MAD’s mischievous, devil-may-care Alfred E. Neuman — sadly not running for president in 2020

My brief note on the passing of MAD magazine prompted one reader, an older drill sergeant type, to say:

“Oh my! Your thinking diverged from a neat-of-a-pin construction? Listen, Waldo, your thinking has never ever been anything but outside the box, tongue in cheek, crushing metaphors and a touch of pornography for color. Assuming that you were as irreverent in college as you were in the Navy, your professors either looked upon your little blue books as an opportunity to hoot with grins or bellow in discontent at your negative and disrespect at what they called school or church dogma. Your mind is not lost or wandering, you are just Marlow.”

To which I replied:

I have always tried to say what was on my mind. As you know from the past 30+ years, there was just a lotta shit in there being flung around. Sorta like what caged monkeys on meth do. Most everyone else I knew growing up, who spoke their minds, had little to nothing to say. Consequently, I tried to get the last word in first, since it saved time so we could move on to something more interesting or whatever next was going to happen or require discussion/decisions. What you heard from me were my initial reactions to life in a world that still appears flat to me, which experts insist telling us is round, but that I find in many instances wholly and utterly crooked.

Sometimes shit comes outta my mouth so fast that I feel like the dummy on the knee of some unseen ventriloquist whose lips are sealed while mine are flapping. Consequently, my careers and life have been full of previous experiences that made me briefly pause before going ahead and making the same mistake.

Still, life has been good to me — likely due in no small part to what I suspect are some very powerful guardian forces in a parallel universe who are taking powerful hallucinogens. There can be no other rational explanation for this ongoing miscarriage of the principles of justice.

Yet, as far as I can tell, besides my mother, the lack of ADHD diagnoses and prescription treatment drugs during the 1950s, comic books, MAD magazine and literary classics during my formative years were pretty much the reasons I turned out this way. The fluoride in my hometown’s water supply may have added a bit of spice and funk.

Funny that you mention my years in college and USN. My college boy thoughts on French avant garde literature were in fact somewhat off the wall. Perhaps because my small private university needed my undiscounted tuition payments, they encouraged me. In the USN, I was seconded a few times to participate in idea generation or crisis/conundrum sessions/teams, since I was an out-of-the-box, no-boundaries type.

I found out many decades later, a year or so before he died, that my highly introverted, metallurgical engineer father was similarly afflicted. Biology? Perhaps.

Maybe my untidiness of mind had its roots in the bad bouts of scarlet fever and tuberculosis I suffered in the mid 1950s. I don’t remember ever getting pissed off at all about it. At one time or other I may have wondered if these things would be central to my existence. In addition to chicken pox, mumps, two types of measles, multiple bouts of the flu and asthma, it seemed that being sick all the time was becoming my way in life. It can’t be was my thought and hope. So instead of getting angry or depressed, I started, unconsciously at first, focusing on being funny as a way of fighting back with a vengeance.

All of us have stuff in our lives that drives us crazy, bat-shit mad. We can spend hours reliving the unfair, unappreciative, inconsiderate treatment life inflicts on us. But getting angry at this stuff made just about as much sense to me as being mad at a bookcase for being a bookcase. I figured that these diseases chose me and not vice versa. It was likely then, when these lousy visitations had been fully stuffed into my ears, my nostrils, my lungs, under my skin and fingernails, that there was no other path forward for me other than laughter.

Better to laugh along with the world about life rather than being righteously angry about it and all alone, no?. You just can’t stay mad or sad about life when you say stuff that makes you and others laugh. MAD magazine helped me greatly with this.

As a kid, I was always a really fast reader, and I would fly through a comic book in a few minutes and be mad and then sad that it ended so quickly. Later on I started to look at the panels more carefully, and realize that so much of it was about the art. That was truly the subversive part of its playful rebelliousness. The art was the melody part of MAD’s music.

The magazine’s writers and artists were true mad scientists in a laboratory experimenting with different outcomes and takes on America’s culture, values, and stories. They likely did most of their work during the daytime. Working at night when it was dark, dark and more dark would have resulted in some very scary stuff, and they would have become very sleepy and irritable. I suspect that these insane MADmen all had little sane men inside of them muttering “You’re mad, truly raving mad, barking dog mad.” It would have been a wonderful place to work.

Marlow

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