American Notebook: The Conventions Of The Mad
Ross, T. J.
THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MAD T. J. Ross .. a body that don't get started right when he's little ain't got no show—when the pinch comes there ain't nothing to back him up and keep him to his...
...It does, indeed...
...An actual ad which has been running in the Sunday supplements concerns the Phoenix Mutual Retirement Plan...
...But a page devoted "to the slobs who constitute 98% of our population" would go, Mad-wise like this: "Miss Zelda Zyttzger Wed in Bayonne to Weight Guesser"—one Sparky Gahagan who is shown wearing a straw hat, jacket and T-shirt, and striped pants...
...It is even sillier than the things it lampoons...
...Huxley's vision doesn't abash them in the least, They already see family life from the Mad point of view...
...During: French patriot faces firing squad (sketched as Jean-Pierre Aumont) and says: You may keel me, Herr Hitler, but . . . another Frenchman will rise...
...The children's attitudes to the familial are even fiercer...
...Olympus, Miss . . . daughter of Mr...
...Mad, on the other hand, revels in apprehending that life as one of sodden desperation...
...Premiers Are Our Specialty...
...The caption reads: How We Retired at the Age of Eleven with 800 Dollars a Month, and is followed by: Like many other 11-year-olds, my twin sister Rhoda and I had been dreaming of retiring for a long time...
...Just talking, watching TV, reading and plain loafing...
...owners of the Caspian Sea and Rocky Mountains became the bride of Major General Nottingham, owner of the 17th Infantry Division . . . he is a distant descendant of Adam...
...THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MAD T. J. Ross .. a body that don't get started right when he's little ain't got no show—when the pinch comes there ain't nothing to back him up and keep him to his work and so he gets beat...
...Granting what one may have to say about the dire myths of progress, scientism, standardization, the collapse of romantic values, and the rest, the brighter students (whether married or single) will gleefully unlimber arguments which are (a) anti-familial and (b) pro-"benevolent despotism...
...Here is the one subject on which Mad really lets go: the Parent...
...Like the sick comedians, Mad likes to cover the news once-over-snottily, and, like them, it casts a discreetly universal net, in the name of know-how...
...Rather than voicing resistance to the oppressiveness of official culture, Mad expresses a savage acquiescence to it...
...Oscar Sessingfors...
...Like the recent corrupt Hitchcock films, Mad is a "sophisticated" example of kitsch feeding on itself—even its show of frenzy is a pretense as, with a HooHa here and a Hoo-Ha there, it throws up such spoofs on pop as Prince Violent, Melvin of the Apes, Flesh Garden, Perry Masonmint, the Katherine Money Party, and Tennessee Williamsburg...
...Notice that if you juggle the above into free verse you have the lukewarm makings of a Beat vision...
...He waves an enormous sundae in the air, while she juggles a soda in one hand and cake in the other...
...Join Nasser's Friendship Club...
...So, parents in the world of Mad don't look good...
...You're in Good Hands with Red Star...
...Don't think about it...
...What have we done, all of us...
...as mother leaves the room, son with Zelda, both yawning, peer over the edge of the couch on which they've been loving...
...If the nations were smart," Mad points out in its number for July '59, "they'd take their cue from Big Business, hire an Advertising Agency" .. . and go in for this sort of thing: Why Be Lonely...
...He is the son of Mr...
...new man...
...You see, we've just retired .. . Funny, but this great new happiness of ours had its start back in an unhappy time...
...Here's how it's done: Mad achieves what on the surface would seem to be impossible...
...In assuming this form whole-hog, Mad must, in fact, adhere to its assumptions...
...very often when jumping off our front porch, we got like drawing pains in our ankles .. . And so on to how the team discovered an "exciting and unusual loophole" in the exciting and unusual Phonyex Mutual Plan whereby they manage to blackmail the company into guaranteeing their future...
...54) was introduced with a "vital message" from Roger Price (a TV entertainer and M.C...
...But both agree on the same line of demarcation: there are the 2% that we all read about...
...Television, with programs like Life With Riley or I Love Lassie, does honor to the condition of its public by upholding, in its inimitable deadpan fashion, a kitchen-bound cretinism as the ideal of the Good Normal Life...
...of the squarest category...
...Mad's attention-getter is a sketch of a couple of brats in hammocks, wildly blue-eyed, contained, and sneering at Us...
