I remember, as a child, attempting to reproduce the BASIC program in one of the MAD magazine issues. Somewhere, I had made a typo, which completely screwed the output. I guessed that the tediousness of the whole exercise was part of the joke, shrugged, and moved on.
It was pretty common to distribute code as "listing" like this. Typically it came with a checksum for every line and a small program to compute and print that for your own program that you had typed over, which you could then use to fairly quickly(-ish) spot any typos.
All of this is how I learned to program by the way. Kids these days don't know how easy they have it.
Huh, we used to type in BASIC programs from magazines back in the 1980s and I don’t ever recall seeing any kinds of checksum. We would often resort to printing out the code and visually comparing line by line against the magazine.
Checksums became popular at some point in the 80s. I remember when COMPUTE! first added them they were a godsend. Especially for the machine language programs that were just pages of data statements.
In case there are any other Sergio Aragones superfan weirdos like me here, who only click MAD-related stories in order to command-f for "Sergio Aragones" and then move on when inevitably there are no results: today's your lucky day, click that link above!
The Commodore version of the source in the magazine never worked. I probably typed it in at least five times in whole thinking I'd screwed something up. It wasn't until a few years ago (from an HN post, no less) that I found the link above and finally, finally got to see what the code did.
I am so glad to see things like this happening again. Im not saying "bring back all the magazines!" But some of them had a real place in the format.
The one thing I loved about the old tech mags was because of the longer cadence they could really focus on long form and more indepth articles than what we usually get.
Shout out to Atomic magazine in Australia during the early 2000s. Absolute peak of this stuff.
We had the MAD board game. I don't remember anything except the card that made everyone act like a rock, with the best rock impression winning. So weird.
Complete opposite experience here, my grandad had a subscription to it! Not sure what happened to the decades of them because they were all gone by the time he passed.
I read the magazine religiously as a kid (early 2000s). I got special editions for christmas (collections of prior articles/comics on particular subjects). There was one about advertising (Called MADvertising or something) that has a lot of information about old advertisements from the 1950s onward
Dick Bartolo one of the writers for Mad used to host The Giz Wiz on twit.tv. It was a daily review of all kinds of random gadgets that come up, it looked to be a life long fascination with those advertisements in the back of magazines. Promise the world and deliver rubbish.
He saw one that had "10 indestructible Fry pans for $1". He knew had had to get them because of how rubbish they would be. Apparently you fold them in half like paper they were so thin.
Edit : Just looked it up, he wrote MAD-vertising. So there you go.
Found a Mad Magazine at my grandparents' place as a pre-teen, opened it, and immediately picked one of the spies to root for against the other one. Serious tribal instinct there.
For any Sergio Aragones fans out there, the Cartoonist Kayfabe interview he did where he told the story of how he first got hired at MAD is amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm5jk2RadxU
I love MAD magazine. I remember my mom half-jokingly telling me to stay away from my older cousins' copies as a kid. Funny now, considering how tame it is compared to Tiktok/twitter humor. But as a kid it felt otherwordly.
My cousins had a large collection from i guess the 70s and very early 80s that i read a lot. My mom and aunt had read them too. So one day i bought a new one at the store and brought it home and my mom found it. There was a parody of Edward Scissorhands, and one of the topiaries he made was of a middle finger. I didn't know what that was as she described it (flipping the bird). Apparently that was enough to get it banned in my house.
Incidentally, i got a parent teacher meeting for bringing some stickers from one of my cousin's Mad magazines to school. There was a "POINK" onomatopoeia with a lady's boob and a wardrobe malfunction on one of the stickers, and this was enough to warrant the third degree.
Mad magazine was pretty tame, i never got the puritanism exhibited by everyone around me, especially since they had read the magazine when they were young, and their kids, too, but i read the same ones and suddenly it's taboo?
My generally feeling was it didn't work that well, mostly because the MAD stuff is very dense, more dense than you'd expect from painting in an art gallery. A lot of it is also very dependent on pop culture that has changed in the interim.
Probably the two best pieces were the direct parodies of the Rockwell paintings, exhibited next to the pieces they parodied.
The Rockwell museum also made an effort to exhibit some of Rockwell's most humorous pieces in some of the side galleries, which worked well here.
Many years ago, I was just doing a drive through vacation of New England and woke up in my B&B to the smell of roasting turkey - I hadn’t realized it but I’d wound up in Stockbridge on Thanksgiving day. I don’t recall anything special going on in town other than a radio station playing Alice’s Restaurant on repeat.
