Comments on: Going for the Jugular Vein

Going for the Jugular Vein

not_on_display — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 22:11:39 -0800

National Lampoon's 1971 parody of MAD magazine. [via Easily Mused]

By: KokuRyu

KokuRyu — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 22:15:43 -0800

Holy shit, this is awesome

By: aubilenon

aubilenon — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 22:24:22 -0800

Well, by decoding the morse code in Spy vs Spy I learned a new racial slur; evidently against Cubans. So I guess there's that.

By: Senor Cardgage

Senor Cardgage — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 22:38:05 -0800

This isnt very good, but I'm afraid it's being protected by a dense force-field of my own nostalgia. Drat!

By: Rhaomi

Rhaomi — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 22:38:40 -0800

I used to read MAD off and on when I was in grade school -- one of their favorite targets was a shameless knockoff publication that tried (and mostly failed) to copy the MAD formula. They even had their own dopey mascot. It was pretty pathetic. Years later, MAD has slowly sunk into irrelevance, with more ads, a higher sale price, and a reduced release schedule. Meanwhile, that shameless knock-off I was talking about? You may know it better as Cracked.com, internet darling and master of the top-X list. And they're pretty chuffed about the role-reversal, too. (As for National Lampoon, it's a scandalized shell of itself that's released some of the dumbest movies on Earth. So it goes.)

By: Tube

Tube — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 22:41:00 -0800

Yeah, I remember this... The "now" being 1957 from the Then and Now was one of those childhood's end moments for me.

By: fungible

fungible — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 22:50:25 -0800

Man, NatLamp used to do some wonderfully vicious parodies. You know they did this as homage. A mean, roast-y sort of homage, but nonetheless. They were actually still good up until the 90s. Boy did it all go to hell after that.

By: Kattullus

Kattullus — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 23:00:25 -0800

The Onion and Mad had a parody-off back in 2002. The Onion: Body Of Missing Mad Magazine Reporter Found In Blecchistan Mad Magazine: The Bunion. That Mad Magazine reporter look eerily like a caricature of Andy Zaltzman. Incidentally, speaking of Zaltzman, The Bugle, the podcast he does with John Oliver, is where you should go for your satirical take on current affairs these days.

By: lukemeister

lukemeister — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 00:00:51 -0800

By the way, the new history of the National Lampoon is a lot of fun.

By: Alvy Ampersand

Alvy Ampersand — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 00:35:45 -0800

This isnt very good, but I'm afraid it's being protected by a dense force-field of my own nostalgia. Citizen Gaines is a classic, so I say fie on you! And your force-field.

By: Mitrovarr

Mitrovarr — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 00:46:11 -0800

Rhaomi: I used to read MAD off and on when I was in grade school -- one of their favorite targets was a shameless knockoff publication that tried (and mostly failed) to copy the MAD formula. They even had their own dopey mascot. It was pretty pathetic. Years later, MAD has slowly sunk into irrelevance, with more ads, a higher sale price, and a reduced release schedule. Meanwhile, that shameless knock-off I was talking about? You may know it better as Cracked.com, internet darling and master of the top-X list. And they're pretty chuffed about the role-reversal, too. I have no idea how they ever pulled that out. Cracked, as a magazine, was so bad that it made the world less funny by simply existing. It was less funny than a serial killer of puppies. That it would survive in any form, much less somehow actually become good (well, at least bearable) was just inconceivable. I'm honestly curious how they managed it - I suspect infernal contracts were involved.

By: telstar

telstar — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 01:27:32 -0800

Is it just me or are snark waves emanating from the Nat Lamp universe interfering completely with the snark waves from the Mad Mag universe, thus cancelling out all snark?

By: Mocata

Mocata — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 01:51:04 -0800

These days, National Lampoon is but a shadow of it's former self, lending it's once vaunted name to projects that should never see the light of day. In it's prime, however... Aaaaaaargh

By: Jimmy Havok

Jimmy Havok — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 02:36:15 -0800

Yeah, I remember this. It was both cruelly funny in its own right, and a marker than we were Adults now, and able to look back in disdain at our younger selves who had sucked down the MAD formula like it was cheap beer. MAD's heyday was the '50s, when they were doing things like illustrated versions of classic lit. The first time I read Rime of the Ancient Mariner was in a MAD reprint. A lot of my early exposure to the classics came from those reprints. The '60s MAD was admirable for its air of complete cynical disdain for everything. It was a great gift, even though they were sinking into formula. But by the '70s, there was only the formula. And Sergio Aragones.

