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#1228242 2019-02-11 1:35 AM
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Once every year or two I go through my MAD magazines and comics and enjoy the range of talent in their pages. An issue of MAD from any era is like a time capsule of whatever was dominant politically and culturally in the time it was published.

And also amazing is how MAD, like no other part of the comics industry, kept the same assembly of talent for over 40 years of publication from roughly 1960-2000, and then some.
Mort Drucker, Dave Berg, Antonio Prohias, Sergio Aragones, Al Jaffee, Frank Jacobs, George Woodbridge, Jack Rickard, Jack Davis, Paul Coker, Angelo Torres, Kelly Freas, Norman Mingo, and so many others. For all these creators to stay with MAD so long, it must have been a great place to work.

MAD walked a fine line, with a sense of humor making somewhat serious commentary about the insanity of our world and culture. At various times my favorite has gone back and forth between talents like Prohias, Aragones, Drucker, Coker, Jaffee and the like. Even under the guise of humor, MAD was enlightening, giving a greater awareness of the adult world, and training the reader in their late adolescent years to take a cynical eye and sense of humor to the official message being fed to the public on any given issue.

Growing up, it was a fun introduction to the more complicated political and cultural world outside of mainstream comics. Although I began reading comics in 1972, I began reading MAD within months of that. The first issue I specifically recall was 157, the March 1973 issue, cover-featuring their parody of all 4 of the Planet of the Apes movies up to that point. "The Planet that went Ape"!




My favorite line I can think of offhand was during "Conquest", where Caesar leads the apes against the human army to take over the world, and outgunned, he uses a secret strategy of laying out 10,000 banana peels to knock the human army off their feet to defeat them.

Also good was the end of the "Beneath the Planet that went Ape" parody, where Taylor (Charleton Heston) is trying to stop the apes from blowing up the doomsday bomb, until Doctor Zaius says that if they survive they'll have to do another sequel, at which point Taylor grabs the self destruct and blows up the earth!

I have scattered issues going back to 1955, and reprints of several of the original comic book MAD issues, including a Millennnium Edition reprint of MAD number 1. And I have a complete run of MAD from 1969-1977, the era I enjoyed the most, with a lot of scattered issues and MAD SPECIAL issues after that.

So... what are some of your favorite runs and features in MAD?



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You and I are about the same age so, pretty much the same run as you.

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It's such a great preservation of culture from the 1960's/1970's era. And while I'd kind of moved on by the 80's and 90's for the most part, what I sampled after remained very consistent. Even after William Gaines died in 1992, it was still consistent until the early 2000's!

One I picked up in the later years was a MAD STAR TREK SPECTACULAR from 1994, that collected the TV series parody from MAD 115 (Dec 1967), along with a later musical version of the series by Drucker from 1976 (MAD 186, when syndicated re-run episodes were huge, but before the first 1979 movie), and movie parodies Star Trek:The Motion Picture (1979), Star Trek II (1982), III (1984), IV (1986), V (1989), and VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), along with parodies of Next Generation, and Deep Space 9. 30 years of Trek culture! Mostly by Mort Drucker, with a little Coker Jr., and Don Martin.



I recall from the 1967 parody, where Kirk and Spock beam down to the planet, and a Don Martin-looking alien walks up, "Hi I'm Flob, keeper of Goodbath." To which Kirk responds "You look more like slob, keeper of no bath." Some funny disfigurement when beaming down in the transporter, where Kirk has a limb sticking out his ear, and an exterior view of the Enterprise in orbit, with Charlie Brown in the space background flying a kite.


Here's MAD SPECIAL 83, Sept 1992, that collects almost all the same stories. I think they were reprinted a lot in the 1970's-1990's.



Both covers by Drucker. I actually like the cover better on the one I don't have.




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A hilarious Aragones offering I recall from a 70's issue of MAD. I think with GROO alone I have about 200 Aragones comics. I think Aragones began drawing for MAD in every issue since 1962.

And beyond that, incredibly, he had time to do "Cain's Game Room" pages in HOUSE OF MYSTERY and other DC titles, as well as plotting and writing other DC stories such as the BAT LASH western series with Nick Cardy. And ultimately, PLOP.
Aragones stopped working for DC in 1977 because of DC's then work-for-hire contract.
Aragones is possibly the most prolific and successful cartoonist on the planet. His work for MAD alone would have made him world famous. And there's such a huge volume of work he's done beyond that!


