Sorry, No More Borscht

A bold claim, that subtitle: But if any single institution could claim to have warped America’s brain, it would be the one composed of “the usual gang of idiots.” MAD magazine was, in some ways, born twice. The first time was as a comic book, an offering from a company better known, at the time, for its horror, war, and science fiction comics—it was intended to make fun of the rest of the line. The second time was after that company, EC Comics, was hounded out of the comic book business by a widespread moral panic culminating in the 1954 Senate hearing held by the Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. So MAD rebranded itself as a magazine—which would not be subject to the new self-censorship of the industry—and went on to sell millions and millions of copies to adolescents and the adolescently-minded across the country.

Somehow, especially in its heyday in the third quarter of the American century, the magazine managed to be simultaneously subversive and mainstream, nurturing countercultural sensibilities of rebellion with visual techniques borrowed from, and by, Madison Avenue. The MAD artists who ruthlessly parodied Hollywood studio products would be hired by those same studios to advertise their latest comedies, which, by the 1970s, were often influenced by the gags and sensibility of the magazine.

This creative symbiosis, the love bite of the hand that feeds you at arm’s length—explored in a new collection of essays edited by David Mikics—is as fair a description of American Jewish comedy as any. So it’s no surprise that, especially at the start, most of the stars in MAD’s orbit were Jewish—starting, of course, with publisher Bill Gaines, who once said that his staff and contributors created the magazine, but he provided the atmosphere. When you consider that he once convinced a stockroom boy over an extended period that he had an identical twin brother—and had that twin brother introduced around the office—you kind of see what he meant. In that madhouse, overseen by editor Al Feldstein from 1956 until 1985, one hundred Jewish flowers bloomed.

There was Mort Drucker, whose uncanny skill at caricature was central to the deadly impact of MAD’s parody, giving the reader the sense of Old Master portraits stretched like Atlantic City taffy and run through a funhouse mirror. There was Al Jaffee, a first-generation American Jew who was reverse emigrated by his troubled mother to her Lithuanian shtetl at age six and claimed, upon his return and ever after, to think in Yiddish. Maybe that helped him create MAD’s iconic Fold-In. And there was the traditionally religious Dave Berg, whose “The Lighter Side of . . .” cartoons provided a gentle, and in some ways aspirationally Gentile, satirical look at contemporary phenomena. His pipe-clenching, frequently exasperated Everyman was exactly the kind of comic figure that populated the television shows of Carl Reiner (Dick Van Dyke) and Norman Lear (Archie Bunker).

But it wasn’t just the artists-writers and their themes that were Jewish; it was the language. MAD was as responsible as any American cultural phenomenon for introducing the sound of Yiddish to the general populace. Note that formulation. Yes, there were certainly actual Yiddish words that appeared in MAD (say, ganef, fershlugginer, and, yes, hoohah, which Harkavy’s authoritative Yiddish dictionary demurely translates as “noise” but in its American formulation is somehow simultaneously both grander and more withering). But there were other classic MAD-isms that seem, to an un-Yiddishly tutored reader, to fall into the same category but aren’t, like potrzebie. (Or sort of aren’t, anyway: In an interview with Leah Garrett reprinted in the book, Jaffee revealed the etymology of the word to be a kind of sniggering Yiddish schoolboy portmanteau of putz and rebbe). Iconic names of American pop culture were particularly at risk for this Yiddishization: As Nathan Abrams points out in his essay, Batman’s partner in crime fighting became Rubin, and a Real American Hero was transformed into G. I. Shmoe.

Will Elder, the “Brueghel of the Bronx,” as Daniel Bronstein calls him in a wonderful essay, was a visual parodist without peer, capable of turning out brilliant facsimiles of Disney and DC products alike. But he was also insistent on flavoring those parodies with a visual and verbal humor that he called “schmaltz.” In a parody of Dragnet, for instance, an interrogation in a restaurant is accompanied by a series of ever-changing signs indicating WE GOT BORSCHT, BORSCHT YOU BET!; WE’RE RUNNING LOW ON BORSCHT; SORRY: NO MORE BORSCHT. (One less clued-in reader wrote in: “What in the world is borscht?”) In another superparody, Popeye, sorry, Poopeye, faced off with Superduperman. You could tell he wasn’t the original because the big insignia on his chest featured an ad for Fleischmann’s yeast.

MAD, in other words, was the perfect fit for an America that was coming around to Jewish humor—a kind of Borscht Belt irreverence, heavy on the ethnic sound and sensibility, lighter on the specific cultural content—as American humor. This was the approach of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows (which was perhaps MAD’s only equal when it came to the quality of parodies), and it would be the hallmark of some of the contemporary “sick” Jewish comedians of the 1950s and 60s, most notably Lenny Bruce. Unsurprising, then, that the magazine would go on to influence so many comedians, essayists, and, of course, cartoonists, many of whom relished the Jewish voice behind that smiling, gap-toothed “What? Me Worry?” face.

That said, Alfred E. Neuman was unquestionably goyish. Can you imagine a Jew being that placidly unworried? “You don’t have to be Jewish to be Jewish,” Dave Berg once said, “but it helps,” which took Bruce’s famous dichotomy about Jewish and goyish one slight step further. Of course, you didn’t have to be Jewish to create work that would be foundational to MAD’s legacy. Cuban satirist Antonio Prohías, for example, came up with the inimitable, inimical Spy vs. Spy; Sergio Aragonés would schmaltz up the margins with those tiny curlicues of comic detail.

Mikics’s collection of essays is more in the spirit of a celebration than a roast; its gentle, nostalgic humor does not partake, unlike that of its subject, of the jugular vein. All of the contributors—about two-thirds of the essays are original to the anthology—pretty much take the subtitle’s argument for granted, but that is as it should be (your reviewer does too).

Some authors describe the shock of discovering the work that spoke to their secret, rebellious hearts. Ivan Cohen’s essay, titled “The Golden Age Is Twelve Dept.,” takes off from the oft-cited factoid that whatever version of a long-running cultural fixture you encounter at that formative age is the one you find the best, regardless of actual quality. Art Spiegelman’s and Peter Kuper’s comic contributions brilliantly combine their own recognizable styles with MAD’s own chameleonic visual sensibility.

But though they all come to praise MAD, they also pretty much take for granted that they are giving the graveside hesped. Although if you squint, you can claim that MAD is still publishing—online, mostly, and mixing new material with classic reprints—no one could claim it has even a shadow of its original influence (at its height, in the mid-1970s, it had a circulation of roughly three million). Is this because its self-deprecating, meta-aware sensibility took over the cultural mainstream, so there’s no need for it anymore? Is it that the tightrope of Jewish marginality and acceptance has changed so dramatically that MAD’s balancing act no longer resonates? Or is it just that we all grew up? Or, maybe more likely, that the culture grew down?

The elegiac essays Mikics has collected are, largely, silent on these questions, choosing to focus on MAD’s indomitable achievements of good humor and bad taste. For its own part, MAD was always particularly unromantic about itself and might well have ruthlessly mocked any attempts at elegy. But in this—unlike in so much else—it would be wrong.

Those of us who read MAD magazine during its golden age, when we turned twelve, understand how important it was to our sense of self. And those who read it as Jews, and as Jewish, will find themselves here in good company.