YOU MUST BE MAD!

Mark Campbell takes a nostalgic look back at some of the best film and TV spoofs from the decidedly unwoke MAD magazine. This time round he brings you the final 15 of his top 30 spoof issues!

Last issue I looked at fifteen hilarious examples of MAD’s famous film and TV strip cartoon parodies. This month I give you fifteen more. They’re listed in strict chronological order as I couldn’t decide which were my favourites—they’re all great.

MAD (always in uppercase) straddled that borderland between wacky kids’ comics like Krazy, and adult satirical mags such as Punch or Private Eye.

Buying MAD felt like a minor act of rebellion. Even if half the jokes didn’t land, because they were about American culture, you could admire the chutzpah with which the artists and writers satirised anything and everything they wanted to. For a child of the 70s, it opened up a whole world of previously undreamt of humour.

The MAD magazine we got over here was the UK variant, but apart from a home-grown letters page and a few anglicised Americanisms, the differences were minor.

MAD was the creation of writer and cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman, and began life in 1952, as a comic rather than a magazine, published by EC Comics. In 1955 it switched to a magazine format, edited by Albert Feldstein, and by 1959, the UK edition had started appearing across the Atlantic.

David Climie was the first UK editor, and the publisher over here was originally Thorpe and Porter, with its distinctive ‘teepee’ logo (TP, geddit?). Dez Skinn took over as British editor in the 70s, later replaced by Ron Letchford. Appearing on almost every cover was the freckle-faced grinning portrait of MAD mascot ‘Alfred E Neumann’.

UK issues appeared initially every two months, utilising covers and contents from the US versions, albeit in no particular order. In 1966 production stepped up to 12 issues a year, in line with the American version.