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The Daily Beast cites the significant cultural influence of MAD.


https://www.thedailybeast.com/mad-magazine-taught-us-to-laugh-but-now-we-laugh-at-it

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Mayor Pete Buttegeig.
Oops!
I mean Alfred E. Neuman, as a lax looking Frankenstein, on the cover of MAD CLASSICS 3, Jan 2006.





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A more classic Alfred E. Neuman from MAD issue 30, from Dec 1956.
A lot of MAD's best Neuman covers incorporate politics.




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Maybe this Jan 1961 cover would have been the better comparison of Neuman to the gay mayor Pete Buttegeig.




"I like Dick"!

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MAD magazine to stop publishing new content after 67 years

 Quote:


MAD magazine is coming off newsstands after a 67-year run.

The famed satirical magazine featuring the freckled face of Alfred E. Neuman will stop publishing new material outside of its end-of-year specials, owner DC said in an email.

In a few weeks, the bimonthly publication will only feature vintage MAD content and be sold at comic book stores. The magazines will still be mailed to subscribers, and DC will continue to publish MAD books and special collections.

“Working at MAD was a childhood dream come true. MAD is an institution with such a rich history,” former editor Allie Goertz wrote on Twitter. “It informed just about every comedian and writer I (and probably you) look up to.”

It was one of the last satirical rags left in print. Spy, a monthly founded and edited by Graydon Carter and Kurt Anderson, closed in 1998. The Onion stopped printing in 2013, though it continues to entertain online and on social media.

“I am profoundly sad to hear that after 67 years, MAD Magazine is ceasing publication. I can’t begin to describe the impact it had on me as a young kid — it’s pretty much the reason I turned out weird,” tweeted comedian “Weird Al” Yankovic, who served as MAD’s first guest editor in 2015. “Goodbye to one of the all-time greatest American institutions.”

President Trump unfavorably compared Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg to geeky, gap-toothed Neuman in a May interview with Politico. In perhaps a sign of the magazine’s fading relevance, the 37-year-old mayor said he had no idea what Trump was talking about.
“I’ll be honest, I had to Google that,” he said. “I guess it’s just a generational thing. I didn’t get the reference.”

MAD magazine tweeted in response: “Who’s Pete Buttigieg? Must be a generational thing.”


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This commentary gives an interesting autopsy of MAD's demise:



Mad Magazine is dead and the reasons are obvious, explained

 Quote:
by Owen S. Good
July 5, 2019


As you have now heard, Mad magazine is no more. “Effectively no more” is how everyone’s putting it, as apparently, DC Comics (its longtime owner) will put out some anthologies and retread editions to keep the trademarks current. But as any kind of periodical satire, the magazine is over; Alfred E. Neuman is now a Force ghost smiling beatifically next to Saturday morning cartoons and baseball cards in the “effectively no more” pantheon of childhood treasures.

The news leaked late Wednesday, slid under the door before a holiday in true weasel fashion (I half-imagined it was accompanied with “Editor’s note: Choke on it!”). Polygon has confirmed that anything Mad publishes after issue No. 11 — it was renumbered a year ago — will be rerun content.

Even if publication of the print edition had decreased (to bimonthly) over the past two decades, and Mad’s famous holdout against accepting advertising ended in 2001, this is still an A-list pop culture #brand tied to numerous childhood memories of insufferable Boomer and Gen-X assholes like me. So a lot of people rushed in to show how Mad touched them when they were young.

[Social media posts by Jake Tapper, Al Yankovick, and others less well known]

I visited Mad’s offices twice; one of them, I’ve already written about. The other time was in 1997. I had literally quit my job, sold anything that could be liquidated, and hit the road. I wandered into Mad’s newer home on Broadway under DC’s ownership, and shot the bull with Nick Meglin, a longtime editor who died last year, while trying not to look like I was looking for work. (I met Nick and John Ficarra, the editor-in-chief, in 1991, and they were on our football pick-em panel at Technician, the student newspaper of N.C. State, my senior year there. That’s how I got buzzed up to say hi this time.)

