Bart using missiles to blow up a large building in New York. The BBC has also pulled The City of New York Vs. Homer Simpson, which contains scenes of Homer running up and down the towers of the World Trade Center. It was due to be shown on the fifth of October, which is my birthday, oddly enough.]

[UPDATE 2: New Kids On The Blecch is to be released in the UK on video and DVD soon(ish).]

[UPDATE 3: On the 20th of May 2001, a video and DVD called The Simpsons: Backstage Pass was released. It's a collection of Simpsons episodes with musical guests and storylines. New Kids On The Bleech was scheduled to be on this disc but was replaced by Homer's Barbershop Quartet. Or Homerpalooza, I forget which. It was possibly removed cos of September 11th reasons (a recent scheduled 'repeat' of The City Of New York Vs. Homer Simpson was pulled at the last minute when BBC schedulers cottoned on) but may also have been removed because a) no-one in the UK knows what MAD Magazine is, or b) 'N Sync, the band featured in the episode, are crap.]

Some screen grabs from an episode I've never seen.
[More screengrabs of this episode are available here.]

PAGE 17: A fucking advert for Corn Nuts, whatever they are. Corn Nuts was the first product advertised in MAD (#403, March 2001, if you're interested), and I just sat there looking at it for ages trying to work out if it was a spoof or not. MAD also published a very smug note about their accepting advertising:

"Dear MAD Reader:
As you know, MAD has long been an innovator in the magazine industry and now, beginning with this very issue you hold in your hands, we offer two very exciting concepts that are sure to revolutionize the magazine business: color and advertising. That's right, for the first time in history, a major publication will offer both full-color editorial pages and advertisments from important international companies. We are sure it's only a matter of time before other publications will do what they've always done - follow our bold lead and offer their own color pages and advertisments. But you, dear reader, will be able to tell your friends that you saw MAD do it first!
Onward to a new era in publishing!
MAD-ly, The Editors"

Cunts. MAD shouldn't be printed on glossy paper anyway. Back to Dick DeBartolo's book where it says:

"It wasn't until the paper shortage in the late 1970's that I really understood how strongly Bill felt about MAD's 'cheap' image. Our printer called to say he was having trouble getting the newspaper stock that MAD traditionally uses, and that even though it would cost him more, he would print MAD on slick paper and take the loss. Bill wouldn't hear of it! "MAD belongs on cheap stock," he said, "and I want cheap stock!". So the printer had to go shopping for the kind of paper Bill demanded. Bill said it probably cost him more than using the the paper the printer had on hand, but he would NEVER let MAD be printed on slick paper!"

[NOTE: The first issue to feature glossy pages and full-colour articles was #400, a celebratory issue, with no adverts. I predicted that MAD would use this new format, attracted by the bright colours, but I never predicted adverts. It's the coming apocalypse, I tell you.]

[NOTE 2: Issue 400 was the first issue to be fully printed on glossy paper but several issues before had printed full-colour inserts, anything from four to eight pages, in the middle of the magazine. The first was an 'Entertainment Weekly' parody in #368.]

[NOTE 3: A British issue of MAD (#207, July '79) printed a four-page Wimbledon supplement in full colour. Well, yellow and green anyway. It featured reprints of the American MAD Tennis Primer and a Don Martin cartoon.]

Insert from #368 and British #207

[NOTE 4 (a): When MAD was a comic book (October 1952 to May 1955), all of it's pages were printed in full colour. It also accepted advertising. When "Katchandhammer Kids!" (#10) was reprinted in "More Trash From MAD #1" in 1958, it was on a special 8-page colour binding. When other original comic book articles were reprinted in the '80s they were in black-and-white, and they were shrunk so as to fit two pages on one at a 270-degree angle. This made most of the strip unreadable. The book "MAD About The Fifties", edited by Grant Geissman, prints most of the comic book articles in full colour and they look beautiful. Only two articles are printed in black-and-white. One is "Howdy Dooit!" from #18 which was originally printed in black-and-white anyway, and the other is "Flesh Garden!" from #11, printed in black-and-white to give us "the opportunity to view [Wallace] Wood's exquisitely rendered figures as they were originally drawn". It looks bloody awful.]

