All right-- so it wasn't always funny or incisive, and it could be tired and dowdy at times. And occasionally it picked the wrong targets in some misguided belief that all sides of every issue deserve equal measures of humiliation. And it hasn't been really relevant for twenty years. Still, you have to shed a tear for the death of Mad Magazine.
Not that it's actually died.
The new owners of Mad Magazine -- the quintessential greedy, ruthless, heartless corporation-- AOL/Time Warner-- will now accept advertising, thank you.
How can Mad Magazine, which used to mock the fundamental principles of hucksterism and commercialism, continue to attack the great hypocrisies in American culture while simultaneously urging you to buy Schlock Beer or Fuds Candy Bars?
My guess is that they will do the insidious thing: they will install a pseudo-hip self-mocking irreverence in the advertising itself, thereby confusing the reader into thinking that it can be cool to be an idiot-- precisely the sort of clever marketing strategy that Mad used to mock.
I don't think any sell-out on my list makes me sadder. Poor William H. Gaines (the original publisher of Mad, who refused all advertising).
Mad was no great shakes as a magazine. It had it's faults. But the one thing I loved dearly about it was that it alone, among all American media outlets, had the courage and audacity to defy the one real sacred cow of our culture: that greed is good.
Sob.
