Mediacy Articles – Volume 15, No. 2
The media literacy movement has cause to mourn the passing of two closely allied pioneers. William M. Gaines, the publisher of Mad magazine, died on June 3, 1992 at the age of 70. Earlier this year, on February 23, Harvey Kurtzman, the original creator and editor of Mad, died at age 68. Gaines provided the business acumen that enabled the magazine to start up and prosper during the Eisenhower era. Kurtzman was the creative genius who gave Mad its anarchic tone and satirical edge.
For many of us who are members of the "baby boom" generation, Mad was our first exposure to what we would later term "media literacy." Mad magazine deconstructed bourgeois suburban culture and the absurdities of popular culture in general, especially the media of television, movies, and advertising.
William Gaines' father, Max, had invented the comic book in 1933 by reprinting newspaper comic strips in booklet form and charging a dime. Gaines' invention became one of the few success stories of the Great Depression. By 1941, thirty comic book publishers were producing 150 different comics with a circulation of fifteen million copies a month. When Max died in 1947 as a result of a tragic boating accident, son William, dropped out of teachers college at age twenty-five and took over the family comic book business, known as Educational Comics.
By 1950, the EC company name was changed to Entertaining Comics. This more accurately reflected the company's comic book output that, under the younger Gaines' direction, included titles such as "The Crypt of Terror" and "The Vault of Horror," the first gory horror comics that featured explicit violence in the artwork. Despite their luridness, these comics reflected more depth than is generally realized even today. They were twisted morality tales with O. Henry-style plot twists that often dealt with social inequality and racial prejudice.
Harvey Kurtzman had joined EC Comics in 1949 and specialized in the company's output of war comics. At the time, most war comics wallowed in gung-ho victory and the annihilation of a one-dimensional enemy. Kurtzman's stories sometimes dealt with the perils of misguided patriotism and reflected the points of view of enemy soldiers and civilians from occupied territories.
Meanwhile concerned parents and conservative social activists were becoming alarmed by the profusion of gore and carnage reflected in the crime and horror comic books of the early 50's. In 1951, crime comics were Made illegal in Canada and legislation was pending in the U.S. Gaines knew that he would have to diversify his output if he wanted his company to survive. Gaines had observed Kurtzman's flair for the humorous and suggested that he try putting together a funny comic book with a satirical edge. The first issue of Mad appeared in 1952 and contained four stories each spoofing a different EC comic. By the fourth issue, Kurtzman realized that parody was the key to success and produced a satire of the most popular comic book of all. The issue containing Superduperman! flew off the stands and Gaines soon faced a lawsuit for copyright infringement by the publishers of the Superman comic books.
In 1954 the attacks on the comic book industry intensified with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Frederic Wertham, a liberal psychiatrist who was the director of a "mental hygiene" clinic. Wertham's sensational book claimed that children were committing crimes such as murder and suicide as a direct result of reading crime comics. Further, Wertham went after comic book super heroes claiming that Wonder Woman was a lesbian and Batman and Robin were having a homosexual relationship. The political climate in the United States was repressive and the country was in the grip of McCarthyism.
The result was the awesomely restrictive Comics Code Authority which had the same impact on the comic book industry as the movie Production Code of twenty years earlier. Only comic books that subscribed to the code and displayed its seal would be distributed and sold in news-stands and drugstores. In the vicious internal politics of the comic book industry, EC Comics was offered up as a scapegoat to the new code and Gaines lost his most successful comic titles. By this time, Mad was making a small profit and Gaines considered it to be the salvation of his company. Kurtzman was thinking of leaving Mad and Gaines enticed him to stay by offering to turn it into a slick magazine that would specialize in satire.
The new Mad was a bimonthly "magazine" that sold for 25 cents. Because it was considered a magazine rather than a comic, it had no problem with the Comics Code. Kurtzman would shepherd the growth of Mad until 1956 when he left to work for Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine. Gaines replaced him with Al Feldstein who would supervise Mad's greatest period of growth.
When I first became aware of MAD, it had a slightly disreputable reputation and was considered vulgar, somewhat like Playboy. I remember sneaking the magazine into the house in the belief that my parents would disapprove of my reading it. Of course, one never brought Mad to school where it would quickly be confiscated by unsympathetic and hostile teachers. Later, as younger teachers who had been influenced by Mad joined the profession, they began to incorporate the magazine into classroom use.
Mad's satirical guns were most gleefully trained on advertising. The post-war prosperity of the 1950's led to the rise of motivational research where the consumer rather than the product became the focus of advertising's persuasive techniques. By 1955, the industry was spending nine billion dollars a year on advertising – fifty-three dollars a year for each man, woman and child in the United States. Mad's primary contribution to media literacy was ensuring that, through satire, we would be aware of the absurdity of advertising technique.
