What, Me Mad?

I couldn’t help but be saddened by yesterday’s news: “Mad magazine, the once-subversive humor publication that helped redefine American satire and influenced a half-century of comedians and comic artists, will soon disappear from the newsstand,” The Washington Post explained. As I have mentioned previously on this page, Mad was a prominent feature of my boyhood—without a doubt my father’s favorite periodical. But after almost 67 years in print, its “newsstand circulation will come to an end after the August issue,” according to HuffPost, which notes, however, that “subscribers and comic shops will continue to receive Mad, but starting in the fall those issues will feature old material repackaged with new covers.”

Some of my best memories of Mad revolve around its frequent sendups of prominent American small-screen crime dramas. The Thrilling Detective Web Site provides a lengthy list of those parodies, everything from “Honey Waste” (spoofing Honey West), “Cannonball” (Cannon), and “Churlie’s Angles” (Charlie’s Angels) to “Simple & Simple” (Simon & Simon) and of course, “The Tranquilizer” (The Equalizer). I managed to track down a few examples online, among them “The Crockford Files” (The Rockford Files), “The Man from A.U.N.T.I.E.” (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), “Clodumbo” (Columbo), and a mocking 1975 twist on Jack Nicholson’s noirish detective flick, Chinatown—or “Chinaclown,” as Mad lampooned it.

The Post’s report goes on to mention that

Mad magazine hit a peak of more than 2 million subscribers in the early ’70s, when it memorably satirized shifting social mores and cultural attitudes. Emblematic of that era—when Mad flexed the most pop-culture muscle as a powerhouse of topical irreverence—was a Watergate-era sendup of President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew in a “big con” spoof of the hit Oscar-winning movie The Sting.

But commercial pressures had changed since the ’90s. To try to survive in more recent years, as circulation dwindled precipitously, the magazine owned by Warner Bros.' DC division shifted to a quarterly publishing schedule and moved its offices from New York to the Los Angeles area. Now, the Mad brand will mostly endure by simply recirculating its classic vintage material, living on through the appeal of what it once was.

Good-bye, Mad. It’s been fun—actually, it’s been hilarious.

READ MORE: “Mad Magazine’s Demise Is Part of the Ending of a World,” by David Von Drehle (The Washington Post); “Mad Magazine, an Appreciation,” by Bill Koenig (The Spy Command); “Jumping on ‘Gunn,’” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet).