Mad

I bought this for my grandson - a renewal from last year. He mentioned his old subscription was running out and he really liked the magazine, so wanted a renewal for Christmas.

At first, this magazine was really really funny. For the last several months it hasn't been all that good. They need to get some new material.

I started reading this magazine in the early 90's, when I was a kid. My dad had a few from the 60's and 70's, and I have expanded my collection since then to include a good amount from the 80's. That stuff was brilliant.

Artists die, we know that. New artists and writers can be good, but the MAD magazine of the 2000's isn't worth buying. Why did MAD start putting in ads? Wasn't it making enough money by itself? I loved MAD for the fact that it was ad-free, and the brilliant writing and artwork, laced with biting satire. Now, the humor in there is more of the "potty humor" level, and is the kind of thing juveniles laugh over.

Now it's not worth the paper it's printed on, and CRACKED magazine has gone the same way. Why must good, beautiful things be ruined?

You see, this is why we can't have nice things.

I think it's possible my brother thought this was acceptable for submission as "fictional reading" in our high school summer requirements, I recall that told around the campfires. Thus bumping him to the dodos grouping where he was to learn about verbs and how to use them for the next 5 or so years. Where he also did not have to write research papers, essays, narratives or do anything that resembled my world there letting blood with Paradise Lost, Passage to India or Chaucer and chivalry and love that never dies.

Yes, Mad will ever be the place he looked to for news and views, about the towns and I suspect the finer points of sex ed., business acumen and how to pick a good college to drop out of three times.
This said I think one of their covers has gone and wrapped itself around the New Yorker. Which is, when you think about it understandable if you think of it this way.....a massive case of cover envy.
Take a good look at the way Mrs. Obama is drawn. See?
Just saying.
I wonder how it will be when the New Yorker cover turns up on Mad. Is it April 1st, am I time warping? Is Hillary, or the Mr. Bill, out with a little time on their hands?

Hum.

The Usual Gang of Idiots have been creating funny words and pictures since the 1950s. And they haven't let up in all that time! I get a kick out of every new issue. Definitely subscribe. You'll be glad you did.

This magazine always delivers excellent and witty satire for all current events! It is always exciting when I receive the current issue.

Trying to get my son to read is like pulling teeth. Finding something he will enjoy reading has been difficult. He just turned 12 and as he sees the lastest movies and popular TV shows he can really relate to this magazine. I am glad I ordered it in early November as the first issued arrived this week just in time for Christmas. I can wait to see his face when he pulls it out of his stocking..of course Mom has already read it!

I brought this magazine to cheer me up. I love the graphic's and their sense of humor. The magazine came really fast after I subscribe to it. It is a pleasure to read.

I have bought this mag for years for my nephews in order to motivate them to read, and it does that. Practice is practice, and makes better readers.
I believe that this is the only reading material that compels them to put down the remote, or to step away from the video games...
I highly recommend this for teen boy reading. Of course, some of the material is odd to "old people", but they love that, and they do "get" that it's humor.

It takes toooooo long for the subscription to arrive its destination! People down there should work better in this matter 'cause its very frustrating to be anticipating your juicy mags and wait almost three months to get your hands on them.

Never the less Mad Mag is a brilliant humor classic and yes... its worth the wait.

I placed my order with Amazon 12 weeks ago. The magazine "customer service" group claims I'll get my first issue in about 5 weeks for a total of 17 weeks of waiting.

Waiting four months for a magazine order to be fulfilled is a bit much.

I am no conservative fundamentalist. I'm all for new things. However, this magazine is just a juvenile time-killer. The original MAD up through the 90's was something of substance. There is about 20% of the current content that is still on par with that tradition.

Mad Magazine under Bill Gaines was the exception to the traditionally accepted magazine economy based on advertising. MAD refused to accept any advertising whatsoever until a few years after Gaines' death. Then the new corporate editors allowed ads and went to full color. Ads are not only annoying, but show that the focus of the magazine has changed. We won't be seeing any truly effective, biting satire of any of their sponsors, I'll tell you that.

Is the new magazine worthless? No. It still has some positive qualities, but it is no longer innovative, but is a shell of the former publication. They have Alfred E. and Spy vs Spy and other traditions, but they aren't clever anymore, just attempts to SEEM as though they are the same.

