We begin with a fact to truly warm the hearts of the hundreds of thousands of grotty little adolescents who regularly read MAD magazine: Its offices are as trashy as the humor mag itself. The walls are grimy, the furniture mismatched, and, in January, there`s still a pathetic artificial Christmas tree squatting atop a table in what passes for a lobby. Yeccccch.
But there`s more. Step into the inner sanctum of 66-year-old William Gaines, where MAD`s portly publisher is surrounded by abject clutter. Notice that all the windows are covered and-this is in January, remember-that the air conditioner is humming. (Gaines passionately despises real light and fresh air.) Notice that there are 29 rubber stamps hanging from a stand on the desk. Notice that there are 11 toy airships hanging from the ceiling.
Can it really be that this is a subsidiary of Warner Publishing Co. Inc., itself a subsidiary of Warner Communications Inc.? Where`s the tinted glass?
Where`s the chrome? Jeez, where are the secretaries?
”That`s one of my secrets for running the business cheap,” announced Gaines, who has many such secrets, including employing only seven full-time and five part-time staff members whom he calls ”the boys.” ”I go over to Warners` offices, and every flunky has a secretary. That takes up twice as much space. And twice as much money.”
Although he gives ”the boys” free editorial rein, Gaines himself expedites each and every business detail within his small kingdom, especially if that detail can save him a dollar or two. Woe, for example, to the employee who doesn`t fill out a Long Distance Phone Call Report each and every time he dares to dial beyond the 212 area code. An unexplained 73-cent call to Congers, N.Y., once threw the publisher into a dither that lasted two days.
Then there is Gaines` appearance. He is a bearish, pear-shaped, bearded man who seems to have lumbered out of the pages of his own magazine. His stringy shoulder-length white hair is held in place, more or less, by a pair of barrettes. His tortoise-shell glasses are invariably askew, his belt seems to have been wrapped at least twice around his high-waisted trousers, and he carries enough medication for a variety of ailments to qualify as a pharmacy. He loves food and travel, maintains a private wine cellar, has been married three times and collects replicas of the Statue of Liberty. He is a compulsive list keeper, a rabid TV watcher, an atheist and, in some political matters, a conservative.
”We have such respect for him that a day doesn`t go by without us abusing him,” said Nick Meglin, MAD`s 52-year-old coeditor.
All of which may or may not explain why MAD has survived 36 years, since the day in mid-1952 when Gaines quietly published a new, 32-page satirical comic book with the unwieldy title, ”Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad: Humor in a Jugular Vein.” Created before rock `n` roll and before color television (before TV dinners, even), MAD emerged from the Truman era to thumb its nose at the ripoff artists, hucksters and schmegeggies of post-World War II America.
Fronted by its gap-toothed proto-nerd, Alfred E. Neuman, MAD`s self-described trash was just the ticket for a generation that would grow up to appreciate ”Saturday Night Live.” Although the magazine has never undertaken a significant readership survey, prevailing in-house wisdom has it that teenaged boys make up an important chunk of those who relinquish $1.50 for each of its eight issues per year. (Meanwhile, 29-year-old associate editor Sara Fowler, who became one of ”the boys” in 1985, is the first female editorial staff member.) MAD itself recently and typically described its average reader this way: ”Low achiever; social misfit; mumbler.”
”We`re an institution,” Meglin said.
”And we should be put in an institution,” countered John Ficarra, 33, MAD`s other editor, as he picked up a drumstick and tapped the snare drum and cymbal he keeps next to his desk for purposes of punctuation. Ka-splash.
But it`s true: Like much of what it satirizes, MAD has become an icon.
”Now everyone takes us for granted,” Gaines lamented. ”We used to be able to make waves. We used to get sued. Now we attack people, and they laugh.”
Make fun of Carol Burnett, and what does she do? She shows up in the office, unannounced, to convey her appreciation. And wasn`t that the reclusive Robert De Niro who dropped in a few weeks back, not only paying his respects but also allowing himself to be photographed for publication with the staff?
What`s next? Ed Meese doing lunch with Alfred E.?
What`s more, to open an issue of MAD today is to think that you haven`t missed any of its cheaply produced black-and-white pages in, say, a decade or two. There`s the regular movie satire, the one-page Spy vs. Spy episode by Antonio Prohias, the back page fold-in, the punned ”department” headings and so on. The work of contributing writer and creative consultant Dick DeBartolo, 47, hasn`t been absent from an issue in 23 years. Until recently there was also the presence of Don Martin, the 56-year-old Miami artist whose zany characters had populated MAD for three decades. But Martin departed the magazine with the March, 1988, issue, unhappy because MAD-meaning Gaines-wouldn`t relinquish either its copyright on his MAD material or its ownership of his original artwork.
