In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Seeing MAD: Essays on MAD Magazine's Humor and Legacy ed. by Judith Yaross Lee and John Bird
  • Jennifer Caplan (bio)
Seeing MAD: Essays on MAD Magazine's Humor and Legacy. Edited by Judith Yaross Lee and John Bird . Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2020. 625 pp.

Seeing MAD is a triumph. From 1952 until the original magazine was retired in 2018, MAD was a humor touchstone for Americans. Because some of the humor tended toward the sophomoric, it has often been overlooked when discussing the intellectual anchors of American humor, but beneath the at times juvenile gross-out humor was a smart, incisive, unrelenting satiric take on American life that turned a lens on the darker parts of our world for the better part of seventy years. Judith Yaross Lee and John Bird set out to fill the surprising gap in scholarship on this pioneering magazine, bringing together more than two dozen scholars from across the academic landscape to give the world the scholarly deep dive into the magazine that we may not have even realized we were missing.

It is not that MAD has been overlooked, exactly. Maria Reidelbach's Completely MAD (1997) is an excellent resource about the first five decades of the magazine's life. Bill Schelly's recent biography of MAD founder Harvey Kurtzman (2016) is exceptionally well done and highly acclaimed. Many of the contributors to this volume have published individual scholarship on the magazine's legacy, and MAD has shown up as a sidebar in other books about the history of comics. Several of the contributions to this volume have, in fact, appeared elsewhere, but Seeing MAD offers scholars in [End Page 177] humor studies (and related fields) a single resource that provides both depth and breadth to our understanding of the magazine and its influence.

It is impossible to highlight the individual contributions in a single review, but suffice it to say that each chapter brings something different to the table, and that it is no small feat to put together an edited collection with this many chapters in which none of them feels repetitive or redundant. It is worth, however, reviewing the overall structure of the book and some of the threads that the editors have woven among the parts. They have divided the volume into five sections (six if you include the resources section at the end) and each section covers a different element of the magazine and in many cases is geared toward a different type of scholarship.

Section 1, "The Usual Gang" (a reference to the MAD talent roster, which appeared on the masthead as "The Usual Gang of Idiots"), is primarily made up of analytical biographies of the most important figures in MAD's history, including founder Harvey Kurtzman and many of the longtime contributors and editors such as Al Feldstein, Nick Medlin, Al Jaffee, and Dave Berg. This section also foregrounds gender, which was an excellent choice on the part of the editors. There has long been a sense that even more than other comic books and humor magazines, MAD skewed toward the sensibilities of adolescent boys and young men. The fourth and fifth chapters in the book both address this issue directly, and structurally, it helps that these conversations happen early on. Section 2 is the longest section at eight chapters, and these are all focused on individual elements or features of the magazine. This section combines a focus on material culture (in particular the magazine's famous "fold-in" pages) with a critique of the magazine's visual culture and a literary-critical approach to reading the magazine.

The third section, "Themes," is just that. It is here that scholars from across the academy will find valuable insights into the magazine: these chapters traverse years of content and draw out thematic trends. The Jewish elements of MAD (which are legion and which Judith Yaross Lee admits was one of the reasons she was interested in focusing on the magazine) find expression here, along with much of the political content. The fourth section is the most explicitly theoretical, while the fifth section, "Legacies," looks to situate MAD on a continuum of publications and...

pdf