...If you do you'll go mad...
...It takes broad, sometimes crude—but never vicious— swings at aspects of our culture that are foolish, sentimental, venal, stuffy, or just plain corny...
...It is much better than watching violent TV programs . . . because it is more violent than TV and comic books put together...
...it gives Farouk what he's already overstuffed with and, like what it reflects, it assumes equality in inferiority...
...Once the abundant falsities of Dad's world of ads and "squares who care" has been described, it is but a step to physical recoil...
...The ad's attentiongetter is a photo of a clean-cut fiftyish couple smiling at You...
...One near-critical skit considers Hollywood's handling of the German and Japanese soldier in films made during the war, and after: During: The Japanese Officer is sadistic...
...In another, a framed portrait of an ape labelled "Mother" hangs in the hut of Melvin of the Apes...
...It can do the same for you...
...Wider, flatter and less cocky than that of Bergen's Charlie McCarthy, his renowned smile expresses neither satisfaction nor awareness nor challenge but a sense of defeat so total as to assume that whoever is being smiled at will be done for next...
...IV The first Mad Reader (Nov...
...Good for a laugh now and then, if you know pop, Mad's message is defensiveness and gamesmanship rather than resistance, criticism or wit...
...she, in manner and complexion nattily menopausal, sits erect, eyes on You, knitting as she grins...
...Is the fast-moving Arab World passing you by...
...60, featured a section on "How to Deal with Parents from Ages 21 to 60...
...In going after this sort of thing, Mad matches its straw-man original with a literalist frenzy (which is in keeping with the psychology of the feeble-minded, as well as with its own tone of premeditated idiocy...
...you Nazi pigs will nevaire .. After: The patriot who faces the firing squad is now Maurice Chevalier: ". . . I cannot blame you for my death, Herr Hitler...
...Mad's cup runneth over...
...and the 98% that we all know about...
...For Alfred E. "opting out" is neither retreat nor strategy but a way of being one-up on squaresville in the square's own terms...
...In one place, Grant Wood's Gothic couple are shown in front of a depot marked Westport, holding stacks of bills...
...Your Premier Problems Are Over: The DeGaulle Employment Agency...
...Yet in its comic book format Mad is exactly like what it is supposed to be panning, and its drawing is even more crass than that of the ordinary "funnies...
...It is, in the precise meaning of that all-American phrase, "a shit-eating smile," borne by the combat-fatigued veteran of Dad's ad culture...
...In keeping, however, with its cackling conformism, Mad avoids Beat extremism as much as it does any hint of intellectual skirmishing...
...keeps vowing to destroy decadent American democracy...
...Save...
...Sagan, Those Without Shadows 1 The letters column of the July '61 number of Mad comics under the banner, "A Mad State of Affairs," features a photograph of the daughter of the governor of North Carolina smilingly enthroned in bed with a batch of Mads...
...Dad's motto is: "I'd be crazy to go back to them things I hadda leave behind...
...His purpose was to present Mad in a light that would reflect innocuousness and "service" for, like all pop, Mad does not presume to be self-justifying, but rather finds its excuse in filling a sociological "need...
...After: The same officer is kind but misunderstood . . . talks impeccable English...
...504 And so on to how the happiness-finder found a Phoenix ad in a magazine and urges you too to send the coupon .. . today...
...Needless to say, Mad's paragon is not alone in not having felt any difference in "greatness" between the candidates, but, again, the imperative is to go along smirkingly with the prevailing drift...
...People want something new...
...Mad here touches on an issue which crops up in the classroom whenever a book like Brave New World is discussed...
...Save...
...After: The German Officer is honest and sincere, but confused...
...you are merely carrying out ze orders .. . And so on to a look at war films of the future in which Tab Hunter will play the Japanese Officer, as an ally, while Perry Como plays a kindly birdloving Gestapo officer whose purpose is "to help minorities rebuild their churches and synagogues...
...11 In the savagery of its acquiescence, Mad shows its consumers how to be bastards A la mode...
...Planned Plunder...
...It invites its fans to wallow inside the whale, then come out one-up...
...and Central Park West...
...III Mad's archetypal smiler and cover boy is dubbed Alfred E. Neuman (no man...
...shouts shvienhundt...
...and Mrs...
...In every case the parent is drawn as an unaware, physically repulsive dolt...
...Yet Mr...
...We have countless old flags, old maps, old Colonels...
