Nothing was off-limits for ‘the usual gang of idiots’ at Mad

As many of us who grew up in America in the 1960s and 1970s learned, Mad magazine didn’t, as our parents warned us, warp our brains – because our brains were pretty warped to begin with. It was a time when what passed for culture was almost entirely scripted by Madison Avenue, promising that overpriced concoctions of sugar water and aspirin would eliminate all pain, social awkwardness and anxiety, or transport us to happy, sex-crazed beach parties with packs of photogenic young people.

Our movies and television shows depicted America as the hero and ultimate victor of every war and conflagration on urban or foreign battlefields or even in outer space; and the people who ran our federal institutions unquestionably knew exactly what they were doing all the time – unlike the ‘usual gang of idiots’ at Mad. The problem for many of us was that those self-professed idiots made more sense than the authority figures.