[NOTE 4 (b): Around the same time the MAD Super Special "Tales Calculated To Drive You MAD" came out, reprinting all the original MAD comic books in full colour without the ads, three issues at a time. It also featured an "Incomplete History Of MAD Comics" by Frank Jacobs and was very well done. The first six issues were also reprinted in a lovely big $20 paperback. Cover picture here, folks.]

[NOTE 5: Don't all these notes make this article look professional? I think so.]

PAGE 18 - 19: The fifth instalment of MAD's semi-regular feature "6 Degrees Of Seperation Between Anyone And Anything". An excuse for lazy topical references about The Weakest Link and Shrek and Tom Green and shit like that. Rick Tulka's pics are great as always, especially the alienesque Barbra Streisand (or 'Bubby Strident', as MAD used to call her).

[UPDATE: Part of this article links Osama Bin Ladan to Camryn Manheim's thighs. It says that he "spreads violence wherever he goes, as does soccer". His face is printed on a poster, his beard covering part of the word "Wanted". Since this piece was written four months before the WTC got attacked, this is an exceptional piece of MAD E.S.P.]

PAGE 20 - 24: "Monroe And... The Great American Road Trip: Part Two". I remember when Monroe was advertised on the leftover piece of paper on the subscription card with the phrase 'Monroe Is Coming'. The first Monroe episode appeared in #356 in 1997 and it's intention was clear from the department title: "Angster's Paradise Dept.". Monroe had to go to the store and buy tampons for his mother (see if you can spot the potential embarassment in the aforementioned situation). It was interesting at first as MAD had never had a regular character before. Alfred E. Neuman and Spy Vs. Spy were both fairly one-dimensional, whereas Monroe was to have a family and friends. Well, a family anyway, and a truly dysfuncional one. They make Beavis and Butthead look like Lucy and Desi. He had a mother and father (divorced but still having sex), an SS uniform-wearing Grandpa, a now-deceased Grandma, a dog called Tripod (named for it's three legs) and a new baby, Perry, named after the gym teacher Monroe's mom lost her virginity to. At school, there was the unrequited love of Jolynda who was going out with the bully Dylan. Monroe's only friend was the geek Walter, who has a Jar Jar Binks lunchbox. It started out as a weekly guide to the embarassing things kids go through while growing up and was quite amusing, in a 'I-glad-that-never-happened-to-me' kinda way. However, as the series went on, it got more and more disgusting and less and less funny. I blame the Farrelly Brothers. This episode features Grandpa drinking Monroe's warm vomit, thinking it's chicken stew. Yes, well done, Anthony Barbieri. If you need me I'll be in the next room, writing comedy. He also uses the same 'holiday romance' story they used two summers ago. In one of the Letters pages of a recent issue (which I can't find at the moment) someone wrote in to say that although she didn't find it at all funny, 'Monroe' should continue as it was a great thing to help children with trouble in their teenage years . This isn't what MAD's about, surely?

It's a pity, as 'Monroe' often features some great lines and marvellous pictures by Bill Wray, who's disgustingly over-the-top style has saved the spoofs of The Blair Witch Project and last issue's "The Wicked Link". Monroe is one of the few recent MAD features that still has the power to shock. Recently, when Mom had her baby, Dad immediately wanted to have sex with her. Immediately. The doctor says he hasn't even sewn her up yet, to which Dad replies "Don't be stingy with the thread, Doc, if you know what I mean". Not an earth-shattering line, I admit, but in the middle of a comedy magazine mainly for teenagers it's a bit of a shock.