...screams in pidgin English...
...He says things like "Vere haf ve failed as human beinks...
...and Mrs...
...The usual society page, as Mad has it, runs to a power-elitist homogeneity and extravagance of this sort: "Stephanie Duprey and Napolean VII Wed in Grand Canyon" or "In a palace near the statue of Zeus on Mt...
...Two Ton" Dooley who reside in the doorway of 76 Houston St., to Blubber Knerd...
...It was fifteen years ago that I injured my leg...
...Thought you might like to know," writes the fan who'd sent in the item, "that Mad has even reached the Governor's mansion...
...That this is as pat a description of the New Yorker formula and tradition as one could hope for, does no honor to the state of Mad...
...It is impossible to use this form without dependence on its stereotypes —stereotypes already fixed in the pub lic imagination, like the Gaunt Thinlipped Hero (Dick Tracy or Gregory Peck), the Defeated Dad, or the Sweet Young Know-nothing...
...The Mad issue for Dec...
...Watch for the Cyprus Surplus Lists: Mac's Empire Surplus Stores, Ltd...
...Save...
...for the marriage of Miss Sadie Dooley, daughter of Mr...
...from war-mongering Imperialists...
...After all, we weren't getting any younger...
...Both bride and groom are buck-toothed...
...The round-up is edgy and abstract, a kind of pointless flailing...
...They will buy a magazine that sounds like it knows something...
...What has happened...
...Huckleberry Finn .. it can't be like this...
...That Mad, like TV, never mixes situations so that a hint of real conflict might come into the joke, may be seen in how it spoofs the Society Page...
...Knerd of Bench 3, 74th St...
...wears monocle...
...He, arched sideways as if about to say something sincere, wears a breezy sports shirt and holds pipe in hand...
...During: The German Officer is evil...
...There it is: "sound" like you know something but keep feeding them the same old carbohydrates...
...He keeps vowing to destroy decadent Hitler-type Fascism...
...The come-on follows: Want to know something...
...Thus, some gagging about pop violence will be followed by the "Mad Shakespeare Primer" to remind its readers that Hamlet, which contains "two knifings, three fatal duels," etc., is...
...One issue shows Dad Lester Cowsnofski in his Rocket Testing Chamber locked away in bliss from "his familiar way of life on earth...
...The cartoon strip —in the rhythm of its potted "plotting," in its simplistic reduction of materials to a one-dimensional, escalatorlike descent to an anticipated "surprise"— shares the basic pattern of all kitsch...
...Hovering, however grossly, on the edge of an impolite critical perspective, Mad flattens the point in the moral vacuum of know-howism: read Mad and learn how to make movies properly adjusted to propaganda temperature...
...nu, man...
...looks like Keye Luke...
...The pre-election issue of Mad appeared with two front covers: one showed Nixon, grinning madly with Al E. by his side sporting an "I Like Dick" button...
...Other tributes come regularly from high school and college teachers and from college-bred mothers concerned with finding a synthetic antidote to the influence of pop culture on their children's minds...
...Consistently, and perhaps unwittingly, Mad depicts parents as apes and family life as apish, without any upbeat compromise...
...Price claims for Mad the distinction of being "the first successful humor magazine to be started in this country since the New Yorker...
...The notice on Sadie Dooley and Blubber Knerd raises shades of Beckett and Lenny Bruce: Ferdie's Flophouse . . . was the setting...
...a good play for children...
...the other showed Kennedy, likewise, with Al E. standing by with an "I Like Jack" button...
...Liza and I have been sitting here in the sunshine for practically a whole week...
...Miss Ducky Dooley, sister of the bride was maid of honor and owing to her well-muscled physique also served as best man...
...In other words, it Gilds the Lily, it carries carbohydrates to Farouk...
...nor does this mean a sort of dandyism but, American-style, a self-contained slobbism, or, as I have said, savage acquiescence...
...and Mrs...
...Visit Exotic Formosa: Mao's Guided Asian Tours: Armed Escorts...
...The caption reads: How We Retired in Fifteen Years with Three Hundred Dollars a Month...
...Zere are good Germans and zere are bad Germans...
...Red Star Five-Year Plan" has already protected such countries as Poland, Hungary...
...looks like a monkey...
...Or mother will be shown exhorting her son to marry that fine girl, Zelda...
Vol. 8 • September 1961 • No. 4
