What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine | Hacker News Reader

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

nrm.org

245 pointsbookofjoe115 comments

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/

dedication to create an svg version...

https://meatfighter.com/mad/mad.svg

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! 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.

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.

The first edition of MSX Computer Magazine from 1985 has them, and I doubt they were the first or invented it: https://www.msxcomputermagazine.nl/archief/bladen/msx_comput...

Perhaps it was less common in other countries? Things were a lot less global back then and things operated more on a local level.

We mostly had Family Computing magazine. I looked up an issue from 1985 with one of my favorite type-by-hand games, Hit or Miss [0], and no sight of a helpful checksum.

To be honest, the idea of it would have blown my mind back then; the idea that your BASIC code is just a text file that can be processed by other programs is something that would never have occurred to me.

https://archive.org/details/FamilyComputingIssue041983Dec/Fa...

In the early 80s I never saw checksums on code listings but by the mid-80s it was fairly common, although certainly not universal.

I would take typing a program by hand from printed paper over dealing with npm, any day.

Thankfully I have to do neither.

> Kids these days don't know how easy they have it.

Maybe it’s rose-colored glasses, but I have much fonder memories of programming basic on a Ti-84 calculator than debugging an import incompatibility between. Es5 and CommonJS modules

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.

It's a sign error.

https://github.com/asig/MAD_computer_program?tab=readme-ov-f...

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.

A port to GNU Octave...

   x = [
   -27,-11,-23,-6,-28,-13,-22,-6,-20,-5,-12,-5,-27,-14,-26,-13 ...
   -38,-29,-42,-28,-40,-28,-50,-16,-8,13,0,13,-29,4,-29,9 ...
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   13,48,12,53,12,48,11,53,11,54,15,57,15,58,14,59,14,59,-1,59 ...
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   -42,65,-38,78,-43,64,-48,78,-47,79,-45,79,-45,80,-45,84 ...
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   -48,49,-56,71,-56,71,-60,56,-52,85,-54,84,-55,83,-59,85 ...
   -60,86,-64,86,-59,55,-58,54,-57,54,-55,55,-55,54,-55,50 ...
   -56,50,-57,48,-57,49,-61,49,-58,48,-60,48,-61,48,-64,51 ...
   -62,48,-65,50,-65,85,-67,84,-67,83,-67,79,-68,83,-68,79,-66,79,-64,79 ...
   -63,78,-68,56,-69,55,-64,78,-66,49,-72,49,-68,48,-73,48 ...
   -69,55,-73,55,-73,55,-73,48,-74,49,-74,54 ...
   61,71,61,65,60,73,60,63,59,73,59,72,60,65,58,60 ...
   59,61,54,56,59,74,55,78,59,75,54,80,54,80,48,80 ...
   46,79,55,79,54,56,48,56,47,57,46,57,47,78,46,78 ...
   45,78,45,58,7,76,11,66,10,66,6,76,9,66,1,66,0,66,6,75];

   l = reshape(x, 4, 522)';
   [x1, y1, x2, y2] = deal(l(:,1), l(:,2), l(:,3), l(:,4));
   sz = 1.2;
   xc = 140;
   yc = 90;
   fx = x1*sz + xc; fy = 176 - (y1 + yc);
   lx = x2*sz + xc; ly = 176 - (y2 + yc);
   plot([fx+1, lx+1]', [fy, ly]', '-b', [fx, lx]', [fy, ly]', '-b');
   axis tight;
   axis off;
   axis ij;
   h = title('What, me worry?');
   set(h, 'position', [140, 170]);

oh great.

the listing is missing checksums! madness!

we're in 2024, checksums are the least I can expect.

It's worse than that. It's actually an AGI seed. If you run it, you get an AI which quickly gains sentience... but it's Mad.

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%...

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."

The Simpsons did the best tribute to Mad that captured its true essence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzu4qILQqpA

“New Kids on the Blech” is spot on.

Fred Astaire as Alfred E. Neuman: In 1959, Fred Astaire danced on television with the odd choice of wearing a mask of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqzpuGXd1lA

Makeup and prosthetics expert John Chambers checks the fit on an Alfred E. Neuman mask he made for a television special in 1959. The man behind the mask is Fred Astaire.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/uuturm/makeu...

Disturbing Alfred E. Neuman Cameo / Worst Movie Ending from Up The Academy (1980): Eek.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K71kJbWWOkY

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.

Mad once caricatured the young Prince Charles with enormous ears. They got an anonymous letter on Buckingham Palace stationary informing them that they were a bunch of poopyheads.

1993 SNL skit about Prince Charles turning himself into a tampon, featuring a cameo appearance by Mick Jagger delivering a package containing Prince Charles to Lady Camilla:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwrzj_oMZ7c

A skit like that could have never aired on live TV without Mad Magazine paving the way in print.

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

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!

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.

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.

So much has shifted to "what is being announced *right now?" Who care what was new and notable last month? I get that the cadence is different but it's much more about hot takes than reflection.

It seems to me that the Onion had a schism and split into the Babylon Bee and this new, very political version. I ended up unfollowing them on Instagram when it was (in my opinion) just thinly-veiled hate-based politics.

Did anyone experience something similar in the last year or so, or am I the one changing?

I had never heard of the Babylon Bee and I just took a look at it. Are you saying you think The Onion is the very political one, or did I misread your sentence?

I think the Onion has become very political over the last year or so. When I started following the Babylon Bee, they were already very political to me.

The Onion has always been very political with a liberal slant. I have some of their print collections from the early 2000s and they're similar to today's Onion with maybe a little more edge.