>It is difficult to imagine a time when satirical, irreverent humor was not common across media
I hate the word "irreverent." It's in every article about comedy written by people who don't seem to understand the difference between disrespecting things that are safe to dunk on, vs breaking cultural boundaries.
Yes, very few news sources are genuinely irreverent. The Register is one of the few, and you can tell, because it often gets people in the comments here complaining of it's style.
A lot of content out there, user-driven especially, is just sarcastic or "ironic" for the sake of it, not actually pushing boundaries. Worse, they're often cementing the status quo but doing so in a way that doesn't actually make the point they want to make.
They just state the (often minority) counter-point in a sarcastic tone and leave it to the reader to fill in the (typically agreeable) blanks.
Are there any Mad Magazines of today? Are there some publications that we'll look back on in 20 years and say "that really shaped humor and it's crazy how many interesting people seem to have all read this when they were young?" Are they online?
Web sketches and memes will probably be looked at that way, but as far as a satirical publication that has sight gags and comics...maybe the Onion, but maybe not as contemporary as some of its pretenders, of which the Hard Drive is the only one that's remotely as funny.
MAD was one of the first pieces of humor I truly fell in love with. I knew about comedy before it, but I don’t know that I really understood comedy before it.
It’s not that it was perfect; it’s that I grew up with it and came of age with it. Also, my immigrant parents didn’t get it, so I was able to enjoy it on my own and it was my first taste of figuring out what I find funny, rather than laughing when other people did.
I still have an Alfred E. Neuman for President bumper sticker somewhere IIRC.
When I was much younger, an older relative was overseas for a year, I used to trace some of the marginal humor (little funny drawings literally in the margin of the magazine pages) on "onion skin" airmail sheets (a thin piece of paper, to minimize weight, that you wrote your message on one side, then folded up into an envelope-size document with Airmail/Par Avion printed on the outside where you wrote the address, can't remember if postage was prepaid or you had to affix stamps). Because it was onion skin, it was semi-transparent which allowed for tracing. He appreciated the effort.
When I was a kid, we’d regularly get MAD at the supermarket. We’d all read it cover to cover. I was young and some of it was over my head but that’s ok. In junior high, my college age sister gave me a subscription to Sports Illustrated which I read cover to cover; SI had a reputation of paying the most for its articles and the writing was excellent. In my 20s, I subscribed to Spy and was inoculated by phrases like fat fingered vulgarian against a future which should never have happened.
I don't remember whether it was Potrzebie or one of the other classic MAD nonsense words, but one day I was amazed to see it as a town name on a sign in the Czech Republic. With a couple of accents.
I still have my original copy of "The MAD Adventures of Captain Klutz", probably bought around 1970ish. Such a singular talent. Died pretty young (68), which is sad.
When I was I preteen in 1980s I loved MAD. I even had a collection, I resisted the urge to fold the back page just to keep them nice and instead folded the back page of a copy in the grocery store
I grew up in Germany but my parents wanted us to learn English so we had subscriptions to many US magazines like Time, National Geographic, New Yorker and, most beloved of all, Mad Magazine. Us kids would fight over the issue when it showed up, good memories!
I used to read MAD as a kid. At some point in the 90s they released a CD-ROM set of every issue. It was a neat idea, but the software was pretty bad, and some of the scans we're great. They simulated the fold-in effect, but the alignment was off on some of the issues.
You thought the early 1970's was when the US currency had been damaged the worst?
This was 1979. By then it was tens of millions more Americans who were being discarded economically[0] in order to retain a fuller illusion of prosperity within reach for the remainder.
Used to have a subscription. Me and Dad would try to get it first. Mom bought tons of their little paperback compilations at garage sales. They programmed me into the man I am today.
In retrospect, goddamn they were bleak. I guess that's just the later stuff tho. I saw the really early stuff in reprints. It had a different flavor.
I remember, as a child, attempting to reproduce the BASIC program in one of the MAD magazine issues. Somewhere, I had made a typo, which completely screwed the output. I guessed that the tediousness of the whole exercise was part of the joke, shrugged, and moved on.
Luckily, someone else succeeded: https://meatfighter.com/mad/
It was pretty common to distribute code as "listing" like this. Typically it came with a checksum for every line and a small program to compute and print that for your own program that you had typed over, which you could then use to fairly quickly(-ish) spot any typos.
