"On their deathbed, no one wishes they'd spent more time at work... but plenty of people at work wish they were on their deathbed instead. (#548 – 12/2017)"

"One good thing about World War 3: at least there won't be any more sequels. (#549 – 02/2018)"

"Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life... because you'll be unemployed. (#550 – 04/2018)"

"A first issue of a magazine is like a first flower in spring. Except we actually had to murder plants to make this. (#1 – 06/2018)"

"You can't teach an old man to fish, but you can teach him to microwave some tuna and make everyone else at the retirement home really angry. (#3 – 10/2018)"

"Disney sets painfully unrealistic expectations. No dogs will eat my spaghetti. (#4 – 12/2018)"

"I have a face that only a mother could love, which is why I'm dating your mom. (#5 – 02/2019)"

"Nothing is certain except for death and taxes, unless you're rich, then just death. (#6 – 04/2019)"

"The end of a vacation is like a thirsty stick: it sucks. Unless the vacation was full of ticks. (#7 – 06/2019 p. 5)"

"Mythical is just mystical spoken with a lisp. (#7 – p. 6)"

"Baby changing stations should be outlawed. Babies are fine just the way they are! (#7 – p. 35)"

"The word boobs is so scary until you get to the second b. (#7 – p. 44)"

"Make your life a little sillier by assuming glock is short for glockenspiel in rap songs. (#8 – 08/2019)"

"Mercury retrograde negatively impacts conversation. For example, when you say Mercury retrograde, people stop talking to you. (#9 – 10/2019 p. 4)"

"Don't let the bed bugs bite is victim blaming. (#9 – p. 5)"

"They say young people are impressionable, but really their skin doesn't retain an imprint like an old person's. (#9 – p. 6)"

"It's okay to cut corners—especially with this magazine. FREE confetti!!! (#9 – p. 52)"

"(Sorry, folks, no dumb quote in #10; Happy Scary Halloween!)"

"The first issue of the magazine hit the newsstands in 1952, with sharp-eyed sendups of movies, advertising, celebrities and comic strips: Mickey Mouse became "Mickey Rodent" and Superman "Superduperman." To the delight of its largely teen-age audience, it brought satire into the mainstream, along with up-to-the-moment New York humor sprinkled with Yiddish, nonsense and non sequiturs."

"It's got to have been an influence on almost every comedy writer I know," said Steve O'Donnell, the head writer for "Late Night With David Letterman." "It's rare that you would meet a comedy writer who doesn't know who Arthur the Potted Plant is, or the kinds of esoterica in the margins that we ardently absorbed because we were scanning every page for most of our childhoods." Presiding over those margins was a 240-pound publisher who filled the office water cooler with wine and celebrated hitting the million mark in circulation by packing his staff off to Haiti, where Mad had exactly one subscriber. Few readers ever receive the kind of personal attention that Mr. Gaines lavished on him: Mr. Gaines drove to his house and handed him a subscription-renewal card. At Mad's office (on MADison Avenue, it says beneath the table of contents) Mr. Gaines was a sounding board for jokes, but left the writing and drawing to others. "My staff and contributors create the magazine," he said. "What I create is the atmosphere."

"The magazine had begun when Harvey Kurtzman, a cartoonist who had been interviewing Korean War veterans for combat comic books, came down with jaundice and decided to create something that he could write from his sickbed. Mr. Gaines gave him the go-ahead. But to children of the air-raid shelter generation, the first primary-school group taught to "duck and cover" -- hide under school desks and shield their faces in case of the white-hot flash of an atomic bomb -- Mad quickly became an essential part of growing up. Month after month, in its relentlessly good-natured way, Mad told them that everything was askew. "It's no accident that it came along when it did, in the 50's," said Tony Hiss, a staff writer at The New Yorker. "That's when TV was beginning to take hold, and one of its unexpected side effects was a new kind of bunkum-detector. All those commercials gave you an awareness that you were being conned and allowed you to see through the hype.""

"Saturday Night Live would be unthinkable without Mad; so would Home Alone and Tim Burton. Even such diverse and serious types as Gloria Steinem and Art Spiegelman acknowledge the stunning impact of Mad on their life and work. Gaines’ little comic book has quite possibly been the most subversive magazine of modern times, simply because it taught readers-kid readers-to giggle at the pomposities and contradictions of mainstream culture. Mad exposed the lighter side of everything young people were taught was heavy. Starting out in a decade fanatically devoted to the status quo and worshipful of grown-ups, Gaines dared to muse, ”I think that 13 just may be the age of reason.” From today’s vantage point, in an age awash with irony, it’s hard to grasp how astounding the first Mads must have seemed when America was liking Ike and loving Lucy. Yet the most popular modern pastimes-the twisted celebration of the distasteful, the obsessive satirical reshuffling of the pop-culture deck- derive from that willfully juvenile revolution."