I hope somewhere out there the people inspired by the original magazine's model are making excellent real satire in other names. I'd suggest searching them out and ignoring this junk. Probably the closest we have today to the real MAD magazine is The Onion.

I read MAD Magazine as a kid back in the '60's and '70's, and have always appreciated the fact that although the humor is for the most part sophmoric, many of the jokes and parodies require that you actually understand the politics/literature/history/cultural reference that's being lampooned.

I've outgrown the magazine (well, pretty much), but my teenage nephews (and their fathers) are always glad to see their gift subscriptions arrive in the mail. I'll find them with their heads together, reading lines to each other and snickering -- feels like the old days!

What paved the way for satire movies such as "Airplane!", "The Naked Gun" and "Scary Movie"? What else than the original source of satire, MAD Magazine!

For more than 50 years, MAD has been the leader in movie parodies and other humorous stuff. Although the above movies are all good, none of them can top this.

It all started in the 50s when Harvey Kurtzman made a comic book named MAD. After 24 issues or so of the comic book, Harvey decided to make it a magazine so it could escape the laws of the Comic Code Authority.
For a long time, MAD was very original and very popular. The reason it's not so popular anymore is that now everyone's doing it.
It's not rare to see something parodied these days. Movies, TV shows, books, everything. MAD has lost its originality, but it is still miles ahead of everyone else.

Sergio Aragones, Al Jaffee and others still work for MAD and none of them have lost the spark they had in the earlier years. I have hundreds of MADs, old and new, and they are all good.

The only complaint is how MAD had no ads for so very long and now they have let ads into their pages. But if that is a necessary sacrifice to keep MAD alive, so be it.

Recurring stuff from the 70s and 80s still live. "Ed" is still alive and well and making fan letters and complaints look as stupid as they really are. Although Antonio Prohias died in 1998, Spy vs. Spy still continues with new writers and artists. Drawn Out Dramas and "A Mad Look At..." are still drawn by Sergio Aragones.

Newer elements include "Monroe", a story about a kid whose life isn't going all that great. Monroe is okay, but "The Fundalini Pages" which include Bitterman and Melvin and Jenkins is truly awesome.
"Go Fetch!" however is dumb. It is basically unpaid ads for products. They try to make the product sound stupid, but it doesn't work and it ends up making you think that it's just another 3 pages of advertising.

The Fold In is still present and so is many other things that avid MAD readers from the 80s will recognize. If you don't mind ads in magazines [hey every magazine has ads now you can live with it] I HIGHLY SUGGEST you get MAD.

Anyone with a sense of humor should get a subscription to MAD Magazine. You will not be disappointed.

In 1986 I had my mom buy me my first issue of MAD. On the cover was a snot-nosed Garbage Pail Kid cartoon of Alfred E. Neuman puking into a barf bag. I was in heaven! My friend and his brother had turned me onto MAD a month earlier when they showed me their prized collection of over a hundred classic MADs from the seventies and early eighties. My first MAD--stained and dog-eared after just a week--was to become the first installment in a collection of MADs that now numbers in the hundreds. For the rest of my childhood I would buy every single issue of MAD to hit the newstands and would scour garage sales in my neighborhood for older issues people wanted to get rid of. Why anyone would ever want to part with a MAD magazine was beyond me in those days.

My indefatigable obsession with MAD magazine growing up has left me with a very MAD sense of humor and a voluminous--not to mention very heavy and space consumming--collection of older and newer MADs to bequeath to my un-born children.

While the magazine has suffered some unfortunate changes recently--namely, the introduction of advertisements to its hallowed pages--its charming, trademark humor remains relatively the same. As a mature young adult, I have fallen into the MAD--oops! I mean bad--habit of buying every issue at the newstands again and can personally attest to this. Dinosaurs such as Al Jaffee, Mort Drucker and Sergio Aragones, whose artwork I admired and tried to emulate as a boy, still draw for the magazine and I am happy to say that the quality of their humorous cartoons hasn't slackened in the least. While the Usual Gang of Idiots still scribble away for MAD, new installments like the Fundalini Pages allow a new breed of artists to share their talent with strips like Bitterman and Melvin and Jenkins.

