When We Went MAD!

Uh, I'm not familiar with this.

What is MAD magazine?

It was revolutionary.

MAD magazine, to me, represented

the epitome of humor magazines.

MAD magazine was the first place

that really mocked people hard.

It was anarchistic.

I'd never seen that kind of humor before,

that kind of irreverent comedy,

and it really changed...

-...something in my brain. -I mean, MAD magazine

is the only magazine that I ever read cover to cover.

I never did my homework, but I read MAD magazine.

Most parents didn't approve.

They thought it was corrupting their minds,

and in a way, it was. In a good way.

I remember reading things

and just in my mind going, "Oh, whoa!"

That's why most people who had MAD magazines

at my age had to hide them.

MAD is not good. Our readers are not smart.

MAD is cheap. The quality is poor.

It's stupid. That's our brand.

In comedy, it took people like MAD magazine

to establish that you are allowed to criticize people.

They weren't afraid of anyone.

MAD went after everyone.

It inspired a lot of people

to want to make comedy.

No! Kelly Clarkson!

Surely you can't be serious.

I am serious, and don't call me Shirley.

MAD was a textbook for us,

how to make fun of things.

MAD was a precursor to The Daily Show

and Saturday Night Live.

You see the parody of The Daily Show

in this month's MAD magazine?

You're on the cover of MAD magazine.

This, uh, is a big deal.

That's, like, a better version of me.

I'll tell you the greatest thing

that I've ever achieved in my career.

I was on the cover of MAD magazine.

I adore MAD magazine.

When you talk about modern American satire,

it starts with MAD.

The rest is, as they say, misery.

During the summer of 1947,

in what would become a defining moment in the world of satire,

President Truman signed into law the National Security Act,

creating, among other things, the CIA.

Also occurring at the time, a young William Maxwell Gaines

would make a decision that would lead to

covertly sabotaging our nation for years to come.

Initially, Bill Gaines' career that he ended up in

wasn't really what he intended to be.

Bill Gaines grew up in Brooklyn.

His dad was M.C. Gaines,

and he was on the very ground floor of

the comics industry.

He had been in the advertising business,

and somewhere along the line, he was packaging 8, 16,

maybe 32-page comic books for advertisers.

One day, he had the inspiration of

putting ten-cent labels on these and sticking them

on a newsstand, and they sold out very quickly.

Coming out with the first comic book,

which was called Famous Funnies.

Really, Max Gaines was responsible

for jump-starting the comic book industry.

He had a sister company to DC Comics.

They were kind of separate companies,

but tied together in a business way.

He was responsible for getting Wonder Woman created,

Green Lantern created.

They established the Justice Society of America,

which way later in the '60s became the Justice League.

Of all the superheroes Gaines championed,

one in particular would stand out above the rest.

He recommended to his buddies

at DC Comics a character called Superman

and published it as a standalone comic.

What he didn't realize is Superman was just

gonna be ginormous.

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird!

- It's a plane! - It's Superman!

Superman!

Oh, let go, let go, let go!

Max was sitting on a gold mine.

The Superman franchise alone would go on to generate

billions of dollars.

But Max threw it all away by selling his stake to focus on

what he believed would be a more lucrative genre.

Educational comics.

Picture stories of the Bible.

Picture stories from world history.

They were boring, and they were literally

designed for little kids.

Nobody wanted to read that stuff,

and so he was starting to lose his shirt.

So Max Gaines's entertaining and educational comics

basically did not move on the newsstands.

Nobody bought them. Nobody was interested.

The company was about $100,000 in the red.

An already difficult time for the Gaines family

would quickly turn to tragedy.

Bill's father was killed in a tragic

boating accident in August 1947.

Bill's mother insisted that he take over the company,

even though Bill actually hated comics.

He didn't like anything about the company his dad created.

He had a very strained relationship with his father.

To him, I was a bum.

I couldn't do anything.

I couldn't fix fuses,

and I wasn't much good at doing anything.

Stepping into the comic business was

absolutely the last thing he wanted to do.

Bill's mother said, "Oh, please go

down to the business and try and make something out of it."

He took a look at all the comics his father

was publishing and thought, "These are pretty lame."

In the beginning, Bill only went into the office

to sign checks and maybe do a little paperwork.

But little by little, he started to kind of enjoy

being at the company.

He liked being around creative people.

One of the major changes came in 1948.

This guy called Al Feldstein walked into the office.

I showed him what I was doing,

which at the time was those Lana Turner sweater types.

Big boobs and, like, you know, short skirts.

And Bill's like, "I like these comics and I like this guy."

And he said, "Would you do a teenage book for us?"

Feldstein originally wanted to be a doctor,

but his father lost his business in the Depression.

There was no money for medical school.

He was about 15, and he found out he could make,

you know, $10 a page drawing comic books.

So he went where the money was, and he did have talent.

So that's how I started with Bill.

We became friends.

And he was very naïve and new to the business.

Al was a kind of a brash, energetic guy.

And Bill needed that.

He needed someone to come in and be gung-ho.

And Al was all of that.

The two of them started working together,

making changes, abandoning the kind of

kiddie comics that Max Gaines was publishing.

Bill would veer from the educational

and focus on the entertaining.

The break came when Feldstein proposed

they try their hand at a brand new comic book genre.

I said, "Let's scare the pants off the kids in comic books."

Just as his father had been an innovator,

Bill and his editor broke new ground by introducing their take

on horror and science fiction comics with a brand new style.

Horror comics became super popular very fast,

and the money started coming in.

Now EC was finally making a profit,

and Bill was able to disprove his dad.

He did make EC a success,

something his father never could do.

A young illustrator named Harvey Kurtzman

arrived at EC's doorstep showcasing his unique talents.

I was known as the funny cartoonist

in high school, the guy who used to do cartoons

for everybody, make everybody laugh.

In true MAD fashion, Kurtzman's first assignment with

EC was a comic book that stood out.

They hired Kurtzman to do this comic

called "Lucky Fights It Through," which was

an anti-venereal disease little giveaway pamphlet.

You know, "Don't sleep with the floozy,

you're gonna get VD."

He was very humble and quiet, shy.

He was like turtle-like. He looked like a turtle.

Harvey was one of the greatest visual talents ever.

It's amazing who was hugely important at

one point and has done so much and influenced so many things.

And if you wanted to draw the line from MAD,

if you could draw it right back like a fuse on a bomb,

it would reach Kurtzman.

Although Kurtzman did some work in the horror comics,

he hated horror comics. He thought they were awful.

Harvey pitched that he would do, like, an adventure comic on

his own, which morphed pretty quickly into like a war comic,

showing the actual real horrors of war.

He was a perfectionist, and it took him really

a long time to do these war comics.

He would go research and talk to veterans.

And they were fantastic comics,

but they actually never sold all that well.

He was putting so much effort in.

He wasn't making any money.

Feldstein was cranking out horror comics a story a day,

and Kurtzman was, you know, slaving over this stuff.