Reading this biography of Alan Moore got me to thinking about Mad magazine as he discussed buying early issues of Mad while growing up in Northampton, England.
“I didn’t understand any of it; it was all making jokes of American things whch I’ve got no knowledge of. But that didn’t stop me repeating it to my parents in the hope that they’d find it funny. So I was telling them jokes about Jimmy Hoffa and Caroline Kennedy and Adalai Stevenson. I didn’t know who those people were, my parents didn’t know who those people were — but it was the beginnings. I was starting to piece together just from Mad satires and other references in comics — I was starting to piece together a picture of the world. It was probably quite sophisticated, given my environment and my age, you know?”
Before The Onion, before “The Daily Show,” there was Mad. I loved Mad magazine growing up, too. One of my favorite jokes on “The Simpsons” made fun of Mad:
Bart: My God! The Mad Magazine Special Edition. They only put out seventeen of these a year.
Milhouse: Boy! They’re really sockin’ it to that Spiro Agnew guy again. He must work there or something.
And of course hilarity ensues when on a later episode, Bart visits Mad’s offices.
Mad’s “untold history” can be found here.