MAD has published over 450 issues and the only unfortunate thing that can be said about this fact is that Alfred E. Neuman still hasn't been elected president yet or voted one of People's 50 sexiest celebrities.

Mad was the Harvey Kurtzman comic book. It was the black and white magazine of people like DeBartolo, Drucker, Jaffee, Gaines, Don Martin, Duck Edwing, Prohias, etc.

This is not Mad. This is a very sad, very bad parody of what Mad was from the 50's right to the 80's.

Mad stood for something back then. It stood against the stupidity of everyday life. Against the sleazy advertisers who merely wanted to make a quick buck out of us. They didn't disguise their own intentions, though - we were labeled "suckers" for paying 90c for the magazine (cheap!), too.

We had social satire. Mad blasted the GOP and the democratic party with the most biting, sarcastic and insightful captions to photos ever.

What do we have now? A full center section of Mad "reviews" for products (which seem to be press releases for products). This kind of stuff seems like a parody the old Mad would make of itself - sadly, it's no parody at all. We have ads for Xbox games. Ads for corn products. Spy vs. Spy - which has nothing to do with Prohias anymore. No more Dave Berg (well, duh). No more attacks against the media - since Mad now depends on it to survive.

True, Mort Drucker is still there, as is John Caldwell. Aragones does some drawings every now and then. But, trust me - you'd be better off trying to find a "Totally Mad" CD compilation (why did it go out of print? I'm glad I got it just as soon as it came out - complete with Mad toilet paper!), and reading the REAL Mad for the rest of your life.

I'm sure Gaines is rolling in his grave.

I'm almost 30 and have been reading MAD off and on since the mid 1980's. Yeah, things have changed and I'll let you form your own opinion as to whether or not the magazine is better or worse, but bottom line, MAD is one of the only remaining forms of print satire in this country. True they have lost a great deal of influence since the 1960's because many of the things that MAD has traditionally poked fun at have taken to poking fun at themselves. What was once taboo is now commonplace. Think about it, how many TV commercials do you like that aren't sarcastic or funny in some way? This was not the norm in MAD's heyday 30 to 40 years ago, and as some have rightly suggested, MAD is at least partially responsible for the edge of sarcasm and witticism you see on TV and in media in general today. I think because of factors like these, some people and especially critics today tend to just blame MAD for "not being as good as it used to be," which you will find is the most common complaint that people tend to have with the magazine. Whatever. Things change, mediums change, but if you still enjoy humor and don't mind getting it in a magazine, then MAD is probably still for you. That is, if you can accept that not every single detail of the magazine is the same as it was in say, 1969. The magazine to me seems to have more of a kid's view than it did when I was a teenager or even younger, but of course then I thought it had a very "grown-up" view. I believe this has more to do with my age and not so much with huge changes in the magazine. MAD taught me to appreciate politics and political satire at an age younger than most, and I think that served me well in school and later. That still exists today in the magazine and is good. There are things that I don't really like personally, like the addition of advertising (I'm not into video games and that seems to be what the majority of the advertising is about...) but it's true that the ads have allowed MAD to bring their physical product up to 21st century standards. Also, some of the newer items like The Fundalini Pages and "Monroe" are taking awhile to grow on me, but at least they are fresh, and you can tell that MAD is trying very hard not to get stagnant. In the final analysis, whether you are new to MAD or are like me and returning to it after a long relationship - it's still worth giving a chance. What - you worry? :-)

I have been reading this magazine since 1966. The best part of it is that children can read it without being subjected to foul
or brutal humor and violence. Yet when Mad parodies a movie or Tv show, it really does expose the stupidity, ridiculousness, or
banality of the movie or TV show, without being depressing or caustic or plain nasty in its attitude to the subject. Mad Magazine helps shape the mind to see the world with a sense of humor. The Drawn-out Dramas are my favorite after all these years.

mad magizine is one of the best magizines ever its so funny i luv it who ever created this magizine is a genius

If you want a magazine that's on the cutting edge of humor - that is, the cutting edge of 1962's humor - then MAD is the magazine for you. Its lameness and corniness often work in its favor, kind of like the masterfully told joke you already know the punchline to but still find funny anyway. If that last sentence doesn't register with you, then you probably won't like MAD. If you DO like MAD like I do, then you will genuinely appreciate its old saws: the Marginal Drawings, the Fold-Ins, and of course the Usual Gang of Idiots...

