The first issue of Mad magazine appeared in August 1952. Coincidentally I was born at the end of that very month. Who knew that we had so much in common?
I don’t remember when I became aware of the magazine– but like many firsts in my life, it was likely later than many of my contemporaries. I don’t think it was my dad who showed it to me, probably one of the kids at school.
It may well have been too sophisticated for me; I certainly didn’t understand most of the social and political references, including the cold war context of “Spy vs. Spy”. I ignored the appropriated image of Alfred E. Neuman’s “What? Me worry!?!” and only sometimes “got” Don Martin’s comic strip. The first thing I did was carefully fold in the back cover to see how the captioned image magically morphed into something completely – caustically — different.
The second was to look for the movie and television spoofs. Like “The Sound of Money” with its caricature of Julie Andrews singing reworked lyrics to the ubiquitous song.
And for years I sang the lyrics to “Chopped Liver” (*sung to the tune of “Moon River”): “Chopped Liver, onions on the side / my social life has died, from you / My friends shun me, they out-run me / the smell of my breath, is slow death, sad but true / My odors’ twice as bad as beer, and people who drink beer agree / I know that my breath will not end / always I’ll offend, my halitosis friends / Chopped liver, in me.
In retrospect however I think I absorbed the magazine’s subliminal message of being skeptical and critical of anything and everything I was being taught. Whatever was being presented –at home, at school, in the media — was subject to spoof, including how it was presented.
I think Mad showed me that I wasn’t crazy: it was the world that was ridiculous. There was another – funnier, darker — side to everything. Inadvertently perhaps, my sense of humor, my appreciation of wit and sarcasm, can be attributed to reading Mad magazine in my formative years. Though I haven’t looked at an issue of Mad in many years, I now realize its iconoclastic perspective helped make me the man I have become.
Jim Van Buskirk 
You know, Jim, you’re probably right about the subversiveness of reading MAD. At the time I thought it was merely fun and naughty, but its satirical and irreverent send-ups probably did teach me to be more skeptical and critical than before I encountered MAD. Thanks again for the memories – for articulating something that I would’ve found peripheral that I probably shouldn’t think of that way at all!
Chopped liver, onions on the side is still an in side joke among certain friends from my youth. Thank you for posting a very interesting observation on one of my early influences.
I loved MAD Magazine as an adolescent and looked forward to the next issue that I purchased at the grocery store. My introduction actually occurred earlier when I took piano lessons from Miss Peterson. She kept piles of past issues which I looked through and being amazed and amused. I loved the wit and irreverence of MAD Magazine.
Mad Magazine was great and very advanced till the 1980’s. Then it went downhill from there. New writers replaced the old, some died and Mad Magazine finally went corporate.