Wandering through the stacks at the college library one day in my freshman year, I happened upon the shelves devoted to American humor. What a discovery! I was thrilled. Here were all these authors I’d never heard of — people who’d written in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Imagine the treasures! Imagine the laughs! Pulling down one book after another, I prepared to chortle, to giggle, and even to guffaw.
Instead I found myself baffled. Bemused. Bewildered.
Humor? How was this stuff humor?
At that time, back in the late 1970s, I was a major in English with a specialization in American literature. Eventually the syllabus of one of the courses I took included a book called American Humor: A Study of the National Character by Constance Rourke. I looked forward to reading it. Given the title, I foolishly thought that it might actually be amusing. Boy, was I wrong. In fact I was (again) baffled, bemused, and bewildered.
[I]f Mad’s subversiveness was admittedly directed in the 1950s largely at big corporations … in the late Sixties and Seventies … it was more preoccupied with making fun of the New Left, Women’s Lib, and the youth revolution.
Yes, Constance Rourke appeared to be a highly knowledgeable critic. But she also seemed to have no sense of humor whatsoever, which was something of a drawback given the topic of her book.
More important, however, was the “American humor” she wrote about: wheezy whimsy, most of it, about New England Yankees and Appalachian backwoodsmen.
What? I was born in America. I’d lived in America my whole life. This was American humor? Yes, some of what I encountered in Rourke’s book was vaguely familiar from Mark Twain and a couple of other classic writers. I loved Twain. But when I thought of American humor I thought of, well, material of more recent vintage. Material that didn’t just make me chuckle, but made me howl so hard that I gasped for air.
What, for example? Put it this way. Like everyone else of my generation — I’m a late Baby Boomer — I appreciated I Love Lucy. And I loved The Dick Van Dyke Show. But the TV series that really hit me where I lived, that felt as if they’d invented it just for me, was The Honeymooners. The total lack of control with which the hapless bus driver Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) screamed at his wife, Alice (“Bang! Zoom!”), felt more like real life — and was funnier — than anything else on TV.
Even moreso, I responded to Abbott and Costello, even though it felt not at all like real life. It took place in a world all its own. Our two heroes (Bud Abbott, Lou Costello) — jobless, rootless, with no visible source of income or personal history — inhabited a bizarro world in which they slept in the same rooming-house bedroom and dressed up every morning in proper 1950s jackets and ties and hats to set forth into a world of surreal adventures, utterly unbridled by the rules that seemed to govern other TV shows or, for that matter, ordinary human existence. In one episode, they packed up the car for a vacation to Phoenix — and drove about 30 feet, stopping next door at the Phoenix Hotel. For me, it was more wonderfully out of this world than Star Trek.
During that early-TV era there was also a show called Dobie Gillis. I found it utterly uninteresting — standard TV fare of the time, tame and predictable. I probably watched a total of ten minutes of the entire series. Which was odd, given that I enjoyed the book on which it was purportedly based, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1951), by Max Shulman (1919-88), and adored Shulman’s earlier opus, Barefoot Boy with Cheek (1943), a zany masterpiece of middlebrow absurdity that was for me, for a while there, something of a comic touchstone.
Later I would become a zealous fan of the early, funny movies of Woody Allen, of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, of the TV series The Odd Couple (except season 1), and of Howard Stern, whom I listened to religiously for years until he gave up being the King of All Media and decided instead to become the most politically correct man in the history of show business. I loved the relentless, uproarious iconoclasm of Joan Rivers, too: one of my life’s regrets is that when I passed her on Fifth Avenue in 1998, I chose to respect her privacy rather than to gush over her.
At some point after encountering Constance Rourke’s book — I’m not sure when — I woke up to the realization that my sense of what was funny had been formed not by traditional American “humorists” of the kind she studied so earnestly but almost entirely by — what’s the word? Oh, yes. Jews.
No, Jackie Gleason wasn’t Jewish. But his writers were. Lou Costello wasn’t Jewish, but Bud Abbott was, and so was the brains behind their series, the unsung genius Sidney Fields. Similarly, The Dick Van Dyke Show, with two WASPs in the lead roles and a heavily Jewish supporting cast, was the creation of the Jewish wunderkind Carl Reiner, who, like Fields, hovered in the backgrounds of many of his show’s episodes.
