Al Jaffee has died. The cartoonist, best known for his work with the storied humor Mad magazine, died in Manhattan this month. He was 102 years old.

Jaffee holds the Guinness World Record for the longest career as a comic artist, beginning in 1942 and ending when he retired from Mad in 2020. He was one of Mad’s contributors for more than 50 years.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Mad magazine helped create modern American humor. From Saturday Night Live to Chris Rock, Seinfeld to Dave Chappelle, and South Park, it’s hard to imagine today’s comedy existing were it not for Mad. The magazine offered an environment in the mid-20th century in which American entertainment, politics, and mass media were satirized. The cover always included somewhere the bemused, “What, Me Worry?” face of mascot Alfred E. Neuman. Inside was the work of brilliant writers and artists such as Jaffee, Mort Drucker, Sergio Aragones, Dave Berg, Antonio Prohias , Paul Coker Jr. , Jack Rickard , Don Edwing , Dick DeBartolo , and Lou Silverstone .

Jaffee was most famous for the “ridiculous fold-in,” the last page of the magazine that would depict a certain message yet become something different when you fold the page in on itself. Thus a butterfly with a short editorial below about “fabulous creatures being exploited” transforms into Elvis Presley — another fabulous creature who was exploited. Funny and clever, but also true and biting.

Decades before the superhero craze and its endless and increasingly dumb movies, Mad was laughing at the genre with its parody, “Superduperman!!!”

Mad genuinely encouraged critical thinking of everything, including the magazine itself. In that sense, Mad lives on — not on the humorless Left, but on the Right. Steven Crowder, Bill Maher, Glenn Greenwald, and Ben Shapiro all seem to live in the spirit of Mad, which was about calling out the crooked and corrupt media, but with laughs. Journalist Richard Corliss once described Mad this way: “The intellectual equivalent to the screams Elvis Presley elicited from pubescent girls. Connecting with the Mad zeitgeist meant plugging into the world of culture — because, first and foremost, Mad was the medium that kidded the media.”

In 1988, cartoonist Art Spiegelman was asked to talk to an art class taught by Mad’s first editor, Harvey Kurtzman, at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Spiegelman praised Kurtzman, who has been called “the spiritual father of postwar American satire and the godfather of late-20th-century alternative humor.” Spiegelman said: “Mad was an urban junk collage that said, ‘Pay attention! The mass media are lying to you, including this comic book!’”

Before former President Donald Trump came on the scene blasting fake news, Mad was telling us that the mass media were lying to us. Entertainers especially got scorched. In 1971, Mad published a parody of Barbra Streisand. The liberal activist and singer was turned into the character Buddy, the Yiddish word for grandmother, and portrayed in the film, On a Clear Day You Can See a Funny Girl Singing Forever. The beloved and preachy liberal anti-war sitcom MASH became MUSH.

In Seeing Mad, a book of academic essays about the magazine, editor Judith Yaross Lee notes that while the New Yorker wanted to represent high culture from Manhattan, many of its contributors were from places other than New York. Conversely, Mad aimed for a national audience while most of its creators were from particular parts of New York — Brooklyn and the Bronx: “Founding editor and chief writer Harvey Kurtzman, artists Will Elder, Al Jaffee, John Severin, and writer-artist Al Feldstein (who succeeded Kurtzman as editor in April 1956) were all buddies from New York’s High School of Music and Art.” This was a contrast to the New Yorker’s “upscale identity and WASP bona fides.”

Jewish humor was the lifeblood of Mad, from the language to the men who drew and wrote the issues. Mad created the word “furshlugginer,” which comes from the Yiddish “shlogan” (to hit). Other Yiddish and Yiddish-inspired words in Mad included “borscht,” “ganef,” “bveebleftzer,” “farshimmelt,” “potrzebie” and “halavah.”

Yet while Mad’s burlesque humor and anti-establishment satire was often rooted in Jewish sensibilities, it translated into the wider culture and became the foundation of modern American humor. At least, the American humor that hasn’t been sanitized and bowdlerized by the Left.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil' s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.