Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword. First There Was Mad: Reflections of a Former Managing Editor of National Lampoon | Peter Kaminsky
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction. MADness, Mishugas, Manhattan: Mad as That Other New York(er) Humor | Judith Yaross Lee
Part I. The Usual Gang
1. Inside the Editorial Process: Mad Veterans Jaffee and Meglin Look at Their Editors | Paul Levitz
2. Harvey Kurtzman and Modern American Satire | M. Thomas Inge
3. Al Feldstein and Mad ’s Humor of Social Critique | Margaret Cavin Hambrick
4. Wally Wood: Picturing Male Adolescent Desire in Mad ’s Early Parodies | Joseph W. Slade
5. The Lighter—and Weightier—Side of Mad; Or, Everything I Needed to Know About Gender and Sexuality I Learned from Dave Berg | Ann M. Ciasullo
Part II. Features from Cover to Fold-In
6. The Secret History of Alfred E. Neuman | Alan Rankin
7. The “Mad 20” with Alfred E. Neuman; Or, It’s the Covers, Stupid | Christopher J. Gilbert
8. The Prohías Paradox: The Cold War Specificity and Existential Universality of “Spy vs. Spy” | Michael J. Socolow
9. Mad About Poe: Poetry in a Jugular Vein | Dennis W. Eddings
10. Sing Along with Alfred: Humor, Satire, and Culture in the Music of Mad | John Bird
11. You Always Hurt the Ones You Love: Mad Magazine’s Affectionate Parodies of Beloved Film Classics | Don Baird
12. A Golden Age of Blecch: Mad Magazine’s Parodic Satire of Quality Television | Ethan Thompson
13. Folding Against the Establishment: Satiric Distance and Difference in Al Jaffee’s Back Cover Feature in Mad Magazine | Kerry Soper
Part III. Themes
14. A Secular Talmud: The Jewish Sensibility of Mad Magazine | Nathan Abrams
15. Mutually Assured Disparagement: Enmification and Enlightenment in Early 1950s Mad | James J. Kimble
16. Diplomats Gone Mad: A Musical Rumble | James D. Bloom
17. Joining the Fray? Mad on Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew | Nicolas Labarre
Part IV. Theories
18. “Comedy before Country”: Engaged Levity and Absurdist Critique in Mad Magazine | Jeffrey St. Onge
19. Genre Studies and Mad Magazine: Changing and Challenging Genres, 1953–1966 | Kathleen Mollick
Part V. Legacies
20. Sons of Mad: Harvey Kurtzman and the Rise of Underground Comix (an Alternate-Universe Analysis) | Nicholas Sammond
21. Quotations from the Future: Harvey Kurtzman’s “Superduperman!,” Nostalgia, and Alan Moore’s Miracleman | Brian Cremins
Part VI. Resources
Mad ’s “Usual Gang of Idiots”: Selected Capsule Biographies | Joseph Otto and Judith Yaross Lee
A Mad Timeline, 1952–2020: Leah Szalai and Judith Yaross Lee
Bibliography, Compiled by Kelley Macek
Contributors
Index