From "The World According to Mad Magazine/Grown-ups who worried it was a subversive influence on America’s youth were 100 percent correct" by Tim Kreider (NYT)(Kreider is a cartoonist and essayist).
ADDED: Here's an example of a cartoon by Kreider: "Male Anorexia." If you like that, consider buying "The Pain: When Will It End?" I did. The back cover has a high-level blurb — from David Foster Wallace:
“I have had the cartoon ‘Male Anorexia’ on my bathroom mirror for seven months. I cannot floss, shave, or pimple-scan without it. I am it; he is me. Kreider rules, and also has a simply mammoth penis–you’d (almost) have to see it to believe it.”AND: The cartoon "Male Anorexia" is cited at the beginning of an article by Jennifer Finn Boylan, "What It Was Like to Be a Transgender Woman in 2003" (2015):
A few years ago, cartoonist Timothy Kreider did a piece entitled "Male Anorexia." The drawing featured a middle-aged man, overweight, with a bad comb-over and a hairy back, looking at himself in the mirror, giving himself the "double thumbs-up" and saying, "Lookin' fine!" Part of the reason that cartoon strikes me as being so funny is because it is so sadly true. Many men do live in a kind of oblivious bubble that makes them blind to the agonizing nuances of beauty. Whether a guy's hair day is good or bad—or whether he has hair at all—is irrelevant to him. Black eye? Beer belly? Jowls like Richard Nixon? Hey, man, you're lookin' fine!
I can tell you this because, unlike most women, I used to be a man. I spent the first 40 years of my life as a boy, endlessly struggling with gender, until at last, when all else had failed, I surrendered to the fact that I was female in spirit. I embarked upon the path that led from male to female in the spring of 2000, and arrived, more or less safely, in the country of women two years later....
ne of the things I've noticed, since I've gone from male to female, is a tendency for women to pull me aside and ask, in a kind of desperate, confidential tone, "OK, so I have to know: What are men really thinking?" To which I can only reply, "I'm probably the wrong woman to ask." Although I did spend the first half of my life in a man's body, I'm pretty sure that my interior life bore very little resemblance to that of a typical guy. For a lot of the time, I felt, more than anything else, like a spy, doing deep undercover work behind enemy lines....
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60 comments:
I call bullcorn on this guy. Mad was funny. The things he learned are the things that any sentient being learns growing up.
What me worry ? He worried for everyone.He makes MAD Magazine then sound like Marijuana is being made to sound today. It was just funny.
In what circumstances did David Foster Wallace see Tim Kreider's mammoth penis?
Today's youth are so %$#@! conformist. No wonder Mad is just about gone.
In what circumstances did David Foster Wallace see Tim Kreider's mammoth penis?
Perhaps "see" isn't the right word.
“...giving himself the "double thumbs-up" and saying, "Lookin' fine!" “
Interesting. The cartoon clearly says “Lookin’ good!”
Mad ran out of ways of saying that Trump is stupid, Trump is bad. That filled every issue since the election. The old crew would have had a field day with other current trends, like Hollywood going woke and the Media rolling over for Disney--for example.
As a kid I remember reading Mad and only getting about 60% of the references. And the bit about it filling him in on the plot of R rated movies applied to me, too.
Modern "Liberals" would want Mad Magazine suppressed because it frequently took aim and mocked liberal looney ideas (and there are a ton of them)
Ugh, if only he could draw like Bill Elder. Then he'd be good.
I'd never been a fan of Nancy, but the other day I noticed that Aunt Fritzi is (poorly) drawn as a flat-chested school-marm, and I recalled that she was a bit of a dish. Turns out at least three people drew Nancy, and everyone loves the original guy, Bushmiller who had real drawing talent (and a reasonably sexy Aunt Fritzi), and hates the intermediate less talented Gilchrist (silly-haired sexpot Aunt Fritzi) and mixed on the current Olivia Jaimes (badly drawn school marm Aunt Fritzi).
”I call bullcorn on this guy. Mad was funny. The things he learned are the things that any sentient being learns growing up.”
And MAD is what helped Kreider learn them when he was young.
I though anorexics forever hated what they see in the mirror?
I started reading MAD in the 50s and even then (I was a kid) I understood all the references and appreciated the satire not because I was smart but because kids were more broadly "educated" {culturally aware) than kids are now. E.g. when MAD ran their famous piece on a quartet of greaser/hoodlums reciting their, uh, "version" of Alfred Noyes's 1906 narrative poem "The Highwayman" I found it very funny and clever -- because even at an early age I had been exposed to the poem. MAD also frequently made fun of what were then called "juvenile delinquents" (i.e., greasers, hoodlums) but also equally made fun, a lot, of beatniks, who represented the left-wing counterculture.
And Don Martin was one of the funniest on the planet. Still is.
Cook: And MAD is what helped Kreider learn them when he was young.