Meglin caught on to my intentions immediately. Perhaps it’s because I was literally wearing a jacket and tie and carrying luggage. He told me that not only was there no work, but that DC had actually increased the frequency of publication to crowbar more bucks out of the operation, while still expecting all kinds of collections and special editions and such to be published. The job, Meglin told me, was now actually a job, and I should get a real one elsewhere. I ended up finding work in Cooperstown, New York, after writing a news story about a murder in which the weapon was, yes, a baseball bat.


What killed Mad, of course, was the internet, but it’s different from how online media is destroying my other Oedipal crush, the newspaper. It’s not so much that people expect everything they consume on a webpage to be both free and immediate. It’s that kids these days (kids these days ...) can do and are doing for themselves what Mad did for past generations. When a too-thirsty #brand deserves a comeuppance (and Mad did this well before that was cool), the audience is now both the source of the satire (memes, usually) and its means of distribution (social media). It’s like self-service gasoline killing the job of pump boy, but the drivers also refine their own fuel, so maybe this is a bad metaphor. Anyway, this self-supporting closed loop can do the humor in a much more timely way, if not immediately. That’s before you get to Mad’s unworkable, obsolete machinery of paid subscriptions and printed matter.

Think of Game of Thrones, the kind of big, meaty pop culture target that would fill pages upon pages of Mad in the past. Jokes about the series finale were stale within a week. When I was a kid (when I was a kid ...), Mad parodies would often trail their movie’s premiere or a TV show’s debut by months. Is that at all viable in today’s world of harvesting eyeballs and getting approval now-now-now?

The modern Mad competed against not just other publications or business models, but the entirety of the internet. It’s the same as my father knowing his community newspaper, in 2003, was screwed because it had been thrust into competition against CNN for his readers’ interest, and more of them cared about the latest missing white woman than what happened at the school board meeting. Well, that goes for Mad’s signature work, too. Don Martin’s calling card was the onomatopoeic sound effect (“frugga dugga dugga” for a skateboard, or “sklitch sklitch sklitch” for an AT-ST scraping Ewok guts off its foot). But that humor tickles the same funny bone as the ehrmagerd meme or lolcats’ broken-English patois.

Mad had once been indispensable to kids, not necessarily because of the art or the writing, but by being a spokesperson for them. Well, now everyone’s speaking for themselves. So these relentless eulogies for Mad are, to me anyway, a supremely ironic coda: People are pointing at something silly and sharing it with friends for a laugh, and the magazine is dying by the same means as it lived.





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An infrequent Don Martin cover for MAD 165, from 1974.

The surrealism of many MAD covers was brilliant. As well as the incorporation of popular trends of any given era at the time it was published.





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It occurred to me there are two prominent cartoonists whose work logically should have appeared in MAD, but never did:

Gahan Wilson

and

Robert Crumb.

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I was just looking at the work of Gahan Wilson, and he unfortunately died about a month after I mentioned him, in Nov 2019.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gahan_Wilson

https://www.comics.org/penciller/name/gahan%20wilson/sort/alpha/



Looking at Wilson's published works, he drew for Kurtzman's HELP!, NATIONAL LAMPOON, PLAYBOY, a couple of First's CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED, THE NEW YORKER, and HEAVY METAL (doing accompanying illustrations for Harlan Ellison's short story "Santa Claus vs. S.P.I.D.E.R."). Just about every mainstream magazine that publishes satire and humor cartoons... with the distinct exception of MAD. Weird.

In any case, I love Wilson's work. Sorry to see him go.



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From a COMICS JOURNAL interview:

http://www.tcj.com/gahan-wilson/2/

 Quote:
GEHR: Mad magazine started around the same time as your cartooning career. What was your take on it when it launched in 1952?

WILSON: I was good friends with Harvey Kurtzman later on, but there was a hokiness about it that didn’t appeal to me. The humor wasn’t edgy enough for me. It had some good slapstick. But the outfit I fit in with instantly, was National Lampoon. That was a remarkable assemblage of brilliant sons of bitches. Its spirit was insidious. It was like being part of a pirate crew. We were like some kind of religious sect. We were out to show the bastards, by God, and we did, very effectively. I just wish something like that would happen again. But there’s no sign of it whatsoever, even though things are much worse now than they were then.


Which explains why he didn't contribute to MAD.
A perception that MAD weren't willing to publish the kind of material Gahan Wilson wanted to do.

