Humor In A Jugular Vein

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By Newsweek Editors

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William Gaines might have gotten a kick out of his obituary in last Thursday's New York Times. Referring to the bearded, bearish publisher of Mad magazine, who died on June 3 at 70, the paper said, "He danced twice in his life (once at a lesson to prepare for his high school prom, the other time at the prom)." One can imagine Mad in its 1950s heyday running a mock Times obit page with headlines like "Rear Adm. Melvin Coznowski; Played Vital Role in Battle of Midway; Danced 39 Times" and "Mrs. Edith Furshlugginer, Socialite, Philanthropist; Danced on 674 Occasions, Friends Say." Furshlugginer (Yiddish for "beaten up " ) and Coznowski (coined by Ernie Kovacs) were special Mad words that appeared in every issue, along with "potrzebie," which Gaines never bothered to define. Heck, or as the French say, potrzebie, he couldn't define his job. Gaines didn't write the words or produce Mad's cunningly chaotic art work. Mostly, he sat beneath a fleet of toy dirigibles, his long white hair held back with combs. "My staff and contributors create the magazine," Gaines said. "What I create is the atmosphere."

What flourished in that strange climate was a magazine that validated many a kid's innermost feelings about mass culture and Madison Avenue. "I couldn't believe it," Rick Meyerowitz, who grew up to become a prominent commercial artist, once said. "Somebody was putting down on paper all these things that were in my mind." Mad was created in 1952 by Harvey Kurtzman, an artist/writer then working on "Two-Fisted Tales" and "Front-Line Combat" for a firm founded by Gaines's father. Originally titled "Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD: Humor in a Jugular Vein," the magazine was, at first, mostly a spoof of the day's dumber comics. Instead of Superman, Mad gave you Superduperman, a hero whose alter ego, Clark Bent, had flies buzzing around his head and who couldn't get to first base with Lois Pain. Instead of Prince Valiant, you got Prince Violent--and all for, as it said on the cover, "Our Price 25 cents Cheap." Parents called it pure trash, but the Usual Gang of Idiots (as the Mad crew was known) took Alfred E. Newman's What, Me Worry? attitude. After all, they were promoting the magazine as pure trash.

It wasn't, though. Mad once reached as many as 2.4 million buyers, one of whom was R. Crumb, the future Cezanne of sleaze. And Kurtzman left in 1956 to create, among other things, "Little Annie Fanny" for Playboy. But with Gaines at the helm, in his fashion, Mad never got scatological or terribly concerned with sex. It just lurched along on its strange eight-times-a-year schedule (the January issue comes out in November), taking neither prisoners nor advertising, poking fun at movies and television and running regular features like Antonio Prohias's "Spy vs. Spy." Sales peaked in the '70s, then declined as baby boomers outgrew the magazine. In 1968 Kinney, which became Warner Communications, acquired Mad, but Gaines never stopped going to the office ("I plan to die here," he said recently) or being legendarily cheap. He once interrupted an editorial meeting and demanded to know whether a call to Reading, Pa., had been business or personal. Every year or two, though, he'd take his employees on a trip. The last was a cruise to Bermuda, during which he and his entourage re-created the crowded-stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers' "A Night at the Opera." Funny guy.

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