Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

nrm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 119 posts

Re: What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

#51

Post by cholantesh »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #49

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.

Re: What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

#53

Post by lykahb »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #49

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?

The Viz Comics is similar

Re: What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

#55

Post by mdaniel »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #49

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?

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

Re: What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

#56

Post by dole »

mdf wrote: post #17

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/

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.

Re: What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

#57

Post by Mountain_Skies »

arp242 wrote: post #46
mdf wrote: post #17

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.

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.

Re: What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

#58

Post by DaoVeles »

criddell wrote: post #11
ethbr1 wrote: post #2

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 liv…

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.

Re: What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

#59

Post by DaoVeles »

bluedino wrote: post #4
ethbr1 wrote: post #2

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 liv…

Hah! Mad Magazine was one of the things my mother refused to allow me to checkout from the library.

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.

Re: What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

#60

Post by trothamel »

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.

Post reply on HN