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.
