Before MAD there were the funny papers, with their well-worn jokesters: Dagwood and Blondie, Archie and Jughead, Little Orphan Annie. The funnies were calculated to make you smile or (rarely) crack you up, but not to dangle you upside down and show you the sheer dimwitted lunacy of life itself. For that, comics reader, you had to wait for the advent of MAD, whose Usual Gang of Idiots poked smirking fun at cows both sacred and profane. Proudly unfurling its adolescent gibes, MAD was kin to wild card TV comedy like the Smothers Brothers and Laugh-In. Small visual doodads festooned its pages, and there were tiny, snide jokes strewn about like buried treasure. This was a device to make young readers pore over each panel repeatedly, while picking their noses and ignoring calls to come to the dinner table. MAD’s densely textured comic vibe inspired the Firesign Theatre, along with Dr. Demento, Monty Python, Second City, SNL, the Simpsons, the Onion, and on and on—a comic Valhalla. Read more
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