My love affair with Mad magazine began when I was 11, and it was love at first sight. But it was no mere fling: I stayed a diehard Mad fan into adulthood. In fact, my love affair with Mad lasted longer than Mad itself, which in 2019 quit doing new stuff and starting recycling the old.

Now, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, Mad — like that classic cliche epitaph — is Gone, But Not Forgotten: Several years ago they made a CD with over 600 issues on it. Unsurprisingly, I bought it. So now when the mood hits me, I take a misguided tour of my youth, and the best that satire has to offer.

I think my relationship with Mad can best be shown by something that happened about 15 years ago. I was walking through town, a copy of Mad in my hand, when I ran into one of my students.

After we said hello, he said, “I can’t believe my English teacher likes Mad magazine.”

“I don’t like Mad,” I said, “I love it.”

“Love it?” he said. “I don’t believe you said that.”

“Well, lemme tell you something you darn well should believe,” I said.

“What’s that?” he said.

“Just this,” I said. “You’re a helluva lot better off with an English teacher who loves Mad, than with one who loves Proust.”

Of course he had no idea who Proust was, and for the sake of him and his loved ones, I hope he never finds out.

But that snarky though cogent comment aside, I think anyone who doesn’t like Mad needs, if not their head examined, then for sure their funny bone … provided they even have one.

Although there may be people who’ve never read Mad (the poor sods), nearly everyone knows its mascot and figurehead, Alfred E. Newman. Or perhaps more precisely, once they’ve seen his goofy visage, they’ll never forget it — no matter how hard they try. He’s best summed up in an article by Jerry De Fuccio in New York Times Magazine, who said, “Alfred E. Newman was everything parents prayed deep down their kids wouldn’t turn into — and feared they would.”

In case you were raised by wolves in an Arctic ice cave, Alfred E. has a head of tousled red hair, freckles, a pencil neck, a missing front tooth, and a look on his face that could charitably be called, “dumb***.” Underneath his image is always, “What — me worry?”

He’s that annoying kid who tagged along after you and your pals at the fair, scarfing pounds of junk food and quarts of soda, and then on the tilt-a-whirl barfed it all up — over everyone else.

In short, he’s everyone’s designated village idiot. Or due to the length and breadth of his fame, he’s everyone’s global idiot. Which is great, because if he’s the Idiot of the World, you can’t be.

Originally, he had no name. Then he became Melvin Coznowski. Finally he was dubbed Alfred E. Newman, named after Alfred Newman, writer of Hollywood movie themes. And just FYI, he (Alfred, not Alfred E.) is the father of musician Randy Newman, of “Short People” fame.

But though AEN seems easy to dismiss, he starred in a riveting legal drama that ended up in the Supreme Court. I read about it in a tome given to me years ago by my fellow literary hack, Lynda Gardner Peer. If you’d like to discover all sorts of stuff about Mad, check it out. It’s called “Completely Mad, A History of the Comic Book and the Magazine,” written by Maria Reidelbach.

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Copyrights and copy wrongs

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Mad used to joke that they were the only magazine with their lawyer’s name on the masthead. Or maybe they weren’t joking, because catch this: In the late ’50s a woman with the Mad-appropriate name Helen Pratt-Stuff filed a copyright infringement suit against Mad. Apparently, in 1914 her late husband had copyrighted an image he sold on postcards that looked a whole lot like Alfred E.

The lawsuit was no small deal because if it was proved that the Stuffs’ image was the original, Mad no longer had their mascot, plus they’d be out beaucoup bucks in damages and lawyers’ fees. And in this case, “beaucoup” translates “millions.”

Faced with the lawsuit, Mad revealed its true iceberg nature: The goofball, blithering idiocy they displayed in public was maybe only 10% of who they truly were. The other 90% was all business. Their lawyers, hardly ambulance-chasing shysters, tore into their research and left no stone unturned. Or in this case, left no image unexplored.

And guess what they found?

They found the image — the exact image — Stuff had copyrighted had been around before 1914. Matter of fact, it — and a whole bunch of other versions of it — had been around before the turn of the century. Plus, few of them had been copyrighted. And the ones that had copyrights had let them expire.

So the Supreme Court declared all those images invalid, and Alfred E. Newman was once again swaddled in the bosom of Mad, where he’d belonged the whole time.

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An ijit for all seasons

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And now a cogent question should present itself, namely WHY had that image been so widespread so long before it was a gleam in Mad’s eye? The answer is pretty simple: It was mostly used by dentists to advertise their supposedly painless technique (thus the kid missing a front tooth, and “What … me worry?”). How accurate their claims of painlessness were is anyone’s guess. Mine is, Not very.

However, the image wasn’t used exclusively by dentists. It also advertised sodas, handbills for a Broadway show, a Texas barbeque joint, a plum pudding and some patent medicines. One patent medicine, Antikamnia Tablets, claimed to cure “headaches, neuralgia, sciatic pains, grippe, women’s pains.” And — unlike the dentists’ claims — theirs probably was true. Then again, it should’ve been, since its main ingredient was heroin.

In addition to the Mad CD I have a bunch of their anthologies, so even though Mad no longer puts out new material, when the urge for brilliant satire and ultimate foolishness hits me, I can turn to one of them for a good dose of the absurd.

And if Mad’s spoofs don’t slake my thirst for laughable lunacy, I satisfy it one other way — by watching the national news.