Bill knocks on the door, a guy answers, and Bill says to him, “We’ve all come here to find out why you canceled your subscription to Mad.” So we all get in these jeeps, and we drive out to some neighborhood in Haiti, and pull up in front of a house. But the second day we’re there, Bill rents a bunch of Jeeps, and he tells us “We’re going to visit someone.” It was ostensibly about bonding as a group, everybody getting to know each other a little better. That’s a weird place to take a company retreat. All the Mad artists and writers, we went over to Haiti. The first trip we ever took was to Haiti. Sometimes it was just about cracking ourselves up. But that got me thinking, there might be an idea for Mad in here somewhere.Īnd that got your creative juices flowing? So I looked at him and said, “I killed her, and I’m stuffing her down the chimney.” He of course retreated very rapidly, and I had to apologize to him later for being such a wise ass. It was just me wrestling with this antenna. It was my son, home from school, and he said to me, “Where’s mom?” I was really struggling with it, and all of a sudden I heard these footsteps on the ladder. A storm had come through and knocked out the antenna, so I was up on the roof trying to fix it. I was living in Long Island at the time, and like everyone in those days, there was a television antenna attached to my chimney. Well, take something like “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.” That came out of a real experience. That’s not where you get the real inspiration. It’s not like the office is a particularly fertile ground for comedy anyway. Our motto was “Humor is no laughing matter.” Most of us were freelance artists, and time is money when you’re in freelance. The truth of the matter is, it wasn’t all that interesting. It was a bit duller than that, I’m afraid. It’s hard not to imagine the Mad office as hilarious bedlam, with nobody wearing pants, farts being set on fire, and everyone fueled on pizza and cocaine. You were one of the original “Gang of idiots” from Mad’s heyday, which included cartooning greats like Don Martin, Sergio Aragones, Frank Jacobs, and Dave Berg. You really have to be careful with these things. I don’t think it’s respectful to the survivors. Even if the laugh is about recognizing the absurdity of what’s happening, it’s still, I don’t know. The intentions were good, but I just don’t want to use tragedy as a way to get a laugh. it wasn’t something I was comfortable with. The Fold-In art tends to be very realistic, and it just. A crossword is always the same general concept, but if it’s done well, it’s different and challenging. I think I get the same joy in doing the Fold-In every month as people who love doing crossword puzzles week after week. I’m always thinking, can I surprise them again? Surprise is what creates a genuine laugh. But you’ve kept it up for 52 years, doing more or less the same thing every month, without throwing in the towel.īecause I never approach it as the same thing. You’ve done Fold-Ins for longer than most marriages last. You’ve been doing this, trying to outsmart your readers, for half a century.Īnd it’s really just one joke, done over and over and over and over. My job is to make it impossible for them to guess in advance. Most of our readers try to guess what it’ll be before they fold it in, and they work very hard at it, from what I’ve been told. It’s a joke that never finds its punchline. If a Fold-In isn’t folded in, does it really exist? It’s like that “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it” riddle. I don’t think people want to be lumps, letting you fill their heads with ideas. What I always loved about the Fold-In is that it couldn’t be enjoyed passively. That’s when I feel like we were doing our best work, when the readers needed to keep up, or at least take a more active role. A kid had to do his homework to keep up with Mad. There were the dog poop jokes, sure.īut you also wrote about government bureaucracy and nuclear proliferation and consumer manipulation. When we were growing up, it felt like reading Mad, and your work in particular, made us smarter. And it’s possible that all the readers of Mad are mentally ill. All human beings are intelligent, with the exception of people who are mentally ill.
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