Yup. If I didn't get a reference in Mad, I'd go find somebody who could explain it to me.
Education, people, education. Introducing young minds to culture and politics. Like Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry and Rocky and Bullwinkle, too. (Isn't that where all of us of a certain age got our earliest exposure to Rossini and Dumas?)
Fester Bestertester and his protegé, Karbunkle.
"What It Was Like to Be a Transgender Woman in 2003"
The Top Sekret Newspeak Decoder Ring tells me that I don't need to read an article to know what it was like to be a man in 2003, especially if that man is weird in a very uninteresting way.
The Kreider cartoon makes no sense. Anorexics do not like what they see in the mirror. Kreider could certainly draw a cartoon mocking male vanity, but it wouldn't have sold if he could not link it to a fashionable topic: anorexia.
Fester Bestertester and his protegé, Karbunkle.
Just reading that makes me laugh.
I have to know: What are men really thinking?"
Depends on which head we are using.
Roughcoat -
Yeah, it always cracked me up, that Don Martin referred to Karbunkle as Fester's protégé. Haw.
On board with most of that — but “religion was more invested in respectability than compassion” is just not a true statement since he states it it with no qualifiers.
This is uninformed disinformation, the kind of thing people say when they get their information from the media instead of actually, you know, going to a church. Or if they go to a lousy church that totally loses the message Jesus taught.
"Many men do live in a kind of oblivious bubble that makes them blind to the agonizing nuances of beauty. Whether a guy's hair day is good or bad — or whether he has hair at all — is irrelevant to him. Black eye? Beer belly? Jowls like Richard Nixon? Hey, man, you're lookin' fine!" Which is why tailored men's suits, elevator shoes, and cologne do not exist. Men never avail themselves of botox or plastic surgery. Hairpieces are found only on women.
The person who wrote this takes being "oblivious" to a whole new level. Missed not only the evidence of his/her eyes, but thousands of years of the history of male vanity. I guess men are "blind to the agonizing nuances of beauty" because they don't use lipstick.
The Kreider cartoon makes no sense. Anorexics do not like what they see in the mirror.
Not the funniest joke in the world, and not funny at all if it has to be explained, but sure it does. That "they don't like what the see" isn't the fundamental pathology. It's that what they see in the mirror has no relation to objective reality. Skinny anorexic female sees a nonexistent fat body and hates it, doughy male anorexic sees a nonexistent spiff bod and...
Never particularly liked Kreider. He hides his careerist drive underneath a self-portrait as a drunken layabout. Drunken layabouts don't get David Foster Wallace to slip him a blurb.
Yes, but for the past twenty years (or more) the cynical, “everything is hypocrisy” hipsters have been the boss.
So, the Mad Magazine outlook became orthodoxy.
And, if you’ve notice, that orthodoxy can be just as punitive in its enforcement of conformity as the targets of Mad Magazine’s satire back in the day.
I think Hillary Clinton must still think of herself as an outsider battling against hypocrisy.
Or to put it another way (and no criticism of Althouse intended here):
Althouse is one of the gate keepers to a potential multi-million dollar career in corporate law.
Me too--MAD was far more honest and sophisticated about the world than the authority figures who pretended to oversee us, and every new issue was as eagerly awaited as a purloined Playboy.
"Male Anorexia" is the PERFECT title for the cartoon.
I think overall Kliban was better, but maybe I'm just more familiar with BK's work.
Narr
"Beanism Explained" sums up my PoL
So, in what way are the kids conformist?
Almost every last one of them believes as a matter of course that all organized religion is ludicrous hypocrisy.
Most churches are fortunate if a few kids attend services.
Mad Magazine became the boss. That’s why it’s dead.
Althouse became the boss, too.
"What Was It Like to B a Transgender Woman in 2003?"
There is a universal sameness in living a lie.
I believe MAD would have referred to him as "Spiro T. Agnew".
THEOLDMAN
Loved Mad, Laughed at Mad,
But, like many 14 year olds, we soon migrated towards National Lampoon which was MAD + politics + boobies.
Then, National Lampoon made a movie (Animal House) that hit us like a nuclear bomb. Now, we wanted to go to college, drink beer with real live college girls.
A healthy humor evolution.
Not sure the fuddy-duddy NYT has anything interesting to say about any of this.......
Krieder was after my time. When I read Mad, I didn't have much interest in politics. Maybe that's why I don't remember any send ups of the politicians of that era. Mostly I remember the parodies of movies and other comic strips. What furshlugginer twelve year old is interested in trenchant political commentary?
"that it was, in short, all BS"
What a moron. It's not all BS. Christianity is not BS. Neither is Judiasm. Buddhaism has a lot to teach us.
It's the humans behind them who are fallible.
Unfortunately, Krieder is not alone in this inability to tell the difference.
As a young child in the late fifties, I loved MAD magazine. But I honestly don't remember it being at all political back then. The show tunes were great! And, being precocious, I was already familiar enough with the subject matter to appreciate the humor. But I didn't see it as subversive.