Fa Fa Fa!

There are a few written sources of parody and satire available in the United States; "The Onion," "Cracked" and "National Lampoon" are all sources of both. Of the three, "National Lampoon" is a relatively sophisticated magazine that started with a largely college audience and retains its college focus today, though its movies appeal to a much wider audience. "The Onion" is a newspaper type format that tends to be less subtle than "National Lampoon." Both "The Onion" and "National Lampoon" contain graphic art, but are principally article-based.

"Cracked" and "Mad" are both graphic based. Of the two, I have seen descriptions of "Cracked" that included phrases such as "low-budget Mad Magazine." Unfortunately, for a short time "Cracked" even suspended production. On the other hand, "Mad" has been around continuously since the mid-50s, and while its affect on readers is reduced from the days when its views were often seen as at least controversial, its readership remains high along with the magazine's ability to keep a good level of humor.

Original editor William Gaines's desire was that "Mad" not accept any advertising to allow the magazine to satirize anyone without fear of reprisal. The magazine kept this tradition until relatively recently, when it began accepting a limited number of advertisements. About the same time the magazine also started using color in portions. The addition of color was enjoyable. The acceptance of advertisements remains concerning, though I have yet to see any real affect on "Mad's" satires and parodies.

Many of "Mad's" features have existed for decades. The miniature cartoons in the margins have existed as long as I have read "Mad," which is back into the 60s. "Spy vs. Spy," the fold-in at the back of the magazine, and "A Look at the Lighter Side of..." have all been long running features. More recently the magazine has added "Monroe," and "The Fundalini Pages," which combines and reduces some previous features along with the addition of new elements, as regular features.

One of the best features of "Mad" remains poking fun at current television shows and movies. While "Mad" is limited to poking fun at one or two movies per month, usually the selected movies were popular either with audiences or the critics and thus likely to be a movie that readers would recognize. "Harry Potter," "Star Wars," "Star Trek," and "The Godfather" are just a small sample of the hundreds of movies that have been honored by a "Mad Magazine" parody. There are a few clunkers in the pantheon of parodies portrayed in "Mad," nearly every one has at least a few good one-liners and most can cause at least a good chuckle, if not an outright laugh. Similarly, the most popular television shows get their turn, and the characteristics of each show are satirized to a usually humorous extreme.

The official mascot of "Mad" remains Alfred E. Newman, the perennially freckle-faced "What, me worry?" representative of the general silliness of us, if we only look at ourselves properly. As others in numerous locations have point out, there are a variety of famous people who bear a remarkable likeness to Alfred E. Newman, and more than one of those famous characters depicted in "Mad" have had their features manipulated ever so subtly to enhance that resemblance. I will leave it to the reader to discover who those famous people might be.

"Mad Magazine" is probably the oldest continuous source of parody and satire available. "Mad" has inspired artists, writers, and imitators. I found it to be a fun magazine as a teenage boy and to my surprise I found that reading it today nearly 40 years after my first exposure to "Mad" is almost as enjoyable as it was then. As with any magazine of any type, especially a magazine attempting to be humorous, there are jokes that fall flat, and occasionally jokes that are sufficiently obscure to leave some readers wondering what was funny, but most jokes are readily understandable. Some will bring a groan because they are so bad. Some will bring a "ewwwww" because they are "potty humor." But there are real gems among the jokes that will bring a smile to your face, and occasionally a laugh that must be out loud. "Mad Magazine" is a wonderful way to put a uniquely graphic and humorous spin on the events occurring around us. I hope that I will always be able to appreciate the humor that the magazine attempts to portray, and that I never take life too seriously.

I bought an issue of MAD on the newsstand last July. I really liked it but my mum thought the subscription price was too much. They should lower it a bit. It makes me laugh every time I pick it up. However, I reccomend it for the 13 and older crowd because it has some humor that kids won't get a/o their parents wont want them to see.