Although, with a knowledge of the iconoclastic work MAD published for decades, I find it hard to believe MAD wouldn't be willing to publish any material Wilson might offer. I mean, MAD published stuff ridiculing political leaders, portraying cops as pigs, dope-smoking hippies, sexual material, and everything in between.

Maybe in the early 1950's Kurtzman-edited days of MAD as a comic book MAD might have been too tame. But by the 1960's, certainly MAD as a maagazine had become willing to explore any issue. In fact, that was precisely the reason it ended its run as a comic book and became a magazine.


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I was just reading about cover artist Norman Mingo, who did his first cover for MAD with issue 30 in Dec 1956, that I posted above. And on issues 30-38. Long enough to establish the look for Alfred E. Neuman.

Then it explains that Mingo left for a good advertising gig for several years, during which most of the covers were by Kelly Freas.

Then Mingo came back and did most of the covers for MAD from 71-185 (from June 1962-Sept 1976).


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Mingo

 Quote:
Norman Theodore Mingo (25 January 1896 – 8 May 1980) was an American commercial artist and illustrator. He is most famous for being commissioned to formalize the image of Alfred E. Neuman for Mad. [1]

A prolific magazine illustrator in the Norman Rockwell vein, Mingo resided in the Chicago area for decades before retiring to Tarrytown, New York. As a child, he won an art contest, receiving art materials and a correspondence course as a prize. Mingo had early professional success, even dropping out of high school for a year due to his workload. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he ran a Chicago ad studio whose staff included future Captain Marvel artist C.C. Beck; the studio closed during the Great Depression. Thereafter he worked largely as a freelancer, including as an illustrator for various advertising agencies and magazines, including American Weekly, Ladies' Home Journal and Pictorial Review.[1] He drew Hollywood paper doll books with oversized heads of actors such as Bette Davis, Deanna Durbin and Rita Heyworth. He provided a bikinied pin-up girl for a 1946 Mennen Skin Bracer advert, signed with his distinctive Mingo script.[2] In addition to pin-up art, he also illustrated for paperbacks (Pocket Books), served as a traditional portraitist, painting such subjects as General George S. Patton Jr., and drew numerous movie posters including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

In 1956 Mingo answered a New York Times ad for an illustrator ("National magazine wants portrait artist for special project"), and was selected by Mad publisher William M. Gaines and editor Al Feldstein to create a warmer, more polished version of a public domain character the magazine had been using. Previously, the magazine had printed a rougher image and redrawings of the character, which were randomly dubbed "Melvin F. Coznowski" or "Mel Haney" in addition to "Alfred E. Neuman." The Panglossian simpleton had appeared in many guises and variations since the 19th century, including in dental advertisements that assured the public of minimal tooth-pulling pain. Mingo's initial painting was the first time Neuman had appeared in color.

Mad editor Al Feldstein recalled the day Mingo responded to the ad at the Mad offices:
  • In walked this little old guy in his sixties named Norman Mingo, and he said, “What national magazine is this?” I said “Mad,” and he said, “Goodbye.” I told him to wait, and I dragged out all these examples and postcards of this idiot kid, and I said, “I want a definitive portrait of this kid. I don't want him to look like an idiot; I want him to be loveable and have an intelligence behind his eyes. But I want him to have this devil-may-care attitude, someone who can maintain a sense of humor while the world is collapsing around him.”


Permanently named "Alfred E. Neuman", the character became Mad magazine's mascot with issue #30.[1] In November 2008, Mingo's original cover featuring the first "official" portrait of Neuman sold at auction for $203,150.

Norman Mingo painted eight Mad covers in 1956-7 before his more regular work with the top-tier Dancer Fitzgerald Sample advertising agency took up all of his time. Mingo had actually landed both jobs on the same day. While working exclusively in advertising, Mingo illustrated campaigns for a variety of companies including General Mills cereal, L&M cigarettes, Falstaff Beer and the U.S. Army.

During Mingo's absence, Frank Kelly Freas rendered Neuman for Mad from 1958 to 1962. Mingo returned to Mad in 1962 and painted most of its front covers until 1976. Most of his Neuman images were a combination of watercolor and acrylics, but he occasionally experimented with different media. His last Mad cover appeared on issue #211 (December 1979). Mingo produced 97 Mad covers in total, plus over 100 additional cover images for Mad's many reprint Specials and its line of paperbacks. He also drew occasional Mad-related assignments for others, such as an Alfred-ized version of beleaguered New York City Mayor Abe Beame in 1976 for the New York Times.