All of this is how I learned to program by the way. Kids these days don't know how easy they have it.
Huh, we used to type in BASIC programs from magazines back in the 1980s and I don’t ever recall seeing any kinds of checksum. We would often resort to printing out the code and visually comparing line by line against the magazine.
Checksums became popular at some point in the 80s. I remember when COMPUTE! first added them they were a godsend. Especially for the machine language programs that were just pages of data statements.
Checksums! Bah, I used to have to code uphill both ways in the snow, and I liked it!
Checksums were a great idea but I just could never resist the temptation to make changes to the program as I was typing it in.
Excellent link, thank you for posting this.
In case there are any other Sergio Aragones superfan weirdos like me here, who only click MAD-related stories in order to command-f for "Sergio Aragones" and then move on when inevitably there are no results: today's your lucky day, click that link above!
nice. I'm a Groo fan.
The Commodore version of the source in the magazine never worked. I probably typed it in at least five times in whole thinking I'd screwed something up. It wasn't until a few years ago (from an HN post, no less) that I found the link above and finally, finally got to see what the code did.
dedication to create an svg version...
https://meatfighter.com/mad/mad.svg
Through my childhood, my mother always found a copy of MAD to give me for Christmas.
Honestly, it'd be great to have more physical zine-style humor back in the US zeitgeist.
It's important to laugh at the issues of the day, while also thinking and doing something about them.
Satire and laughter is a critical antidote to the 24/7 BREAKING-NEWS panic-fear response that all-day news so often inspires.
PS: Also, long live Spy v Spy. Go team black spy. https://archive.org/details/SpyVsSpyTheCompleteCasebook/Spy%...
In case you didn't know, The Onion is back in print:
https://membership.theonion.com/
I am so glad to see things like this happening again. Im not saying "bring back all the magazines!" But some of them had a real place in the format.
The one thing I loved about the old tech mags was because of the longer cadence they could really focus on long form and more indepth articles than what we usually get.
Shout out to Atomic magazine in Australia during the early 2000s. Absolute peak of this stuff.
I miss Spy Magazine (no relation to MAD or Spy vs. Spy).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_(magazine)
My favorite cover (very slightly NSFW): https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3662697/The-spy-who-hate...
We had the MAD board game. I don't remember anything except the card that made everyone act like a rock, with the best rock impression winning. So weird.
Hah! Mad Magazine was one of the things my mother refused to allow me to checkout from the library.
Jeanette Winterson recalled her mother's lament about books: "You can't tell by looking what's inside them."
Complete opposite experience here, my grandad had a subscription to it! Not sure what happened to the decades of them because they were all gone by the time he passed.
The Simpsons did the best tribute to Mad that captured its true essence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzu4qILQqpA
I read the magazine religiously as a kid (early 2000s). I got special editions for christmas (collections of prior articles/comics on particular subjects). There was one about advertising (Called MADvertising or something) that has a lot of information about old advertisements from the 1950s onward
Dick Bartolo one of the writers for Mad used to host The Giz Wiz on twit.tv. It was a daily review of all kinds of random gadgets that come up, it looked to be a life long fascination with those advertisements in the back of magazines. Promise the world and deliver rubbish.
He saw one that had "10 indestructible Fry pans for $1". He knew had had to get them because of how rubbish they would be. Apparently you fold them in half like paper they were so thin.
Edit : Just looked it up, he wrote MAD-vertising. So there you go.
Occasionally, I'll find old copies of Life and/or single page cut outs for movies/events.
The advertisements (sometimes on the back) are honestly more interesting.
There's no truer window into a capitalist country's soul than how products are sold!
Found a Mad Magazine at my grandparents' place as a pre-teen, opened it, and immediately picked one of the spies to root for against the other one. Serious tribal instinct there.
You'll probably love this.
https://s3-eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/cartoons-s3/styles/pro...
...An artistic portrait of Antonio Prohias (Mr. "Spy vs Spy") by Cuban cartoonist and illustrator Ramses Morales Izquierdo.
For any Sergio Aragones fans out there, the Cartoonist Kayfabe interview he did where he told the story of how he first got hired at MAD is amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm5jk2RadxU
I love MAD magazine. I remember my mom half-jokingly telling me to stay away from my older cousins' copies as a kid. Funny now, considering how tame it is compared to Tiktok/twitter humor. But as a kid it felt otherwordly.
Anyways here's the example MAD folding picture from the exhibit when its folded -- https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbtwberkshi...