I love it when MAD shocks me. Things that I never thought they could print. Last issue there was a spoof of tattoo and piercing magazines which started off routinely before turning into a collection of freakish drawings by the ultra-realistic Hermann Mejia. It contained pictures of a man who stretched his left nipple with a bowling ball on a chain, and a couple with hundreds of sores, cuts and boils on their lips caused by kissing each other with their lip-piercings. The most disturbing picture was of the winner of the 'youngest person to have a tattoo' competion: a seven month old baby boy, who's parents have decided to cover him with Teletubby and Elmo tattoos, and "CHANGE ME!" written in goth lettering, with an arrow pointing to his diaper. Subtle nose and ear piercings top off the ensemble. We learn that the baby had to reliquish the prize after being taken away by social services and put into care. Very bizarre thing to find in a humour magazine. The next page also bypasses the taste barrier with an ad (fake) for the 'Do-It-Yourself Home Tattoo Kit' complete with "practice cat (pre-shaved)", accompanied with picture of said cat, looking pathetically right into the eyes of the reader. Deeply disturbing. And fucking great. MAD should always shock and disgust, but not at the expense of being amusing.

But the borders have changed. In 1974 people would complain about a picture of a middle finger. Nowadays MAD make references to priests being paedophiles with no consequence. It's best explained in their "The Simpsons By The Numbers" article earlier:

Percentage of parents shocked by Bart when the show debuted in 1989: 43%
Percentage shocked now, in the era of Tom Green, South Park and MTV's Jackass: 0.0034%

Substitute 'Bart' with 'MAD' and, yes, you've found another problem with the current MAD Magazine.

#166, April '74 and #356, April '97

PAGE 24 - 25: "10 Signs That Your Neighbourhood Gang Is Getting Old". Fairly routine MAD article, with topical twist by the modern day writer Mike Snider. It's mostly just the old 'old people are forgetful/drive slowly/have arthritis/are forgetful' material transpanted to neighbourhood gang members: "All the graffiti is now in easier-to-read large print", that sort of thing. Pics by the aforementioned Hermann Mejia, who talent is being wasted on such a routine article.

PAGE 26 - 27: Hello and welcome to the middle of the magazine, and now it's time for some sex references so that twelve year-olds think that MAD is still a dangerous read. "A Man's Guide To How Long Before You'll 'Get Any' After Commiting One Of These Common Relationship Errors". The title is longer than the idea that inspired it, namely the old comedy cliché that woman won't sleep with men when they upset them. Boring rubbish like "Tone of voice she doesn't like when talking about her mother: 5 days" and "Failure to be serious about a relationship quiz in Cosmopolitan magazine: 4 days". Oh, please no more, for I fear my sides will split (for the Americans reading this article, that was sarcasm). AN ADMISSION: I did giggle at the other half of the article, "AWoman's Guide To How Long Before You'll 'Get Any' After Commiting One Of These Common Relationship Errors", which states that the longest a man will leave you without sex is two hours, even for "sellling his dog to a Korean restaurant" or "killing his mother". The large and extremely ugly picture is by the over-pasteling Peter Kuper, but more on him later. Oh, and it was written by Mike Snider. Why doesn't that suprise me?

PAGE 28 - 30: "When Corporate Sponsorship Of Public Schools Goes To Far!". Yes, it's one of these. An idea they've seemingly done a million times before ('What would happen if SOMETHING made SOMETHING ELSE? We think it would look a little like this...'), this article written by Ricky Sprague (who he?) gives four examples of advertising in school books: R.J. Reynolds' History book (praising tobacco), Seagram's chemistry book (teaching kids to mix drinks), Mastercard's flash cards ("2 + 2 = 4* *'4' is the correct answer if reached during the initial grace period..."), and The Home Depot's science book (dealing with the extinction of small hardware stores). I probably don't get all the references, not being American, but even if I did I'd probably still think it was a one-joke idea repeated four times. Also, an awful lot of writing went into something that most people are going to skim over to get to Spy Vs. Spy. A waste of everything involved. Except MAD veteran George Woodbridge, whose pictures are funnier than the words. Another survivor since the fifties. "Get-It-Out-Of-Your-System-Land" must be one of MAD's finest articles.

PAGE 31: Another fucking ad for *ahem* "Dark Age Of Camelot", a computer game not for the Game Boy Advance. "A massively multiplayer online roleplaying game", it says here. That's good, I was just thinking there weren't enough of them already on the market (note: sarcasm again.).