By: acb

acb — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 03:19:48 -0800

I have no idea how they ever pulled that out. Cracked, as a magazine, was so bad that it made the world less funny by simply existing. Cracked.com bears as much relation to the original Cracked as pravda.ru bears to the Soviet Communist Party newspaper. In both cases, someone bought the name of a floundering, obsolete property and used it to launch something unrelated but more marketable. And wasn't the original Cracked merely the best known of a plethora of lame MAD knockoffs, complete with Neumanoid idiot/underclass-stereotype mascots?

By: crunchland

crunchland — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 03:40:21 -0800

Aw, I think you're being a little too hard on poor old Sylvester. I recall that Cracked came out at a different time of the month than Mad did, so you would have something else to read, and they had John Severin, and I liked his drawing style. I see that they ultimately stopped publishing as late as 2007, but I stopped reading it in the 70's, so maybe it went way way downhill in later years. In the early 70's though, when I was 10, I thought it was great.

By: hippybear

hippybear — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 04:21:59 -0800

Maybe this is a good place to drop this page (and link) for The Mad Magazine TV Special.

By: fungible

fungible — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 04:46:34 -0800

Ten ways Cracked finally became new successful than Mad

By: fungible

fungible — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 04:47:21 -0800

New=more

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 04:53:16 -0800

For whatever reason, my parents let me have a subscription to Mad all through my childhood. I was a loyal, rabid reader of the magazine. Yet, there was always a niggling little disconnect I always felt toward the magazine. Then, I discovered NatLamp and this parody pretty much voiced exactly what I was feeling, especially this page. I don't think I've so much as picked-up a Mad since then. Hmmm...Maybe I should scan my original copy of NatLamp's Sunday Newspaper parody and post it somewhere?

By: jeremias

jeremias — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 05:25:47 -0800

And wasn't the original Cracked merely the best known of a plethora of lame MAD knockoffs, complete with Neumanoid idiot/underclass-stereotype mascots? Yes. Yes it was. I am revealing publicly for the first time that I have assorted issues of Crazy from the late 70's and early 80's shamefully hidden in my attic.

By: Liquidwolf

Liquidwolf — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 05:31:05 -0800

Yes. Yes it was. I am revealing publicly for the first time that I have assorted issues of Crazy from the late 70's and early 80's shamefully hidden in my attic. Yep. I was just about to mention Crazy. I have some disturbing memories of that mag for some reason.

By: fish tick

fish tick — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 05:32:46 -0800

Mad fold-ins, past and present.

By: grumblebee

grumblebee — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 05:55:18 -0800

"Panic" was a "Mad" knockoff from EC Comics, the same company that produced "Mad."

By: acb

acb — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 06:59:27 -0800

Cracked came out at a different time of the month than Mad did, so you would have something else to read, and they had John Severin Not to mention Daniel Clowes, for a while.

By: jfuller

jfuller — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 07:11:46 -0800

> Yeah, I remember this. It was both cruelly funny in its own right, and a marker than we were Adults now, > and able to look back in disdain at our younger selves who had sucked down the MAD formula like it was cheap beer. My adult self looking back still thinks Don Martin was a very great cartoonist, my candidate for Greatest U.S. Cartoonist Who Never Sold Anything To The New Yorker. And TNYer is very much the less for that. I stare at Don's characters' hands all the time hoping some of that hand-drawing mojo will rub off on me. N.b. the linked Mad parody is dead on, but the Mad that existed before the "formula" set in (the one mostly drawn by Wallace Wood, Will Elder, and Jack Davis and written by Harvey Kurtzman) would not have been such a soft target. Hail and farewell, Wally.