My cousins had a large collection from i guess the 70s and very early 80s that i read a lot. My mom and aunt had read them too. So one day i bought a new one at the store and brought it home and my mom found it. There was a parody of Edward Scissorhands, and one of the topiaries he made was of a middle finger. I didn't know what that was as she described it (flipping the bird). Apparently that was enough to get it banned in my house.
Incidentally, i got a parent teacher meeting for bringing some stickers from one of my cousin's Mad magazines to school. There was a "POINK" onomatopoeia with a lady's boob and a wardrobe malfunction on one of the stickers, and this was enough to warrant the third degree.
Mad magazine was pretty tame, i never got the puritanism exhibited by everyone around me, especially since they had read the magazine when they were young, and their kids, too, but i read the same ones and suddenly it's taboo?
Related. Others?
The Mad Magazine Fold-In Effect in CSS – Thomas Park (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36856428 - July 2023 (5 comments)
Al Jaffee, king of the Mad Magazine fold-in, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35517629 - April 2023 (64 comments)
Frank Jacobs, Mad Magazine writer, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26819773 - April 2021 (18 comments)
Al Jaffee turns 100 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26461739 - March 2021 (28 comments)
The Al Jaffee / Mad Magazine Fold-In Effect in CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23457930 - June 2020 (43 comments)
Mad magazine legend Al Jaffee retires at age 99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442041 - June 2020 (25 comments)
A World Without Mad Magazine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20527990 - July 2019 (2 comments)
The World According to Mad Magazine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20427142 - July 2019 (5 comments)
Mad Magazine to mostly stop publishing new material - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20351524 - July 2019 (86 comments)
A personal tour of MAD magazine, in the crucible of a young life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11984032 - June 2016 (12 comments)
Al Feldstein, the Soul of Mad Magazine, Dies at 88 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7680093 - May 2014 (17 comments)
I saw this exhibition a few weeks ago.
My generally feeling was it didn't work that well, mostly because the MAD stuff is very dense, more dense than you'd expect from painting in an art gallery. A lot of it is also very dependent on pop culture that has changed in the interim.
Probably the two best pieces were the direct parodies of the Rockwell paintings, exhibited next to the pieces they parodied.
The Rockwell museum also made an effort to exhibit some of Rockwell's most humorous pieces in some of the side galleries, which worked well here.
The linked Norman Rockwell Museum is in Stockbridge, MA, which is also home to (formerly) the Alice's Restaurant[0] of Arlo Guthrie fame.
[0] For today's lucky 10,000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m57gzA2JCcM
Many years ago, I was just doing a drive through vacation of New England and woke up in my B&B to the smell of roasting turkey - I hadn’t realized it but I’d wound up in Stockbridge on Thanksgiving day. I don’t recall anything special going on in town other than a radio station playing Alice’s Restaurant on repeat.
For some unfathomable reason, I can still remember their football fight song, to the tune of "Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame":
Cheer, cheer for old Pivnick Tech
We're gonna get it right in the neck.
Send a sound of Taps on high,
While Pivnick lays down to die, die, die.
What though the odds be great or small,
Old Pivnick Tech will fumble the ball.
While her undergrads get sick, and
Transfer to USC!
>It is difficult to imagine a time when satirical, irreverent humor was not common across media
I hate the word "irreverent." It's in every article about comedy written by people who don't seem to understand the difference between disrespecting things that are safe to dunk on, vs breaking cultural boundaries.
Yes, very few news sources are genuinely irreverent. The Register is one of the few, and you can tell, because it often gets people in the comments here complaining of it's style.
A lot of content out there, user-driven especially, is just sarcastic or "ironic" for the sake of it, not actually pushing boundaries. Worse, they're often cementing the status quo but doing so in a way that doesn't actually make the point they want to make.
They just state the (often minority) counter-point in a sarcastic tone and leave it to the reader to fill in the (typically agreeable) blanks.
They want the benefit of the label without the execution
Are there any Mad Magazines of today? Are there some publications that we'll look back on in 20 years and say "that really shaped humor and it's crazy how many interesting people seem to have all read this when they were young?" Are they online?
Web sketches and memes will probably be looked at that way, but as far as a satirical publication that has sight gags and comics...maybe the Onion, but maybe not as contemporary as some of its pretenders, of which the Hard Drive is the only one that's remotely as funny.