PAGE 32 -35: Ah, the silent scrawlings of Sergio Aragonés, what will he look at this month? "A MAD Look At Priests, Ministers, Rabbis & A Few Scoundrels". You would have thought that MAD would be getting into a dangerous area when taking the piss out of the clergy, but because the premises are so silly no-one could possibly take offense. John Caldwell wrote and drew an article called "When Priests Go Bad" (I love the idea of "drive-by baptisms") and created a sequel, "When Nuns Go Bad", and of course Duck Edwing has his wonderful character The Ventriloquist Priest. Now Sergio Aragonés, a man that nobody could dislike, is doing having "a MAD look" at them and the results are as funny as always. A woman is healed by a minister only to have a heart attack on stage, a man at communion has bad breath, and a rabbi practises his sermons through a camcorder. Not earth-shatteringly funny but momentarily amusing. There's even some proper satire in there too: a priest, who's collecting money to help the needy, shoos a homeless man away from his church. Sergio Aragonés has been doing these since 1963 and he never seems to run out of ideas. His unique style of drawing (he never creates a preliminary sketch) gives his material an ad-libbed quality, probably since most of them are ad-libbed. He even draws dozens of 'MAD Marginals' to fill the magazine every month and has rarely repeated a joke. One of my MAD heroes. Viva Sergio!

PAGE 36 - 37: Didn't they already do this article already? Oh, it was just something similar. Alright then. "Student Excuse Notes For The 21st Century". You can guess what it's about. Jeff Kruse writes letters like "Sorry about Lenny missing class last Monday. He overdosed on Ritalin and didn't wake up til noon" and "Antigone was absent from class yesterday because she was attending the funeral of her surrogate mother's live-in lover". Really just some more 'MAD-trying-to-look-topical'-type jokes. Not funny enough to make you laugh out loud, this is one of those articles where you think 'Oh, I can see why that could be considered amusing'. To quote Alexei Sayle, "I'll laugh at that when I get home". A humourous collage by occasional contributor Gerry Gersten tops off the piece.

PAGE 38: Another ad. Oh, wait, it's for a MAD product this time: "Spy Vs. Spy: The Complete Casebook". A new book featuring all 247 "Spy Vs. Spy"s, interviews with Prohias, unpublished sketches.... Hmmm, I think I might have to buy this. Where's the nearest comic book store? What? Oh yes, the anti-MAD article. You go ahead and read on, I'll just look at this page for a bit. Ooh, rare pre-MAD propaganda cartoons, nice...

PAGE 39 - 42: "The Lighter Side Of...". This has always been an oddity for MAD. In the middle of all their sex and violence and political satire, there comes this three pages of sweet little interchanges in a time before cynicism. Berg (who has been doing these strips since 1961) has always entertained, and wrote an excellent book about religion called "My Friend God". His character of Roger Kaputnik, a not-very-loose caricature of himself, has become a MAD favourite, and usually ends each "Lighter Side" with his visits to the doctor:

DOCTOR: Kaputnik, your X-rays show that everything intenal is in order! But my own two eyes can see an external problem!
KAPUTNIK: Oh my God! What is it?
DOCTOR: You can use some new underwear!

...and it's like that. Inoffensive, silly, whimsical little dialogues in comic strip form. He even uses this old joke:

JUDGE: How do you plead, Mr Charney?
DEFENDENT: Usually I get down on one knee and beg!

See? Not revolutionary, but just sweet little music hall gags. A great relief in a magzine with articles about not 'getting any' and neighbourhood gangs. Sadly, most readers will skip over this too, trying to find the drugs references in the 'lunchbox' article (see below).

My only complaint is with the unrealistic computerised colourisation (by "Wildstorm"). There's no point to it. But I can forgive any article that mentions Max Korn on a regular basis.

The reason second-hand book shops exist.

PAGE 43: Uh oh. It's another "MAD's Celebrity Cause-Of-Death Betting Odds", a recent MAD regular feature showing the odds on how a famous person (or occasionally thing) will expire, usually creating one funny line out of six. "This Month's Future Handful Of Dust: The Little AOL Man". Hold on, didn't they do this recently? "A Day In The Life Of The Little AOL Man", issue 406, June 2001? Oh, look, there it is in the corner. No, this is ever-so-slightly different. The funniest type of death: "Heart attack upon learning awful secret that his father is the yellow 'Smiley Face' from the 1970's". Least funny: Take your pick. Written by Mike Snider again and drawn by Hermann Mejia, who draws some comedy CD-ROM cases.