Mingo's Mad cover total surpassed Freas' in 1965, and his leading status endured until 2016, when current contributor Mark Fredrickson became the most prolific Mad cover artist with his 98th cover.[1] Combining the regular issues (including some back covers), the reprint "MAD Specials" and the paperbacks, Mingo produced more than 200 original covers for Mad. Fellow cover artists Jack Rickard and Bob Jones have remarked that Mingo was the only one who could paint the Neuman character perfectly "on model" every time.

A born again Christian, Mingo began signing his covers (executed in gouache) with the ichthys beneath his name in 1975, beginning with Mad #174.[1] At that time he and his wife Margaret attended the Second Reformed Church in Tarrytown, New York.

In contrast to his usual rendering of the definitive Neuman face, Mingo created a dramatic variation in 1979, after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. On the back cover of issue #210 (for which Mingo had also done the front cover), with an exaggerated version of the plant's meltdown in the background, Alfred stands in front of cracking cooling towers, sweating and hair standing on end, and abandons his trademark grin for a grimace as he says, "YES...ME WORRY!".[1]

60 years old when he took his first Mad cover assignment, Mingo was the oldest of the magazine's regulars to make his debut. He was also the only veteran of the First World War ever to write or draw for Mad, having served three years in the Navy.

Mingo died on May 8, 1980, after a lengthy illness.[3]




You can click on to enlarge any of the covers at Mycomicshop.com, and arrow forward or backward to view them all at a very rapid clip:

https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?TID=353271



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https://boingboing.net/2012/12/04/robert-crumb-writes-a-short-s.html

 Quote:


Harvey Kurtzman created MAD in 1952. It started out as a comic book, and the first issues mainly lampooned other comic books (Superman, Archie). It soon branched out to make fun of all cherised American institutions and I would argue that it was the beginning of modern humor that led to Saturday Night Live.

Kurtzman wrote every story for the first 23 issues of MAD, which were illustrated by the cream-of-the-cartoonist crop: Will Elder, Jack Davis, Wally Wood, and Kurtzman himself.

In 1956 Kurtzman left MAD after publisher William M. Gaines refused to give him controlling ownership. Unfortunately, MAD marked the high point of Kurtzman's career, in financial terms. Even though Kurtzman continued to produce brilliant work, he never again experienced the same level of commercial success that he'd had with MAD.

In this introduction to a 1976 one-shot comic book called KURTZMAN KOMIX (published by Kitchen Sink), Robert Crumb writes a bittersweet appreciation for one of America's great cultural treasures.




I never would have guessed that MAD was the greatest commercial success for Kurtzman. I would have guessed he made a ton more money doing "Little Annie Fannie" for PLAYBOY.

I guess the closest Crumb himself came to doing MAD (despite being heavily influenced by MAD) was his own magazine WEIRDO in nthe 1980's, that on many covers had an early 1950's MAD look, although very neurotic, perversely sexual and just way off the deep end from where MAD went.





The border around this cover almost looks like a twisted version of a Chick tract.

I highly recommend the documentary Crumb (1994) about the artist's life and career. Disturbing to watch, but intelligent, brutally honest and very interesting, about Crumb and his 2 brothers, who could have been equally talented artists if their lives took a different path. It won an academy award for best documentary the year it was released.

Crumb's work is brilliant, but I guess a bit too violent, overtly sexual and downright pornographic to have even appeared briefly in MAD. If you want a good sampling of Crumb's work, I like the book ROBERT CRUMB'S AMERICA, about 100 pages of his stories collected from across the spectum of his work, of material from roughly 1967-1994.

MAD, while often more intelligent than its audience, was mostly aimed at 10 to 15 year olds. And it was at roughly 15 that I lost interest in MAD, at least in the new material coming out. The stuff from about 1963-1976 spoke to me most at the time. The last year I was still buying but losing interest.




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One more...




I love this cover!
The nervous old lady warning the reader not to even look, its contents are so horrible.
And the testicular-looking title logo. Great stuff.

Again clearly manifesting Crumb's own MAD influence on his work.





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Among many clever features, certainly among them was Paul Coker, Jr's "Horrifying cliches" series.