Gaines may count paper clips, but he does get high marks from contributors for offering high rates-as much as $600 per page-and for paying COD. Which may be why many of MAD`s two dozen or so contributing artists and writers-”the usual gang of idiots” as they`re called on the magazine`s masthead-seem to have been around as long as Alfred E. Neuman himself.
”We`ve all had so much experience working together that we work in a kind of shorthand,” said Al Jaffee, who has been writing and drawing for the magazine since 1955.
”They haven`t done anything new in the last 10 years,” sniped Michael Della-Femine, 26-year-old editor of Cracked magazine, the only MAD knockoff, of many, to survive into the 1980s. (And the competition to which the disgruntled Martin defected.) But if MAD seems less outrageous than it once did, perhaps that`s because real life in America-Jim and Tammy, Gary and Donna, Sly and Brigette, etc.-has become stranger than satire.
Consider Paul Peter Porges, a MAD contributor for 17 years, wrestling with a proposed story intended to be a catalogue of products for spoiled pets. ”The trouble is, reality has become so ridiculous,” Porges complained in an accent that is part Austrian, part French and part Dutch. ”My ideas on this aren`t crazy enough. I mean, did you see that story in People magazine about pets in tuxedos? How can I top that?”
MAD`s birth was kind of an accident. Gaines` father, Max, had been a comic book pioneer who had died in a motorboat accident in 1947 and left behind a company that published educational and children`s comics. (God`s truth, parents: The ”E.C.” in E.C. Publications Inc., which publishes MAD, originally stood for ”educational comics.”) Gaines the younger, who had been born in the Bronx and raised in Brooklyn, wanted to be a chemistry teacher. But he and a partner, Al Feldstein, found themselves concocting a new line of horror, crime, suspense and war comics. Unfortunately, a newly created watchdog known as the Comics Code took a dim view of such efforts, and the line was gone by 1954.
In the meantime, the pair had hired a quirky, creative artist named Harvey Kurtzman. But Gaines recalls that Kurtzman, who was paid on a per-page basis, was unhappy about his income. He wanted to do more than the two war books Gaines had assigned him. Gaines suggested a humor comic, and the 32-pager was born.
At first it satirized only other comic books and lost money. Soon it was profitable and attacking everything in sight, particularly advertising. When Kurtzman demanded a bigger slice of the financial pie, Gaines bid him adieu, although he is a MAD contributor to this day. Feldstein became the editor; he quit in 1984.
The other main character in all this was the irrepressible coverboy and Ted Koppel look-alike, Alfred E. Neuman. Many have seen the published versions of Neuman`s arrival at MAD. As Gaines recollects it, the kid was an advertising gimmick for a late-19th Century Topeka dentist who called himself Painless Romaine. He also had appeared on post cards, armed with his now-famous ”What, me worry?” slogan.
Kurtzman spotted one such card and adopted the kid for MAD. His name was later lifted from a fictional character on the old Henry Morgan radio show, which in turn had been lifted from composer Alfred Newman. Except MAD misspelled it. Got that?
MAD has not accepted advertising since 1955. Virtually all its operating revenue comes from circulation, according to Ficarra. Gaines said that`s because he`s afraid advertisers might try to influence the magazine`s editorial content. But you also get the feeling that he believes ads would make MAD, well, too much like a real magazine, maybe even with secretaries.
”You`d have to have color pages and salesmen and all that stuff,” he frets. Meanwhile, the notion that MAD has never promoted itself is simply not true. There have been several spinoffs, most notably a successful board game and an off-Broadway show. What`s more, the magazine recently signed a merchandising contract that will result in just the kind of hucksterism it has traditionally lampooned: T-shirts, buttons, watches and so on.
After all, Gaines admits that circulation is down from a high of 2.3 million in the 1970s to about 1 million. Even worse, the all-expenses-paid vacation junkets to foreign parts for the staff and contributors have become both shorter and less frequent than in the past. MAD staffers blame several culprits for these turns of event, including electronic competition-how can you compete with anything as absurd as TV?-to kids who simply don`t want to read anymore.
And, anyway, Gaines figures MAD`s 11 foreign editions fetch another 500,000 or so circulation, and let`s not overlook the approximately 200 MAD paperbacks that have been published over the years. The publisher says that Warner, which acquired MAD in 1967, still asks only that he show up in corporate headquarters once a year and dream up some vaguely plausible reason that he still won`t accept advertising.
”I turn a nice profit for them,” he says, ”and they don`t bother me.” What, him worry?
