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. That was because Mad didn’t just make us laugh, often to the point of tears; it freed us from the stupidest, most unsustainable beliefs we were supposed to hold about our country – such as, well, that it wasn’t run by idiots.
Mad’s best-known contributors shared one vision: that America wasn’t at all what America said it was
Nothing measures the cultural shift regarding Mad........