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

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

#61

Post by fuzzfactor »

duskwuff wrote: post #42
benrmatthews wrote: post #19

“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.

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

#62

Post by DaoVeles »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #8
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…

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.

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

#63

Post by evanelias »

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/

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!

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

#64

Post by yamazakiwi »

dogleash wrote: post #26

>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.

They want the benefit of the label without the execution

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

#65

Post by derencius »

evanelias wrote: post #63
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/

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.

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

#66

Post by Loughla »

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…

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.

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

#67

Post by pimlottc »

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.

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.

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

#68

Post by kenjackson »

pimlottc wrote: post #67
arp242 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#69

Post by AlbertCory »

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!

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