Their gun control headline "'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'No_Way_to_Prevent_This%2C'_Sa...) dates to 2014.

Since wanting to end school shootings is not a left or right issue, how would a conservative publication satirize the issue?

At a guess, by pointing out the "Gun-Free Zone" signs.

Edit: No longer a guess, https://babylonbee.com/news/chicago-schools-gun-free-zone-si...

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.

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.

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.

There was a Spy vs. Spy game on the C64:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu2e866bEcM

There were actually two Spy vs. Spy games. The second one was named Spy vs. Spy II. Genius!

Three, actually! They even had a bit of continuity. In the first game you have to escape the embassy by plane before a bomb goes off, in the second your plane crashes on a volcanic island and you have to escape by submarine before it erupts, in the third your sub crashes into a glacier and you have to escape by rocket before you freeze to death.

Or something like that, it's been a while.

> It's important to laugh at the issues of the day, while also thinking and doing something about them.

Laughter has this incredible way of cutting through the noise and getting to the heart of things.

> It's important to laugh at the issues of the day

Is it? In Robert Heilein's Stranger in a Strange Land one of the central conflicts involves the main character who's grown up on Mars, where there are no humans and no humor. He is thrust into Earth, humans and humor and makes a bold observation about humor: We only laugh at things that cause pain. Whether physical, mental or spiritual, all humor is reflecting on pain.

So with that in mind, laughter starts to look a lot more like a psychological hiccup. Or a reaction to pain. That's all without getting into who's doing the laughing and who's being laughed at. They aren't mutually exclusive, but they have different psychological impacts on each participant. Does the person being laughed at, want to be laughed at? Perhaps to them its another form of social control...

His observation is a work of fiction, not an authoritative or evidence based one.

I take it you've never read Mad magazine then?

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?

> 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......

Working link to the page that contains the picture: https://btwberkshires.com/arts/visual-arts/mad-magazine-draw...

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)

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.

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.

Some pop culture has changed in the interim. A couple times a decade, I find myself using the "Ordinary conformists / Non-conformists / MAD non-conformists" article I saw in my grandparent's collection as a child.

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 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.

>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

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.

"potrzebie" was the default password for Wizard(#1) on TinyMUD and its derivatives. If I recall correctly, that usage is traced all the way back to Jim Aspnes' original, minimal database.

https://www.tinymux.org/install.txt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Aspnes

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.

This nostalgia trio reminded me of the article claiming a long, previous-to-MAD history of Alfred E. Neuman.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/03/03/a-boy-with-no...

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"

As a kid I used to enjoy MAD as my dad used to bring copies from his office library. Long before I even knew who Tintin or Asterix were, I knew Neumann. Lol

I bought a 6-7 CD set of all MAD issues from start to early 90s but it doesn't run anymore, not in Windows 11. Even the software was well designed with funny instructions and commands

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.

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!

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.

The Viz Comics is similar

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

There's also an updated set on DVD called "Absolutely MAD" which goes to 2006: https://madcoversite.com/cd.html

There is Mad Magazine reboot from DC Comics, comes out every other month. I just ordered it yesterday (in response to this HN thread), so we'll see how it is. I figured for $20 for a year it was worth a try, see what the son thinks of it. https://www.dc.com/mad

Magazines are basically dead. It's YouTube channels that are molding kids humor now.

My babysitter in the late 90’s had a stack of mad magazines (and possibly other humor type competitor mags, like Cracked or Nuts) I would explore.

The one that lives permanently in my head is a bit where they show off a full page cutaway of a house (and possibly wider social infrastructure) designed for every single person being so fat they use mobility scooters to get around, the tone framed of course an an optimistic advancement for society.

That said, I’m not sure if it was MAD or one of the other copycat humor mags. I’ve never been able to find it again in the MAD archives I’ve seen.

My mom would buy me these because she loved hearing me laughing hysterically.

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.

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.

My favourite issue was the one that had "video games based on real life"

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/167708-mad-magazine-video-...

Some are pretty funny. I always wanted to implement a bunch of them.

One of my favorites has always been the pharmacist behind the scenes dispensing all prescription medications from a single huge bottle of aspirin.

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...

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.

I have heard (in uk?) you listen to radio to get the source and type it in! By the time of late 1970s you have source code disc or even pirated diskette (cutting hole). Hence except a few miss the experience of typing your source code or listening to them.

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!

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...

You know this is also satire, right?

If it is (and I'm not convinced), what difference does it make?

The first read would be to find all the squggles of Sergio Aragonés...

Brilliant marginalarian.

Every Friday from age 7-12 my mom would take me to the grocery store with her and proceed to take 2 hours to shop. I would read every comic they had including MAD and Cracked. Also superhero stuff

A fantastic way to spend those grocery trips!

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!

I started reading Mad in the mid-60s, before I was old enough to get the humor. My first firm memory of it was the Star Trek musical parody. Since I was practically raised on Rogers & Hammerstein and Lerner & Lowe, I knew all the melodies and it was just hilarious.

in my day MAD was purely subscription based: no advertising

“What Simple Pastime is Becoming a Luxury that Many Americans Can No Longer Afford?”

Anyone have the “after” of the fold-in image?

Teeth. I can't afford teeth.

AKA "luxury bones".

"eating"

"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.

MAD didn’t just entertain, it pushed boundaries and made people question the world around them

I once worked with the Normal Rockwell Estate and their letterhead used Comic Sans.

>spoke truth to power

I've become actually allergic to certain phrases.

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