I'd have a hard time exaggerating Mad Magazine's influence on my young mind. In particular, their cynical take on advertising pretty much is my view of it. For instance, if I see something like "'Hot New Game' is 'a thrill ride'", I assume they lopped off "...for kindergartners who scare too easily".
I love ya, Mad gang. Thank you for sneakily teaching this kid some critical thinking.
I think it falls in that category of stuff meant for kids but not dumbed down for kids.
This tends to be the absolute best content for young readers, because we all feel like we're hanging with the adults. Even better, with the funny and/or smart adults. It tends to elevate young people because that's when we're most desperate to be older/cooler/smarter/funnier.
Despite this being a huge part of a lot of people's lives, it always felt like you were in a club. You could get away with stealing jokes and delivering them at school without anyone catching on. You could copy the style of art from an issue and nobody was the wiser (I won an art contest in 6th grade with something very close to a MAD artist I no longer recall).
I don't know what the modern equivalent is. What's the barely-above-ground cultural lynchpin that sneaks a few kids into the late night comedy club now?
Sponge Bob in its first season. I thought it was a dumb kids cartoon, until I inadvertently watched an episode. The humor in it worked on many levels, there was the kid's humor, with a wicked overlay of adult humor on top.
I recall one where SB and friends were out on a fishing boat. The name of the boat was painted on the prow. The framing of the shot cut off the first couple of letters, and adults would assume the missing letters formed a very rude remark. A later full frame shot with the missing letters spelled something innocuous. Sponge Bob is full of jokes like that.
The later seasons, however, are about as clever as a brick.
An older cartoon with the same idea is Rocky & Bullwinkle. They had the slapstick for the kids, and sly satire for the adults.
For example, one plot centered around a pond named Veronica Lake. (Veronica Lake was a film star renowned for being sultry.) Someone asked where the boys were at some point, and the reply was "they are playing in Veronica Lake." I always wondered how that got past the censors.
"Rocky and Bullwinkle" was an incredibly smart cartoon, at least on the level of Looney Tunes, with a sophisticated level of satire that the Warner Brothers cartoons generally didn't do.
The new R&B shows on Amazon do a pretty good job of capturing the spirit of the original, which was a pleasant surprise for something coming out in the late 2010s.
Another more modern cartoon that does similar stuff is "Animaniacs", which was also a kiddie show that was surprisingly smart and often sophisticated, something that can be appreciated by adults as well as kids
On the live-action front, there was Laugh-In, which runs in syndication now, and seeing an episode 50+ years after originally seeing it aired (when I was under 10 years old) gives me a whole new perspective on the show. I realize now how much of it flew right over my little head. While today some of the jokes have aged like milk, it's surprising how much of it is spot-on even today.
Saturday Night Live with the OG cast was also a groundbreaker. To this day, I find myself imagining a Dan Aykroyd voiceover for a wide variety of current commercials.
I love how perfectly you described that. Yes, I was a kid, but I was in on the joke. The cool grownups were giving me a knowing wink as they made fun of, well, everything.
If I knew of something like that today, I’d leave it laying around for my kids to find.
My son watches The Simpsons and I put that in the same boat.
It wasn't when I was a kid and watching it fresh, because everyone watched it, but I've asked my son if any of his friends watch it and apparently it doesn't register at all with kids today.
I'm sure he only got into it because I must have put it on at one point or he stumbled into it on Disney+
I’m not sure something like that is even possible anymore. Everything needs to be heavily advertised everywhere all at once, and there are too many channels for that where people are constantly connected to. It’s all too competitive and if it doesn’t have a global reach, it’s a failure. Also, everything is constantly scrutinized; what you described would nowadays be quickly considered as being snobby and/or stuck up and insensitive to those who didn’t get the joke, or who couldn’t access it for whatever reason, or with limited brain power, or anything like that. I bet there would also be at least a couple of people who would say it’s not appropriate for children and would try to (in one way or another) bring down those who let the children have it. In other words, the world today has too much entropy for that to happen.
Thanks for this link - I used to have a huge collection of the Mad books, unfortunately my parents sold most of them when we moved. "MADvertising" was my favorite, fortunately I still have "History Gone MAD" which was my second favorite (most of which has been floating around the internet uncredited for years, e.g.: https://blowjoke.com/time.html )
I remember being younger and reading highlights magazine, which had cool stuff like hidden pictures.
But then I "graduated" to mad magazine and couldn't go back. I also vaguely recall a magazine called cracked, but it was a poor knockoff in comparison.
Apart from the fold-in, I also remember Spy vs. Spy when I was younger and couldn't get all the in-jokes when they made fun of a current movie.
The funny thing about Mad is that it was incredibly literate, especially in the 50s and 60s. Those were some smart guys writing "Snappy Comebacks to Stupid Questions", etc.
In fact Al Jaffee just passed away at the amazing age of 102. Hacker News had a link to a piece about him in the NYT.
I love ya, Mad gang. Thank you for sneakily teaching this kid some critical thinking.