"... Mad’s parent company, E.C. Publications, for copyright infringement. At issue was 'Sing Along With Mad,' a pullout section published in 1961 that consisted entirely of song parodies by Mr. Jacobs and Larry Siegel. Among them were 'Louella Schwartz Describes Her Malady' (a lampoon of Berlin’s 'A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody') and 'The First Time I Saw Maris' (a spoof of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 'The Last Time I Saw Paris'), about the commercialization of the Yankee slugger Roger Maris during the season he hit a record-breaking 61 home runs.... In his opinion, [2d Circuit] Judge Irving R. Kaufman (most famous for presiding over Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s espionage trial) wrote, 'The fact that defendants’ parodies were written in the same meter as plaintiffs’ compositions would seem inevitable if the original was to be recognized, but such a justification is not even necessary; we doubt that even so eminent a composer as plaintiff Irving Berlin should be permitted to claim a property interest in iambic pentameter.'"
1961 — I think that's about when I discovered Mad. I was 10! It was the first thing I ever subscribed to. The writings of Frank Jacobs played such an important role in the development of my young mind.
(To comment, you need to email me — here.)
FROM THE EMAIL: Retail Lawyer:
I started reading Mad around 1961 as well! I was 10 years old. I think I may have been a bit “culturally deprived” because I think I often heard the Mad parody of songs before I heard the actual songs.
Ha ha. Me too.
And the parodies made a greater impression. “He tousled his hair so carefully, that now he the leader of the whole country.” From Pirates of Penzance. About JFK. I believe it came out while the country was mourning his assassination. Now I believe that Gavin Newsom is my governor because he tousled his hair so carefully.
AND: Craig wrote:
I have a 10-year-old son who could benefit from a subscription to Mad Magazine, the way it used to be. I want my kids to grow up questioning everything. He does read the newspaper comics every day, which I think is great for him, but in general there are too many sacred cows these days. As you say, it's the era of "That's Not Funny". I wonder how the erasure of subversive comedy from mainstream culture will affect the developing minds of the next generation.
Kay writes:
I believe The Simpsons may have played the same role for kids of my generation that Mad Magazine did for kids of yours. But my dad introduced me to the magazine when I was pretty young, and I loved it immediately. In the 80’s a lot of Mad (in magazine and also paperback form) had reprints of the classic Mads from the 60’s and 70’s. It taught me a lot about American pop culture and history in general. Love Sergio Argones, Antonio Prohías, Duck Edwing, Al Jaffee. The parodies, the illustrations, the fold-outs. Yes!
The fold-out era is after my time.
Or is it fold-in? Yeah, Wikipedia says "fold-in."
Mad publisher Bill Gaines joked that he was a fan of the Fold-In because he knew that serious collectors valued pristine, unfolded copies, and would therefore be inspired to purchase two copies of each issue: one to fold and another to preserve intact.The oldest fold-ins were from 1964. I was 13 and had moved on to fashion magazines and music magazines.)
ALSO: Ozymandias writes:
Mad’s humor—which in 1961 ran from the utterly silly to razor-sharp satire to something nearly absurdist—provided us pre-adolescents with much laughter and delight, but its broader and subtler effect was to lift kids out of the daily slog of home, school, TV, etc., and introduce them to possibilities of more critical perspectives of the culture in which they lived.
Mad’s pages were packed with a sophisticated range of contrasting references, familiar and the foreign, drawn from high and low culture. (I remember one piece that had Maria Callas appearing on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand with the in-studio teen audience obliviously boogying to Callas’s aria).
Mad seldom played down to its readers. One had to expand one’s field of learning and information to “get” the humor. One parody of the Cold War, “East Side Story,” portrayed numerous early ’60’s world leaders as members of opposing “gangs” in “rumbles” at the UN (Krushchev in leather jacket and jeans!). One of the parody songs included a reference to Krishna Menon, even then a somewhat obscure Indian Communist leader.
Mad’s nonchalant sardonicism was thus something of a model and incubator for kid’s nascent critical thinking skills. The humor was never mean, but an implicit aspect of Mad’s “takes” on mid-century life in America was that, by sabotaging sacred cows and shibboleths, humor could also serve to clear the field of much of nonsense in favor of whatever better things might remain.
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