PAGE 44 - 45: Spy Vs. Spy. . Except it isn't. Antonio Prohias died in February 2001. These new Spy Vs. Spy's are done by Peter Kuper who over-pastels these strips to death, making them near unreadable. The ones in black-and-white are worse: they look like someone spilt a sack of coal over the magazine. This Spy Vs. Spy features nothing original. Tanks, castles, elastic doors, Prohias had done it all before and better. Spy Vs. Spy should have been stopped when Prohias died, it will never be as good as his originals, which we can always look back on if we wish to. Of course, the same could've been said about MAD Magazine when Bill Gaines died. And it was.

PAGE 48 - 49: "Lunch-Packing Mom Profiles". More semi-topical jokes coloured by Wildstorm to make it look like an episode of Recess. It's written by Ryan Pagelow (who he?) and drawn by the newish Amanda Conner, who draws excellent spoofs of comic book superheroes in other, better articles. This article, on the other hand, is pointless: Stuff like the "New Age Mom" who gives her daughter "soy milk and horrible-tasting wheat-grass drink" and "Fundamentalist Mom" giving her son "earplugs for when that Evolution Theory nonsense comes up during science class". "Divorced Mom" steals it's jokes from old 'Monroe' strips, and "Crack Addict Mom" ends the article under the mistaken belief that it is satirical, tasteless, and funny.

PAGE 48 - 51: A four-page movie parody of Spielberg's latest Hollywood blockbuster. It couldn't be done by anyone else but Dick DeBartolo and Mort Drucker, "the George Bernard Shaw and Leonardo DiVinci of comic satire", or so says George Lucas in a letter to DeBartolo in 1980 after reading MAD's spoof of The Empire Strikes Back. DeBartolo and Drucker had previously created the MAD spoofs "Ibanana Jones And His Last Crude Days", "Jurass-Has-Had-It Park", and "201 Minutes Of Space Idiocy", proving they're the best people to bring us a spoof of the new Kubrick/Spielberg film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, or, as MAD puts it, "A.I. Absolute Idiocy". Drucker's opening panels are always great, featuring all the stars of the film along some suitable throwaway jokes: In this spoof, there's a robot with the head of Shrek, the Disney version of Pinocchio, and best of all, Woody Allen as the robot from Sleeper! "Max Korn" is also mentioned. DeBartolo also supplies some giggles in this panel: Haley Joel-Osmond's character is called "DaveNocchio" and the teddy bear has "the looks of an Ewok, the charm of C3PO and for some inexplicable reason, the voice of Hannibal Lecter!". He overuses the joke that the film's too long, but this is justified because Spielberg's managed to make a three-and-a-half hour film from a ten-page short story. Three-and-a-half hours! I wouldn't say it was long but I started to grow stubble by the end of the first reel. I left the cinema looking like a member of ZZ Top. I gotta tell ya, I get no respect, no respect at all.

But seriously folks, let's talk about Dick DeBartolo. A writer for TV game shows, he first had an article printed in MAD in 1962: #69's "Some MAD Ads We Never Got To See". Later, he wrote a comedy monologue spoofing submarine movies for a TV show, but it was rejected. Under MAD editor Nick Meglin's suggestion he rewote it as a comic strip for a MAD paperback. After penning a few generic movie spoofs for the magazine Meglin asked DeBartolo if he wanted to start specifically spoofing current movies. DeBartolo wrote a three-page spoof of Dr Zhivago ("Dr Zhicago", #113, September 1967), and thus started nearly 40 years of writing MAD's famous film and tv parodies. Among those he wrote are: "Grim Pix" (Grand Prix), "What's The Connection?" (The French Connection), "The Poopsidedown Adventure" (I'm not telling you the rest, you have to guess them for yourself), "Airplot '75", "The Towering Sterno", "Mirthquake", "One Cuckoo Flew Over The Rest", "King Korn", "The Spy Who Glubbed Me", "Jaw'd, Too", all four "Star Roars" films, "Abominal House", "Alias", "Raiders Of A Lost Art", "The Right Stiff", " Bleak For The Future", "Crock O'Dull Dummee", "Legal Wreakin'", "Roboslop", "Who De-famed Roger Rabbit?", "Teen-Rage Moolah Titwit Turtles!" (and it's sequel "The Secret Is To Snooze"), "Totally Recalled", "Interminable Too: Misjudgment Day", "Prince Of Tirades", "In Line To Be Fired", "The Stooge-itive", "Die Hard With No Variance", "Corn Air", "F*!@/Off", "Trypanic", "Gotsilly", and many more! As well as all that, he's written dozens of TV parodies and magazine spoofs, eleven original MAD paperbacks, over 400 "MAD Minutes" radio spots, and that memoir I mentioned earlier called 'Good Days And MAD', which is where I'm taking all my information from and you should all go out and buy it right now if you've any interest in MAD Magazine. Dick DeBartolo has contributed to every MAD Magazine for over 32 years, a unique achievement. No wonder they call him MAD's Maddest Writer.

