About Mad Magazine: Quotes and Opinions

Mediacy Articles – Volume 15, No. 2

Compiled by Derek Boles

"If you were growing up lonely and isolated in a small town, Mad was a revelation. Nothing I read anywhere else suggested that there was any absurdity in the culture. Mad was like a shock, breaking you out."
R.. Crumb
New York Times Magazine

"Relativity theory in 1905 announced the dissolution of uniform Newtonian space as an illusion or fiction, however useful. Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or rational space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx brothers and Mad."
Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
Lewis Carroll

"When I took over the magazine and guided it through the sixties and the seventies I was really excited. I was getting a great deal of satisfaction because I thought that I was performing a kind of service for young people in my own way as a liberal, in at least alerting them to what was going on around them in the areas of advertising, politics, manufacturing, packaging etc. I knew that I had helped form some of the militant, liberal young people's minds in terms of the draft card burning, the Vietnam war and the brassiere burning, at least I was part of it."
Al Feldstein
Completely Mad

"I would pick up a regular comic book or an imitation of Mad like Cracked and it was dumber than I was. It might be funny, but it was stupid-funny. You picked up Mad and it was making you reach a little bit. You were a notch more sophisticated after you finished reading it."
Bill Griffith
Cartoonist (Zippy)

"Without Mad, it would have been harder to survive a Republican upbringing."
Candice Bergen
Murphy Brown

"I don't think that it's going too far to say that for my generation, the generation that protested the Vietnam War, growing up with...Mad... shaped the situation to allow our generation to protest that war....It was comics about media that made you question how you get your information, and that's a ncessary component toward taking any kind of political action."
Art Spiegelman
Completely Mad