Goodbye Alfred E. Neuman, Spy vs. Spy, fold-ins, The Lighter Side of…
that introduced 1960’s eleven-year-olds like me to irreverence.
Alfred, the antidote to Archie, the pin to pop the Cold War anxiety,
the gap-toothed grin to mock icons from Uncle Sam to Streisand
simply by fitting his freckled face into their familiar costumes.
The Sound of Music became The Sound of Money and Rocky, Rockhead.
Did Mad just miss the jump to viral videos? Offspring are everywhere.
What is The Book of Mormon but a fleshed-out Broadway Mad satire
minus the punny title (Book of More Men? Book of Neuman?)
through an anticolonial lens? Maybe that’s it. There’s no more room
for nonpartisan buffoonery. Alfred, you should have taken a side.
To us, Alfred was always winking. We bought MAD at Ada’s for 30¢,
rode our bikes to Dave Oldham’s, sat in his basement snickering
at the red-lettered Avis motto turned to We Don’t Try Very Hard!
and the fold-in back cover that read, At a club a young comic bombs
with jokes that in a year will kill using props and wearing nothing at all!
Folded in, the comic disappeared, curtain edges formed a mushroom cloud
and the text read Atomic bombs will kill us all. MAD laughter
was our armor, Alfred our ally, What, me worry? a war cry against a world
that terrified or ignored us. Because only an idiot wouldn’t be worried.
