![]() This image in turn was a “made safe” version of the ape-like caricatures of the Irish common a century before (see Jacopo della Quercia’s “Seven Memes …”). The modern Neuman is said to descend directly from the image of an Irish “simpleton” used in promotions for painless dentistry as well as in advertisements for soap, baked goods, and other consumer goods and services around the turn of the century (for a complete survey see John Adcock’s excellent article at his blog Yesterday’s Papers). In fact it had appeared throughout the twentieth century, often in association with variations of the phrase “Me worry?”, on postcards, print ads, calendars, business cards, enamel signs, buttons and perhaps even the nose of a World War II-era B-26 bomber. The big surprise for me was to learn that the image now universally known as Alfred E. That story is probably closer to the truth. Kurtzman himself told several tales, stating elsewhere that he spotted his source on a postcard pinned to an office bulletin board. MAD-ologists clog the Internet with origin stories for the Neuman image. Neuman “was a face from an old high school biology textbook, used as an example of a person who lacked iodine.” With several articles about the connection between popular culture and the “monsters” of biology, how could I have missed such a clear and obvious thing? So it was a real “duh-oh” moment when I read in David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague that MAD artist Harvey Kurtzman claimed his inspiration for Alfred E. Kliban and National Lampoon for social commentary and comic kicks. Whether dressed as Marharishi Mahesh Yogi, Indiana Jones or Barack Obama, Neuman seemed to be stuck in a parallel universe where there was never a civil rights movement or a sexual revolution. I never much identified with MAD’s jug eared, gap toothed, ur-teenager. The magazine had its culturally relevant bits, like Don Martin’s ononmonpidic explosions and Sergio Aragones’ slapstick marginals, but on balance MAD was weighed down by filler of a sensibility that went out with Eisenhower. It was creepy anthropology, a moist record of the guilty id of my older siblings and younger aunts and uncles, subversive if a little toothless. Of course that’s partially why I liked it. Yet its humor always felt weirdly out of step, recycled, even a bit reactionary. ![]() ![]() At the time, the late 1960s and early 1970s, MAD was hitting its highest circulation numbers. MAD magazine was a rare treat when I was a young teenager, a little expensive and difficult to acquire on a regular basis, but a standard newsstand pickup ahead of road trips and summer weeks away.
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