Enough with the biography already! Here's some of the best lines from "A.I. Absolute Idiocy":

MARK'EM: Cut off a lock of her hair! That will make her love you a little bit more!
DAVENOCCHIO: I have a better idea! I'll tease the edges, give her blonde highlights and finish it with an almond conditioner!

GIGGLE-LOW JOE: Hi! I'm "Giggle-Low Joe"!
DAVNOCCHIO: I'm DaveNocchio! Whadda you know, Joe?
GIGGLE-LOW JOE: I know next time to read the script before signing on to a movie, even if Spielberg is directing!

DR.NO: Hello! I'm Dr No! 30 seconds of me and people shout "No! Please, no more!". I know everything! I bet you want a heart! Or some courage!
DAVENOCCHIO: No!
DR. NO: I know! You must want a brain! Cause if you had one, you wouldn't be in this movie! Hmmm... I guess I don't have a brain either!
DAVENOCCHIO: No! I just want to find the Blue Fairy!
DR. NO: Oh, her? She's two panels away! But first you have to meet the man who conceived you in the land where it is said the lions weep and the Mets fans moan!

NARRATION: DaveNocchio prayed for the Blue Fairy to turn him into a real boy until all the fish died and the ocean froze over! And the audience prayed they would get out before they too died! What semed like 2,000 years passed, for those on the screen, and those watching the screen! Finally, his prayer was heard by weird robots of the future, who had looked like beings that we've had "close encounters" with before!

DAVENOCCHIO: I don't have a birthday, because I wasn't born! I'm an immaculate contraption!

Ba-dum tsch. What's with all the exclamation marks? To tell you the truth, the whole spoof is pretty good. It mentions The Wizard Of Oz and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind when it should, and even features a great Stanley Kubrick reference:

MOMICA: You're on your own now, DaveNocchio! Go in any direction but that one!
DAVENOCCHIO: Why, mommy? What's in that direction?
MOMICA: The Stanley Kubrick part of the film! It's dark, dreary and unintelligable!
DAVENOCCHIO: Gee, that sounds much better than where we've spent the first part of the film!

The piece is enhanced immensely by the excellent drawings from Mort Drucker, who is the best caricaturist in the world and has a great sense of humour. I temporarily tired of him after the dreadful Cast Away parody (#404, the second issue and Drucker's first spoof after MAD became glossy and colourful), thinking that his scrawling didn't look good on the new glossy paper, but this spoof has restored my faith. I've just noticed that the cage of robots at the "Flesh Tear" features Robocop, Data from Star Trek, the robot from Lost In Space, and R2D2! It's this type of attention to background detail that keeps MAD comic strips, film spoofs or not, the best ever. Terry Gilliam has said that he was inspired by this style to fill the entire screen as much as he can with tiny details. Try to read all the propaganda posters in Brazil for a good example of what he means.

The spoof ends with a typical MAD twist ending (i.e. not funny) with DaveNocchio's mom being reincarnated and switching DaveNocchio off, but who can complain when a three-hour multi-million dollar Spielberg/Kubrick blockbuster isn't as entertaining as a four-page black-and-white comic strip? Not me. Fa Fa Fa!