And I will add, after reading Roughcoat's post, that, yes, we were blessed with genuine education back then.
Give me a marginal cartoon by Arogones, or give me death!
Gahan Wilson.
My peer group and I loved MAD magazine back in the mid-to-late '60s. The TV, movie and musical parodies were great (e.g. "East Side Story" and the review of "Hud, the Sick Western"). The immortal Don Martin permanently twisted my little mind back then. I could never take humans completely seriously after that. We even invented our own cartoon magazines and passed them around during class and lunch hour, trying to outdo one another. Good times in the late pre-adolescent years.
RIP MAD, we'll miss ya.
I could never take humans completely seriously after that.
Right, Phidippus. And we could never take life completely seriously, either. And I think part of the secret to a happy life is not taking it too seriously.
Change the cartoon verbiage to "Looking good, Sally".
Blogger Bay Area Guy said...Then, National Lampoon made a movie (Animal House) that hit us like a nuclear bomb. Now, we wanted to go to college, drink beer with real live college girls.
Animal House came out the Summer before Freshman year in the dorms in Santa Barbara. Life is just nor fair.
MAD made fun of liberal pieties back in the day because New York in the 70s and 80s was a crime ridden hellhole. Only the super rich could avoid it.
Don Martin was a blessing. A comedy saint. Think about it: the names; the sound effects; the feet; the situations. He was hilariously funny and there wasn't a mean bone in his humor. He brightened up my day. He still does, just thinking about him and writing about him here.
"Later that same day ..."
Ha ha ha!
"Pflut!" "Spronk" "Grch!"
"I am NOT a bowel of spagehtti. I am NOT a bowel of spaghetti! I am not ..."
"FWAP!"
Just up my alley. Mad magazine at its glory when I was 13,14. Less about politics and more about lampooning Liz Taylor's "Cleopatra ",and Peter O'Toole's "Lawrence of Arabia ",then, on to college and Firesign Theater and National Lampoon, mix in drugs, later, George Carlin and Richard Pryor, on to Saturday Night Live also "Caddyshack "and of course, the fabulous "Animal House ",later, middle age and Spy magazine and the evolved Libertarian Dennis Miller. In my opinion all sourced from *early * Mad.
Much like python, now there are no heresies except against the state, like the eu, and one can't speak of the crime situation, because crime think,
going over luke 19, the famous 'overturning of the money changers' scene was about the temple failing in it's primary function of attracting unbelievers, extorting them on the sales of livestock, and foreign coinage,
Cracked magazine, still does lipservice to cultural mores, but still virtue signals,
I see what the author "praises" as “puerile” humor as a continuation of a long tradition of vaudeville ethnic, primarily Jewish, humor into print rather than stage.
Growing up as a gentile boy in Alabama, I never understood just how much of what I read in MAD was Jewish humor, e.g much more than in National Lampoon, which nevertheless was replete with Jewish writers.
Ethnic humor may have highbrow moments but it mostly aims for the gut, not the brain.
Re National Lampoon, the argument has been made that the humor was principally Irish-American Catholic in its cast, hence dark and unsettling -- as one would expect from the likes of Doug Kenney, Michael O'Donoghue, and Conan O'Brien. I think there's something to that. Definitely not Jewish humor, or so it seems to this Irish American Catholic.
@Roughcoat,
Definitely not Jewish humor, or so it seems to this Irish American Catholic.
In the main, I agree with you. But there was so much Jewish influence on NatLamp. Remember Son O' God Comics? Or, the Goyspiel According to Bernie?
I read NL religiously. MAD no long kept my interest. When was Conan O'Brien on NL staff? As I recall, he was Harvard Lampoon. Went on to the Simpsons but not NL.
THEOLDMAN
YH: True dat.
Marcus: I don't believe Conan was officially on the NL masthead, but those Irish guys were constantly in cahoots, to greater and lesser degrees. They were friends, hung together, influenced each other.
They were from the same Catholic Irish American planet, if you will. They saw the world the same and they had the same dark and sometimes sinister sense of humor, an Irish trait.
Yeah, NL was definitely more Irish/RC than MAD. In the Context of No Context was prophetic--was that Doug Kenney?
Narr
All In De Fambly y'all
I forgot, P.J. O'Rourke, another member of the NL Irish/RC mafia, coauthor (with Kenny) of the now-legendary "National Lampoon's 1964 High School Yearbook."
And Brian-Doyle Murray.
Oops, Kenney not Kenny; and Brian Doyle-Murray not Brian-Doyle Murray. I think.
I actually knew someone who had male anorexia. Guy worked in a health store and was absolutely ripped but seriously underweight. I believe it eventually killed him.
In retrospect I can see that people who warned my parents about MAD "rotting" my mind were on the right track, in that MAD got a lot of us to be skeptical about a lot of what society thought we should worship.
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