By: Spatch

Spatch — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 07:17:48 -0800

Wow. This is very, very good. Dick DeBartolo mentions this parody in his memoirs, and how inwardly pleased he was to have been given a backhanded compliment in the middle of the Citizen Gaines piece ("Satire! Sounds familiar. Didn't we do that once?" "[Larry] Siegel or DeBartolo would know, but they're not here.") The fact that the piece is written in his style, well, that makes a different point, I guess. I never read the full piece, though, and I am just amazed at how brilliant it all is. Absolutely vicious, right down to the masthead. Burning the zeppelin along with Arthur the Plant at the end of Citizen Gaines, the Wally Wood ref, Paul Coker's cliche monsters, a very ham-fisted Scenes We'd Like to See (sorry, Jaffe), hell. I think the only big thing they didn't hit was Frank Jacobs' musical parodies. But holy crap, that letters column! It's all well done, but the end of it is precisely the kind of stuff National Lampoon did well: reffing in a single column Sartre, Daniel Keyes, and Tommy the Traveler, a notorious undercover cop in the early 70s who would infiltrate campus radical groups, incite them to violence, and then have 'em busted. Man. That's a lot of layers for a simple slam. Homage or not, however, they were right. MAD had lost its anarchy and energy by the 1970s, and it never came back from that. As much as I love the MAD Magazine I grew up with, I know its formula. Comfortable, perhaps, but formulaic nonetheless. I'm surprised the MAD Primer feature lasted as long as it did. Who were the last generation of elementary school kids to use simple primers, anyway? (There was also the fact that Dave Berg apparently couldn't draw his way out of the 70s. He was still drawing longhairs in hippy vests and dudes in leisure suits in the late 80s if memory serves. And geez, the NatLamp really slammed him hard. Were his words about "coming together to find a shared perspective" a philosophy he trotted out regularly for interviews?)

By: GavinR

GavinR — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:08:46 -0800

I have a soft spot in my heart for Marvel's Crazy. It was an obvious knock-off of Mad but I loved it.

By: Devils Rancher

Devils Rancher — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:51:59 -0800

I have assorted issues of Crazy from the late 70's and early 80's shamefully hidden in my attic. Dude! 1. Tumblblog! 2. If you can snark the badness, Book Deal! 3. Who the hell even needs three these days?

By: Pickman's Next Top Model

Pickman's Next Top Model — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:58:41 -0800

I came into this thread to fondly reminisce about the Talking Blob. And done.

By: Halloween Jack

Halloween Jack — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 09:39:53 -0800

The parody of MAD is accurate, but pointless; after all, the two magazines served what I'd assume were two completely different markets. I'm reading this (and especially this page) as NatLamp's ha-ha-only-serious attempt to get kids who were almost ready to give up MAD anyway, and maybe check out NatLamp (which, although written by college graduates, was done almost entirely from an adolescent male perspective), to maybe hurry it up a little. G'wan, kid, take a look! You can keep it in the woods, along with your porn!

By: Halloween Jack

Halloween Jack — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 13:01:53 -0800

Spatch: Homage or not, however, they were right. MAD had lost its anarchy and energy by the 1970s, and it never came back from that. As much as I love the MAD Magazine I grew up with, I know its formula. Comfortable, perhaps, but formulaic nonetheless. I'm surprised the MAD Primer feature lasted as long as it did. Who were the last generation of elementary school kids to use simple primers, anyway? Remember, Spatch, this was published in 1971. Most of your new approaches to pedagogy really didn't take hold until the mid-to-late 70s, at least in my experience (of course, that may have been due in part to my being in parochial schools, mostly, for the first half of that decade). And, in general, NatLamp's accusing William Gaines of selling out to The Man stinks. Gaines took a lot more heat (and lost a lot more) from being targeted by the Senate in the mid-fifties than National Lampoon ever came close to getting, no matter how outrageous they tried to be (e.g. the "we'll shoot this dog" cover, the VW ad, etc.). I don't think that Gaines drove away Kurtzman by trying to soft-pedal the humor so much as Kurtzman simply got greedy. And if MAD eventually became repetitive and dull (on its way to becoming financially successful), well, I got two words for you: Van Wilder. (There was also the fact that Dave Berg apparently couldn't draw his way out of the 70s. He was still drawing longhairs in hippy vests and dudes in leisure suits in the late 80s if memory serves. And geez, the NatLamp really slammed him hard. Were his words about "coming together to find a shared perspective" a philosophy he trotted out regularly for interviews?) I think that they're just assigning him to a trope that Berg didn't particularly fulfill in real life; he made fun of himself as much, if not more so, than any of the DFHs he had in his strip. (If you want a cartoonist that genuinely hated the counterculture and its members, try Al Capp.) And, yeah, his style eventually got stuck in time, but that's practically a universal Old Cartoonists' Disease; I remember being amused at the Buscema brothers (John and Sal) drawing the mid-to-late-seventies high school students in The Man Called Nova as if they were barely post-Beatlemania.