While Gaines had sold advertising in the early issues of Mad, he quickly realized that his satirical attacks on Madison Avenue's techniques would rule them out as a reliable source of revenue. The magazine was always careful to make fun of the ads themselves, not the products. This was a fine distinction as the publishers of Adbusters were to find out when the makers of Absolut vodka threatened litigation over that magazine's ad parodies.
Mad taught us to laugh at the absurdities of our mainstream culture. It made fun of everything that we were taught in school to hold in awe and reverence. Mad was our first exposure to parody, satire, light verse and utter nonsense in print.
Surprisingly, much of what was in Mad was only fully comprehensible to the well-informed. The humour was frequently more sophisticated than most adults at the time would have given it credit for. It was Kurtzman who initially ensured that Mad could be funny without talking down to its audience. Feldstein continued this trend and introduced the notion of parodying great literature. Besides the obvious parodies of contemporary popular culture, the humour often contained references to Gilbert ∓ Sullivan, the poetry of Robert Frost, and the works of Shakespeare, among others. Great poems were printed verbatim with hilarious illustrations that were puns of the text.
One spoof that was way ahead of it's time and managed to ruffle a few American feathers was the 1959 "Cool School" version of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Alongside Lincoln's text was a "bop talk" version employing the patois of African- Americans as adopted by the beats. "Fourscore and like seven years ago our old daddies came on in this scene with a new group, grooved in free kicks, and hip to the Jazz that all cats make it the same." Some educators were initially outraged but they soon discovered that their students were studying the original text much more carefully than they ever would in class.
Similar parodies of popular songs led to a lawsuit over copyright infringement launched by music publishers representing such musical icons as Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. The suit went to trial and an important legal precedent was set when the trial judge ruled that satirists must have an original on which to base their work, or satire could not exist. Mad's satires of music and literature began to find their way into classrooms as younger teachers began to discover that the magazine's versions were great motivators to get students to read the originals. In Calgary, a junior high school teacher got into trouble for embellishing his students' exam papers with small cartoons from Mad. A parent had charged that the drawings "carried sexual and satanic overtones" and "encouraged disrespect for authority." Gaines, who had left teachers' college when his father had died, called the school to offer his support to the beleaguered teacher.
But, of most interest to us adolescents were the hysterically funny send-ups of contemporary movies and television programs featured in every issue of Mad to this day. We boomers didn't know it at the time, but Mad was our first venture into media literacy. Mad showed us how to talk back to the media by pointing out its contradictions and absurdities. Mad magazine was the first place that I learned that advertising often lied, that products were usually not as advertised, and that ads promised a lot more than they delivered. Much of what was in Mad was, in fact, a deconstruction of the popular media. The magazine made it abundantly clear just how shallow and unrealistic most movies and television programs were. Popular television shows and movies were cannon fodder for Mad's satirical guns with slight name modifications to prevent lawsuits. Bonanza became "Bananas" along with "M*U*S*H," "Star Blecch" and "2001, A Space Idiocy." The saccharine mega-hit musical of 1965 starring Julie Andrews will always be known to me by its Mad title, "The Sound of Mucous."
Occasionally the parodies veered into controversy. Hogan's Heroes, one of the most idiotic programs in the history of television became "Hochman's Heroes," a weekly sitcom featuring the zany inmates of Buchenwald concentration camp, "Wait'll you see the latest gag we're going to pull on the guards over at the Crematorium. It's a real gasser!" Mad was also accused, with considerable justification, of wallowing in homophobic humour and its portrayal of women reflected the almost exclusively male editorial staff.
These parodies of media texts provided many of us with our first exposure to the concept of media literacy. Parody is, by nature, a form of deconstruction and Mad's satirical treatment of popular culture provided us with a form of deconstruction that was simply unavailable throughout the fifties and sixties in any other form of media.
By the late sixties, as media texts became more sophisticated and began to acknowledge the relative sophistication of their hip young audiences, Mad had to scramble to keep up. One way they did this was to parody the process of the creation of media texts, a task made easier by the fact that Mad writers themselves were becoming more involved in mainstream media production. Examples of some of these later parodies included "The Mad Automatic Do-It-Yourself Scriptwriter," and "The Evolution of a TV Situation Comedy," which traced the evolution of a hit TV show as its ratings grew over the years and it began to generate huge profits. One parody, "Book! Movie!" examined what happened to a novel when it was transformed into a movie and the Hollywood profit machine went to work on the original text.
The younger members of the boomer generation also owed much of their knowledge and understanding of various social problems to Mad. Divorce, alcoholism, intolerance, bigotry, racism, drugs, corruption, sex, xenophobia and alternative religions and lifestyles were all topics that were ignored by the mainstream media in texts aimed towards kids. Mad managed to comment on these issues without seeming shrill or patronizing. Kids found these messages more palatable when they came from such an obviously anti-authoritarian source. In the pre-video age of the late sixties and seventies, when increasingly more mature movies were unavailable to audiences under the age of eighteen, younger Mad readers could read parodies of Restricted movies such as Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather and Bonnie and Clyde.
