MAD Magazine: Warping America’s Brain! – free online event

Britain’s Jewish Literary Foundation has announced a free online event, MAD Magazine: Warping America’s Brain!, with The MAD Files editor David Mikics and author Liel Leibovitz, as part of this year’s Jewish Book Week in March.

Jewish Book Week is London’s longest-running literary festival returns in 2025 for more than 80 conversations, performances, workshops, debates and talks, taking place 1st – 9th March 2025.

Join Mad Magazine editor David Mikics joins Liel Leibovitz, editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine, for the online event, MAD Magazine: Warping America’s Brain! on 4th March, the event taking its title from an essay by Geoffrey O’Brien for The MAD Files.

Alfred E. Neuman and assorted MAD magazine logos
Alfred E. Neuman and assorted MAD magazine logos

A mainstay of countless American childhoods, before The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live and social media memes, there was MAD. Launched by Harvey Kurtzman in 1952, it gleefully thumbed its nose at all the postwar pieties. 

Unfazed by lawsuits, the ire of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and the dull-witted scorn of critics and scolds unwilling to get the joke, MAD became the zaniest, most subversive satire magazine ever to be sold on America’s newsstands, anticipating the spirit of underground comix and ‘zines and influencing humour writing in movies, television, and the internet to this day.

MAD’s “Usual Gang of Idiots.” Clockwise from top left: Harvey Kurtzman (The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics, Abrams Books, 2009), Will Elder (self-portrait, Wikimedia Commons), Al Jaffee (Luigi Novi / CC BY 4.0), Mort Drucker (Gustavo Morales / CC BY-SA 3.0), and Don Martin (Wikimedia Commons) | Montage via Library of America
MAD’s “Usual Gang of Idiots.” Clockwise from top left: Harvey Kurtzman (The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics, Abrams Books, 2009), Will Elder (self-portrait, Wikimedia Commons), Al Jaffee (Luigi Novi / CC BY 4.0), Mort Drucker (Gustavo Morales / CC BY-SA 3.0), and Don Martin (Wikimedia Commons) | Montage via Library of America

Released last year by Library of America, The MAD Files, edited by David Mikics, celebrates the magazine’s impact and the legacy of the Usual Gang of Idiots who transformed puerile punchlines and merciless mockery into an art form. The book features 26 essays and comics presenting a varied, perceptive, and often very funny account of MAD‘s significance, ranging from the cultural to the aesthetic to the personal. Contributors include Adam Gopnik, Roz Chast and Art Spiegelman, who writes “I couldn’t learn much about America from my refugee immigrant parents – but I learned all about it from MAD.”

“Beautiful Girl of the Month” cover by Basil Wolverton (MAD, No. 11, 1954)
“Beautiful Girl of the Month” cover by Basil Wolverton (MAD, No. 11, 1954)

“The out-of-control things that happened in the pages of early MAD were of the sort that occur when people are not erecting monuments,” writes Geoffrey O’Brien in his essay. “MAD’s creator, Harvey Kurtzman, drove the point home: “When you’re desperate to fill space, you think of outrageous things.” If necessity is the mother of invention, then MAD’s golden era – the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, or whenever a dedicated reader happened to be twelve years old – represents an anarchic highpoint of comic creativity, sometimes crass, often sophomoric, always committed to a vision of transcendent lunacy.”

Roz Chast remembers how the magazine was “love at first sight. MAD made fun of stuff that I thought needed to be made fun of… It was one of my first inklings that there were other people out there who found the world as ridiculous as I did.” David Hajdu and Grady Hendrix zero in on MAD‘s hilarious movie spoofs; Liel Leibovitz delves into the Jewishness behind the magazine’s humour; and Rachel Shteir amplifies the often unsung contributions of MAD‘s women artists.

Details from Children’s Games by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and MAD parody of Woodstock, illustrated by Sergio Aragonés (MAD, No. 134, April 1970)
Details from Children’s Games by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and MAD parody of Woodstock, illustrated by Sergio Aragonés (MAD, No. 134, April 1970)

Several essays are admiring profiles of the individual creators that made MAD what it was: Mort Drucker, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Jaffee, Antonio Prohias, and Will Elder. For longtime fans and new readers alike, The MAD Files offers an indispensable guide to America’s greatest satire magazine.

David Mikics editor, is the author, most recently, of Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker and Bellow’s People: How Saul Bellow Made Life into Art, and editor of The Annotated Emerson. He is the editor for Library of America of Harold Bloom’s The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon. His writing has appeared in Tablet, The Nation, andThe New York Times.

Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and the host of its weekly podcast, Rootless, and its daily Talmud podcast Take One. Liel’s “High Holy MAD” essay for The MAD Files, delves into the Jewishness behind its hugely influential humour.

Book tickets for the free online event MAD Magazine: Warping America’s Brain! at 6.30pm on 4th March 2025 here

Jewish Book Week 1st – 9th March 2025 – Full Programme

Library of America Interview: “Outrageous Errors and Goofs”: David Mikics on the Loony Legacy of MAD

The MAD Files is available from all good bookshops | ISBN 978-1598537925 | Buy it from AmazonUK (Affiliate Link) | Buy it from your favourite bookshop via Bookshop.org (Affiliate Link)

With thanks to Paul Gravett



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