PAGE 52: An ad for an appalling American toy called "Tech Deck Dude" which are those annoying finger skateboards, only now they've got moulded plastic fingers with faces and clothes. The ad is a spoof of the movie poster for The Mummy Returns. This wouldn't exist without MAD, the first thing ever to do spoofs of specific movies. Inspired everything from Sid Caesar to French and Saunders did MAD Magazine. In the corner of the ad it reads in tiny little writing "NOT AN ACTUAL MOVIE ADVERTISMENT". Thanks for telling me, all those product shots and the phrase "COLLECT THEM ALL" threw me a bit. In the good old days, this page would have been a marvellously silly four-panel strip by Don Martin. SPLEENK-FERWANGGG!! That's the sound of me ripping this page out and throwing it in the bin.

A filthy Don Martin cartoon from 1957. Because you deserve it.

INSIDE BACK COVER: Here we go with another ridiculous MAD Fold-In! MAD inventor and Snappy Answerer Al Jaffee (pronounced "Finch") has been doing these since 1964 with a pic of Elizabeth Taylor changing husbands. The Fold-In has been in almost every issue since, and gets many complaints when it isn't. I can't go into the full story of the Fold-In here (mainly because I haven't the knowledge) so go out and buy "Fold This Book!: A Ridiculous Collection of Fold-Ins". It has a complete history of Fold-In's, as well as over 350 prefolded reprints and sketches and behind-the-scenes photos and stuff like that. This month's Fold-In is a picture of an incompetent baseball team with the question "What historically great team has stumbled badly in the last year?". The caption:

THE SUPPOSED EXCELLENCE OF THIS TEAM IS UNDER EXTREME
PRESSURE LATELY. BUT NO ONE THOUGHT THEY
COULD LET THEIR IMAGE FALL SO COMPLETELY APART

Fold it in to see a picture of a big grey building with the caption now reading:

THE SUPREME

COURT

Ho ho, very satirical. Well it's not funny but... um... at least it's well-painted. One of the few MAD articles that should be in colour. I hope Jaffee does some more articles about ridiculous inventions, he's very good at that sort of thing.

BACK COVER: An advert for Altoids, the American equivalent of Fisherman's Friends only without a name that becomes a double entrendré when you suck on one. Because their slogan is "The Curiously Strong Mints" they've used popular American children's book character Curious George. Do you see what they've done there? Clever, doncha think? Very proactive. More cocaine, Bob? The first advert on the back page of MAD was also for Altoids but featured the two Spy Vs. Spy characters hiding their mint tins from each other. MAD's back covers used to be great: comic strips by Duck Edwing or Al Jaffee, a fake ad written by Dick DeBartolo, an upside-down spoof of another magazine's cover. This is the current problem with MAD: too much emphasis on money, not enough on humour. Soon people will stop buying it, it will lose money and become even more bland to attract a bigger audience, sacking it's main writers and artists and employing the guy who does the photo captions for People magazine, before eventually turning into a glossy entertainment mag with a few topical one-panel cartoons about George W. Bush's penis written by fourteen-year old kids who haven't even seen A Night At The Opera, and then finally disappearing to be replaced with Time-Warner's lastest monthly promo mag whose sole purpose is to rewrite press releases into good reviews for their new movies. We'll then have to buy The New Yorker, glancing at all the cartoons trying to find a caricature by Angelo Torres or something silly by Jack Davis. After that we'll have to buy lazy MAD rip-offs like 'Comic Relief' and 'Cracked', although we don't really want to, and occasionally thumb through a second-hand copy of the 'Incurably MAD' paperback muttering "For the love of Potrzebie, now THAT was a great magazine".

OK, so maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but if MAD carries on like this it's readership will fall and it will eventually disappear. And then what are people like us, people who enjoy reading silly comic strips by people with a sense of humour, what are we going to do?

YES - ME WORRY!

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But the November issue of MAD is very funny, thereby fucking up my entire arguement. Ah well.

But the December issue is appalling. 'Harry Potter special' indeed!

And the January issue comes with a free AOL disc! Oh, it's the end, the end..