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Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

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%...

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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...

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...

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.

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.

> 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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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