On an even grander scale, Mad lampooned the stultifying WASP culture that dominated society at the time. The magazine was a wonderful antidote to the television pap of Father Knows Best and The Brady Bunch. Middle-class suburbia was where most of Mad's readers resided and the magazine never lost an opportunity to send up the bourgeois absurdities of that milieu. Mad provided its young readers with a fervent anti-establishment scepticism and this played no small part in leading to the widespread though apparently temporary rejection of that milieu by the Vietnam War-era college generation. Mad helped an entire generation to articulate a pervasive dissatisfaction with rampant materialism by making fun of the mindless acquisition that characterized middle class suburbia. Admittedly Mad's moral authority in this area was heightened by the fact that they did not accept any paid advertising. Today we must deal with the irony that the children of this enlightened generation are now among the most conspicuous consumers in history. Recent issues of Mad have acknowledged this.
Mad's attacks on the suburban bourgeoisie also extended to parental authority figures. Young boomers who were thinking of experimenting with alternate lifestyles delighted in Mad's send-ups of martini-guzzling and pill-popping parents who disapproved of their offspring's values. Of course, the magazine was careful not to alienate suburban parents completely because, in Mad parodies, suburban children were equally as obnoxious and hypocritical.
Mad's ideological positions have occasionally come under attack, most often by those on the right. Like most good satire, it has usually managed to avoid this by attacking zealots at both ends of the political spectrum with equal glee. Early in the magazine's history, a 1954 attack on right-wing demagogue Joseph R. McCarthy was testimony to the courage of Gaines' convictions. Later Mad would be attacked by William F. Buckley, the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan. There is little argument that Mad favored a liberal point of view, probably slightly to the left of center.
According to Maria Reidelbach, who wrote Completely Mad, a history of the magazine, "by 1960 its circulation reached a landmark one million and it was read by 58 percent of all college students and 43 percent of all high school students, perhaps the only 'cult' magazine to be read by a majority. Mad had succeeded in finding a middle ground in a society polarized between squeaky-clean suburban lifestyles like those portrayed on Donna Reed and Father Knows Best, and the perceived menaces of Communism, ethnicity, and rock and roll. When it found that middle ground, it proceeded to throw pies at both sides, its readers, and even itself."
As boomers grew up, they quickly lost interest in Mad. In the self-righteous and serious late sixties the magazine seemed childish and irrelevant. For many of my generation, the periodical National Lampoon attempted to fill the humour gap that was a legacy of jettisoning Mad. But Lampoon was frequently unfunny and incomprehensible and was not an acquired taste. Working in a children's camp for many years, I would occasionally find copies of the magazine or its pale lesser imitation, Cracked. I would thumb through Mad to assure myself that the magazine was introducing the current pubescent generation to social and cultural deconstruction.
The later fortunes of Mad magazine were mapped by the demographic fluctuations of the baby boomers. The magazine's circulation peaked in 1973 at 2.4 million when the last boomers were about to enter high school. In the years since, the numbers have dropped to about a third of that.
Ultimately, Mad could not really compete with the media that had provided it with so much satirical fodder. The television medium began to consume itself and Mad's light-hearted parodies of advertising could not compete with the hard-edged satire of Saturday's Night Live's fake commercials. SCTV was a weekly live-action version of Mad and that cast's brilliant characterizations only highlighted the limitations of the print medium when it tried to take on television. Movies also turned the mirror on themselves and in the seventies, Hollywood director Mel Brooks Made Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety and Spaceballs among others, all films that brilliantly deconstructed and celebrated the genres that had given them birth. Brooks' mantle has been assumed in the 90's by the comedy directing team of Zucker, Zucker and Abrahams with their hysterical parodies, Airplane!, Top Secret! and the Naked Gun films. According to Kurt Anderson, writing in Newsweek magazine,
"Gaines bears paternal responsibility for a large swath of pop culture from the last quarter-century. Virtually every stand-up comedy routine is a regurgitation of Dave Berg's Lighter Side strips. Underground artists from R. Crumb on have taken inspiration from....Mad's dense, rude cartoon style. Parodies of advertising and TV did not exist before Mad invented the form. Ernie Kovacs, along with Bob and Ray, wrote free-lance for Gaines in the '50s, and Kovacs and Mad begot Saturday Night Live and David Letterman (who is, physically as well as spiritually, Alfred E. You-Know-Who come to life). Without Gaines and Mad there might have been no National Lampoon, no Maus, no Ren ∓ Stimpy, no Spy, no Airplane!, Top Secret! nor Naked Gun!" In Canada, CODCO, SCTV, the Air Farce, Adbusters and Frank magazine are linear descendants of Mad."The September, 1992 issue of Mad, the last issue published while Gaines was still alive, continued the relentless send-up of contemporary popular culture. The articles included:
The media literacy movement owes much to William Gaines and the "usual gang of idiots," as the modest and creative geniuses of Mad referred to themselves inside the front page.