By: Ruthless Bunny

Ruthless Bunny — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 13:08:49 -0800

Oh, I loved Mad, and in turn National Lampoon. In 1977 I was 14 and it was in the perfection of both magazines that I made the move. Makes me want to look through e-bay for old National Lampoon copies. Of course I worry that they'll stink like pot, but still... Also, ever notice how Dave Berg and Hank Hill look alike?

By: gompa

gompa — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 13:44:49 -0800

I have assorted issues of Crazy from the late 70's and early 80's shamefully hidden in my attic. Dude! 1. Tumblblog! 2. If you can snark the badness, Book Deal! Look At This Fucking Series of Scans from '70s Mad Wannabes! by Roger Kaputnik Shit My Dad's Attic Contains by Fonebone This is Why You're A Hoarder of Second-Rate Pop Artefacts by Melvin Cowznofski I Can Has Cheezmags by Mickey Bitsko Well, it's no She's Just Not That Into You, but we could probably move 20,000 or so during the holiday season.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 17:19:50 -0800

> Citizen Gaines is a classic Yup. (And made me feel smug for having always preferred the original Kurtzman mag, even as a kid. And why shouldn't he have been greedy? He was the soul of the magazine. Look whgat happened after he left, fer chrissake.) Thanks for this post, it brings back many memories!

By: IndigoJones

IndigoJones — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 17:20:36 -0800

Gaines took a lot more heat (and lost a lot more) from being targeted by the Senate in the mid-fifties than National Lampoon ever came close to getting, no matter how outrageous they tried to be True, but surely it was more for the horror stuff than for Mad? This is the cover the committee was referencing.

By: Obscure Reference

Obscure Reference — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 18:09:44 -0800

I still have some of my Mad magazines from the 50s, but the satire magazine I miss the most is Spy.

By: Jimmy Havok

Jimmy Havok — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 18:44:00 -0800

It's a bitter commentary on our world that that short-fingered vulgarian still has enough money left to be considered rich, while Spy can only be found in the used magazine racks of second-hand book stores.

By: Mister_A

Mister_A — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 19:42:18 -0800

Ach, Spy was brilliant to my adolescent/young adult self. .

By: Alvy Ampersand

Alvy Ampersand — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 01:19:28 -0800

True, but surely it was more for the horror stuff than for Mad? Indeed it was. Actually, Kurtzman did not like the horror books, which were edited by Al Feldstein. While there were some mercenary considerations - Feldstein worked far faster than meticulous Kurtzman and Vault/Tales/Haunt were more lucrative than Kurtzman's war books (Which are incredibly humane and in a real, substantial way, far more subversive that the horrors, as well as being little master classes in storytelling and cartooning), Kurtzman didn't think they were appropriate for kids. Feldstein would replace Kurtzman on MAD, and edit it for almost 30 years. Kurtzman simply got greedy I may be misremembering this, but I believe the ultimatum to Gaines was at least partly a result of Hugh Hefner's offer to publish a Kurtzman-headed publication. Kurtzman was happy at MAD but sought more control and craved the legitimacy of the slicks. The 51% thing was sort of a way to bring things to a head. Hefner would publish two issues of Kurtman's Trump before a budget crunch at Playboy forced its cancellation the following year. For a funny - sorta - take on the Kefauver hearings, check out Rick Vietch's Maximortal series, wherein an upper-popping Gaines proxy takes the stand and fucks things up royal. There's no indication that Gaines actually did that, but there are some who think his testimony did more harm than good.

By: crunchland

crunchland — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 07:08:38 -0800

So I finally got around to actually looking at the page scans from the National Lampoon, and I pretty much decided that they were really very mean spirited, and written by people who must have been snubbed by MAD Magazine and weren't hired as writers. I never thought the demographic for National Lampoon ever overlapped with that of MAD, but maybe there was a time when they were going after the same audience.

By: IndigoJones

IndigoJones — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 13:50:53 -0800

Ah, Spy! I still have a full run of that magazine - or, rather, the first iteration, when it was good. The comeback issues - best passed over in silence.