This may interest you: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=totally+mad+magazine&ia=web
> "Totally MAD" is a collection of the issues of MAD Magazine from the start until 1998 published by Broderbund
The Viz Comics is similar
MAD was one of the first pieces of humor I truly fell in love with. I knew about comedy before it, but I don’t know that I really understood comedy before it.
It’s not that it was perfect; it’s that I grew up with it and came of age with it. Also, my immigrant parents didn’t get it, so I was able to enjoy it on my own and it was my first taste of figuring out what I find funny, rather than laughing when other people did.
I still have an Alfred E. Neuman for President bumper sticker somewhere IIRC.
When I was much younger, an older relative was overseas for a year, I used to trace some of the marginal humor (little funny drawings literally in the margin of the magazine pages) on "onion skin" airmail sheets (a thin piece of paper, to minimize weight, that you wrote your message on one side, then folded up into an envelope-size document with Airmail/Par Avion printed on the outside where you wrote the address, can't remember if postage was prepaid or you had to affix stamps). Because it was onion skin, it was semi-transparent which allowed for tracing. He appreciated the effort.
When I was a kid, we’d regularly get MAD at the supermarket. We’d all read it cover to cover. I was young and some of it was over my head but that’s ok. In junior high, my college age sister gave me a subscription to Sports Illustrated which I read cover to cover; SI had a reputation of paying the most for its articles and the writing was excellent. In my 20s, I subscribed to Spy and was inoculated by phrases like fat fingered vulgarian against a future which should never have happened.
If anyone is interested why there is "Potrzebie" above "what, me worry?" on the drum: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrzebie
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/fg.html
I don't remember whether it was Potrzebie or one of the other classic MAD nonsense words, but one day I was amazed to see it as a town name on a sign in the Czech Republic. With a couple of accents.
I just love Don Martin's style!
Came in to comment on this, all of them were great but Don was the GOAT. And his sound effects! I would love to compile a list of them.
I still have my original copy of "The MAD Adventures of Captain Klutz", probably bought around 1970ish. Such a singular talent. Died pretty young (68), which is sad.
"Eat More Mangoes"
When I was I preteen in 1980s I loved MAD. I even had a collection, I resisted the urge to fold the back page just to keep them nice and instead folded the back page of a copy in the grocery store
YOU! My mom would always come home, and claim it "was that way" when she bought it for me.
I thought she was doing it. But it was you.
I grew up in Germany but my parents wanted us to learn English so we had subscriptions to many US magazines like Time, National Geographic, New Yorker and, most beloved of all, Mad Magazine. Us kids would fight over the issue when it showed up, good memories!
I used to read MAD as a kid. At some point in the 90s they released a CD-ROM set of every issue. It was a neat idea, but the software was pretty bad, and some of the scans we're great. They simulated the fold-in effect, but the alignment was off on some of the issues.
Stuff You Should Know had a podcast last year on it with the back story of how it was created https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-stuff-you-should-know-26...
n+1 once said McSweeny's (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/) is just Mad Magazine for the literary set, and today is the right time to share that.
The whole take-down is great: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-1/the-intellectual-situati...
My mom would buy me these because she loved hearing me laughing hysterically.
If you look around in stores, MAD is doing kind of “best of” issues.
I purchased one recently with their old sci-fi stuff (original “Star Drek”, there Star Wars parody, etc. ). I found it in a grocery store.
Classic stuff to be sure.
full color, higher page counts are ~$18. I get maybe one a year and i have no idea where they are!
“What Simple Pastime is Becoming a Luxury that Many Americans Can No Longer Afford?”
Anyone have the “after” of the fold-in image?
"Eating."
https://i.postimg.cc/wjXHqQhF/MAD-Fold-In-Al-Jaffe-172-What-...
You thought the early 1970's was when the US currency had been damaged the worst?
This was 1979. By then it was tens of millions more Americans who were being discarded economically[0] in order to retain a fuller illusion of prosperity within reach for the remainder.
[0] Never to be heard from economically again.
Teeth. I can't afford teeth.
"eating"
I once worked with the Normal Rockwell Estate and their letterhead used Comic Sans.
in my day MAD was purely subscription based: no advertising
One of my favorites has always been the pharmacist behind the scenes dispensing all prescription medications from a single huge bottle of aspirin.
Used to have a subscription. Me and Dad would try to get it first. Mom bought tons of their little paperback compilations at garage sales. They programmed me into the man I am today.
In retrospect, goddamn they were bleak. I guess that's just the later stuff tho. I saw the really early stuff in reprints. It had a different flavor.