Another page:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/24/dc/be/24dcbed5978dc110d3779bc95ff43747.jpg

A surprise for me last Christmas was seeing Paul Coker Jr.'s name among the credits of the animated special Santa Claus Is Coming to Town (1970).

Born in 1921, 91 years old and still alive!


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.

I'd forgotten there was a MAD television comedy series not that long ago :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_(TV_series)


Popular enough to have a television series that renewed for 4 season in 2010-2013.
And then all of a sudden so lacking in readership that the magazine itself was cancelled by 2019, after 67 years as a leading cultural icon. Hard to believe.

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The MAD TV show was decent. I liked it better than SNL. MAD TV didn't feel overproduced, and didn't rely on flavor of the month topics and celebrities, unlike SNL. A lot of MAD TV sketches aged better than SNL's (which usually went after low-hanging sociopolitical fruits that's only relevant for that week).

MAD TV also had gems from Bobby Lee, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele.


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In the early years, I think Saturday Night Live was brilliant, and many of its segments I think transcended the "flavor of the month" you describe that dates the material in a later era. In the era of Steve Martin, Dan Ackroid, Bill Murray, Lorraine Newman, Jane Curtian, Garrett Morris, John Belushi and that team (circa 1975-1981) they were doing wildly innovative stuff.
Then it flondered a few years, then it became great again in the era of Eddie Murphy.
Then it floundered again a few more years, then regained greatness with regulars like John Lovitz and Phil Hartman.
Then it floundered a few more years, then it regained greatness with Adam Sandler, Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon and others in that era.

And since then, I think it's been on a 20-year losing streak. Aside from largely being unfunny in recent years, it has also lent itself to one-sided leftist agenda-pushing, with most of its emphasis on partisan Democrat/Left messaging rather than even attempting to be funny. I think the loss of the conservative half their audience pushes SNL at times to attempt equal-opportunity parody of the Left, but those moments are still few and far between.
One of the funniest was a "Schoolhouse Rock" parody that instructed Barack Obama how a law is supposed to be passed (making fun of the fact that Obama largely bypassed the legal process, passing virtually everything unilaterally by executive order).

How a Bill Does Not Become a Law - SNL



Another in the Trump era portrayed Trump advisor KellyAnn Conway as a Damian/The Omen-like supernatural creature the Left was terrified of.

Kellywise - SNL Oct 14, 2017

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brutally Kamphausened
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Here's a link to every last issue of MAD, all 550 issues, from 1952 till its cancellation in April 2018 :


https://viewcomiconline.com/mad-issue-157/

or at :
https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/MAD/Issue-1?id=72763#1


The first 23 issues MAD was a comic book, then with issue 24 it switched to a magazine format, to excape censorship by the comics code.
For me, mad didn't reach its full form until about 1962, with its Mort Drucker-illustrated movie and TV parodies, Antonio Prohias' "Spy vs Spy" and earlier features, Sergio Aragones, Al Jaffee, Don Martin, and Dave Berg's "The Lighter Side of..." all bringing their work, and MAD as a whole, to its fully evolved form.

But even in its early issues there's plenty of beautiful work, and part of the fun is watching the artists develop over the years to their final style and format. In particular artists like Joe Orlando and Wally Wood did some very detailed work in the early magazine issues, even though they didn't stay with MAD.
Wood after leaving MAD did the first year or so of early issues of DAREDEVIL with Stan Lee, as well as his own fanzine WITZEND, several semi-pornographic comic strips such as "Cannon" (later collected by Fantagraphics' Eros imprint), and many other projects for Marvel, DC, and others until his death in 1981.

Joe Orlando left to become an editor for DC, from 1968-on developing DC's mystery line, starting with HOUSE OF MYSTERY (issues 174-321) and HOUSE OF SECRETS, JONAH HEX, Wein/Wrightson's SWAMP THING, Fleisher/Aparo's Spectre run in ADVENTURE COMICS, and in the late 1970's Orlando became one of DC's managing editors. In between he did occasional covers and other art for the likes of TIME and NEWSWEEK.

Looking at 2 decades of their work after leaving, you get an idea how their later work would have looked if they'd stayed with MAD.

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brutally Kamphausened
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Don Martin again, "One Night In a Police Station"....

[Linked Image from i.pinimg.com]

from MAD 165, March 1974.
https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/MAD/Issue-165?id=72918


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