Why was I never remotely entertained by Red Skelton, the beloved comic whose variety series was in the top 10 Nielson ratings during most of my childhood? Am I oversimplifying if I say it was because he was a WASP, a cultural descendant of the humorists Constance Rourke wrote about in her book?
All of which brings us, finally, to Mad Magazine, which I think did more to shape my notion of comedy than anything else, and which is the subject of a new documentary, When We Went MAD, in which director Alan Bernstein makes a point of just how Jewish that remarkable rag was. No, the great names at Mad — and there were many of them — weren’t all Jews from Brooklyn, but most of them were. And their comic sensibility was essentially that of the very best Borscht Belt standups and the blue-chip writers of Sid Caesar’s legendary Your Show of Shows.
In other words, Mad (which was founded in 1952) wasn’t just Jewish. It was really, really Jewish.
Not that I realized it at the time. All I knew was that I loved Mad. It spoke to me. Which is why so much of When We Went MAD (just out on Amazon Prime Video) was a disappointment. “Mad was the precursor to The Daily Show,” says one of Bernstein’s talking heads. The Daily Show? As Alfred E. Neumann would say: “Ecch!” No, Mad, with its unerring impiety, was the precise opposite of The Daily Show, which perfected the art of shamelessly spinning the news (and deceptively editing interviews) to rigidly enforce the establishment narrative.
The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart himself isn’t one of the talking heads in When We Went MAD, but the list of folks who show up in this film to praise the magazine’s irreverence is heavy with names like Bryan Cranston and Judd Apatow and even Tom Carvell, the executive producer of the shabby Daily Show knock-off Last Week Tonight with John Oliver — all of whom, far from being avatars of Mad-like heresy, are vapid parrots of leftist orthodoxy and members of the very Hollywood elite that was one of Mad’s favorite targets.
The documentary’s line on Mad, which is articulated by one after another of Bernstein’s talking heads, is that it was a “left-wing” take on “Americana” — a “wonderfully subversive” response to “an era of tremendous repression” when “the whole country was in a conformist mode.” The regular Mad cartoon feature “Spy vs. Spy,” we’re told, was about U.S,-USSR moral equivalence; what’s omitted from the documentary is the fact that its Cuban-refugee creator, Antonio Prohías, was no Cold War fence-sitter but a fervent enemy of Castro.
Bernstein’s emphasis on Mad’s so-called left-wing subversiveness (“no one else had ever thought to make fun of corporations”) is misleading on two counts. First, the main attraction wasn’t the subversiveness; it was the wit. One of Bernstein’s talking heads, Quentin Tarantino, gets it right: “the pull was the movie satires.” God, yes. Antenna on the Roof! Is Paris Boring! In the Out Exit! The Sound of Money! The Ecchorcist!
Second, if Mad’s subversiveness was admittedly directed in the 1950s largely at big corporations and the advertising business, by the time I was reading current issues in the late Sixties and Seventies — at the height of its popularity — it was more preoccupied with making fun of the New Left, Women’s Lib, and the youth revolution. When I was barely into my teens, it was Mad that told me it was OK to be amused by the mindless, shiftless, three-chords-on-a-guitar way in which kids several years older than me were playing at rebellion.
Witness Sleazy Rider (June 1970). Or the April 1968 cover, which depicted perennial cover boy Alfred E. Neumann as a dopey-looking flower child, complete with love beads and earrings, under the headline — in psychedelic Laugh-In typeface — “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead.”
A July 1971 parody of the now-forgotten movie Joe jeered at its premise — a Park Avenue heiress, beloved by her parents, moves into a downtown hovel with some drugged-out bum “to find meaningful answers to life.” In the April 1975 parody of Death Wish, the cop who’s hunting down the vigilante tells an underling: “I want a list of names of everyone in New York who’s been mugged, or had a member of his family mugged.” To which the underling replies: “That’s easy, Chief. Just pick up the phone book!”
Bernstein does include a brief old clip of Mad publisher Willim M. Gaines saying that he and his crew prided themselves on having “no politics.” Longtime Mad writer Tom Koch says that “you had to hit all sides,” while adding that “I think I was the only conservative who wrote for Mad.”
I find that hard to believe. What seems certain to me is that more than a few of today’s populist MAGA voters were formed in part by Mad Magazine’s reflexively sarcastic response to an era that embraced both The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and The Madwoman in the Attic — the very idea of biting, acerbic criticism, after all, being a feature not of the lockstep, humorless left but of the freedom-of-speech-loving right.
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