Back The MAD Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America’s Brain! (paperback)

The MAD Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America’s Brain! (paperback)

Before SNL and the wise-guy sarcasm of Letterman and Colbert, before The Simpsons and online memes, there was . . . MAD. More

Edited by David Mikics

Arriving in late July. Preorder your copy today and it will be shipped to you as soon as books are available.
In bookstores September 3.

Overview
Table of Contents
Contributors

Overview

A mainstay of countless American childhoods, MAD magazine exploded onto the scene in the 1950s and gleefully thumbed its nose at all the postwar pieties. Unfazed by lawsuits, the ire of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and the scorn of critics and scolds unwilling or unable to get the joke, MAD became the zaniest, most subversive satire magazine ever sold on America’s newsstands.

The MAD Files celebrates the magazine and its creators, the self-styled Usual Gang of Idiots who transformed puerile punchlines and merciless mockery into an art form. Twenty-six essays and comics present a varied, perceptive, and often very funny assessment of MAD’s significance. Art Spiegelman, Roz Chast, and Chris Ware recall what MAD meant to them as children; David Hajdu and Grady Hendrix zero in on MAD’s hilarious spoofs; Liel Leibovitz delves into the Jewishness behind the magazine’s humor; and Rachel Shteir amplifies the unsung genius of MAD’s women artists. Several contributors offer admiring profiles of the individual creators who made MAD what it was: Mort Drucker, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Jaffee, Antonio Prohías, and Will Elder.

For die-hard fans and newcomers alike, The MAD Files is an irresistible, 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 and Harold Bloom’s The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon. His writing has appeared in Tablet, The Nation, and The New York Times.

The paperback edition features French flaps and has been printed on acid-free paper.
Table of Contents

Introduction by Adam Gopnik
Into Your Tent I’ll Creep
Tuberoses and Tigers
How Ruritanian Can You Get?
Sodom in the Suburbs
Lady, Play Your Endocrines
Great Aches from Little Boudoirs Grow
Antic Hey-Hey
Why, Doctor, What Big Green Eyes You Have!
Rock-a-Bye, Viscount, in the Treetop
Four-and-Twenty Blackjacks
Oh, Sing Again That Song of Venery
When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Films . . .
Roll on, Thou Deep and Dark Scenario, Roll
Vintage Swine
The Wickedest Woman in Larchmont
I’m Sorry I Made Me Cry
By the Waters of Razz-Ma-Tazz
“M” Is for the Migraine That She Gave Me
Mayfair Mama, Turn Your Damper Down
Hungarian Goulash, with Battered Noodles
It Takes Two to Tango, but Only One to Squirm
Shades of Young Girls among the Flummery
Contributors
Nathan Abrams Mark Allen Bonnie Altucher Max Andersson Michael Benson Sarah Boxer Daniel Bronstein Roz Chast Ivan Cohen R. Crumb Mary Fleener Drew Friedman Leah Garrett Adam Gopnik David Hajdu Grady Hendrix Frank Jacobs Tim Kreider Peter Kuper Liel Leibovitz Jonathan Lethem Geoffrey O’Brien Rachel Shteir R. Sikoryak Art Spiegelman Clifford Thompson Chris Ware Mary-Lou Weisman

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-792-5 221 pages

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