"For generations of readers, the names of the Mad Men now “exist as gods on Olympus,” says art director Viviano. Gaines also brooked no interference from his corporate bosses. He wanted the magazine to tackle the world on its own terms. And it did. Nothing was sacred to Mad. “It was magical, objective proof to kids that they weren’t alone, that in New York City on Lafayette Street, if nowhere else, there were people who knew that there was something wrong, phony and funny about a world of bomb shelters, brinkmanship and toothpaste smiles,” The New York Times wrote in 1977."

"The Mad trips ended just after Gaines’ death in 1992, and some of the legends – Dave Berg, Antonio Prohias, Don Martin, George Woodbridge – have passed on. Age and distance have made it harder to connect. But Jaffee relaxes with Jack Davis and Sergio Aragones as if he’d seen them yesterday, sharing stories, signing books and observing the passing crowd, as cartoonists will. At this gathering in Savannah, Mad is the center of the world. But outside SCAD’s Poetter Hall, times have changed. The magazine’s circulation, which topped 2 million in the 1970s, was down to just below 200,000 as of 2010. The magazine, once printed on pulp, now uses better-quality paper, prints words it once shunned, and even takes advertising. It’s the kind of stuff that gives complainers material for potshots at the magazine even though – given Mad’s influence – you might say we’re living in a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad world. But the magazine remains a rite of passage, points out Viviano, a way for preteens and preteens at heart to negotiate the adult world. “It’s still a magazine for skeptics,” he says. “That hasn’t changed.”"

"Begun as a comic book spoofing other comic books, Mad set the tone for the modern satire popularized on television’s “Saturday Night Live” and in films such as Airplane and Naked Gun. Free of advertising, Mad faithfully adhered to Gaines’ irreverent edict: “Don’t believe in ads. Don’t believe in government. Watch yourself--everybody is trying to screw you!”"

"Gaines enabled Mad to turn down all advertising partially by maintaining a very low overhead. The magazine’s crowded, toy-strewn Manhattan office included such decor as a year-round Christmas tree. His regular staff rarely numbered more than nine or 10, and he relied on free-lance cartoonists and writers accepting small pay in order to be showcased in Mad."

"Once upon a time, in the Age of Innocence, children really believed that all adults were good, that all Presidents were as honest as Abe Lincoln, that the adult world was in every way bigger and better than their own world, one which children knew well was full of savagery and danger. Children were expected to give up their seats in public conveyances to adults, to reserve strong language for the company of their peers and in every way to treat adults with respect. No single cultural force of the past 25 years better illustrates the changes that have occurred since those old days than Mad Magazine. Mad began as an offshoot of comic books. But while the comics of earlier years ran the gamut from cute Disney to the gruesomely violent Tales from the Crypt that aroused parental ire and even Congressional investigations, they all nevertheless fell into the category of fantasy, long an accepted adjunct of childhood. Mad was the first satirical magazine for children, a sort of an easy-to-read Junior Swift, the first to deal with children's reality -their parents, schools and the general adult culture around them - in a mocking way. As Al Feldstein, editor of Mad for the past 25 years, says, What we did was to take the absurdities of the adult world that youngsters were facing and show kids that the adult world is not omnipotent, that their parents were telling the kids to be honest, not to lie, and yet they were cheating on their income tax. We told them there's a lot of garbage out in the world and you've got to be aware of it. Everything you read in the papers is not necessarily true. What you see on television is mostly lies. You're going to have to learn to think for yourself."

"While the early issues of Mad chose child-centered material to satirize, the focus turned in the 1960's to more and more difficult concerns - adult hypocrisy, sexuality, women's liberation, divorce, the drug and alcohol scene. One feature, entitled If Babies Could Take Parent Pictures, contained illustrations with this caption: Here's my idiot father trying to drive and take pictures at the same time. I was lucky to get home alive. The phrase my idiot father does not have a jarring sound in 1981; children today are cheerfully irreverent toward their elders. But the words were shocking then, coming from a child. A convention was coming to an end - one that compelled children to repress their natural (Freud would say Oedipal) hostilities, forced them to mutter under their breaths perhaps, but rarely to be openly abusive. Mad Magazine was clearly influential in the move toward free expression among children; its relentless exposure of parental hypocricies during the 1960's caused shock waves of admiration and reaction among its young readers, who were not unaware of their older siblings' angry accusations of hypocrisy against The Great Society's war in Vietnam."

"Much of the material Mad satirized in its pages was first available to children in other media, especially television and the films. As these began to show increasingly adult material, Mad's pages also began to become more sophisticated. The magazine grew racier, but its readership grew younger. In the late 50's our readers seemed to be about 15, l6, late high school, early college. Today the mean age is probably about 13, Al Feldstein says. He attributes the change unequivocally to increased television viewing."

"MAD publisher Bill Gaines says he got the magazine's credo from an old New Yorker cartoon showing a man on a soapbox shouting, "I hate everybody regardless of race, creed or color." "It really has become our motto," says Gaines. "We attack anyone no matter who or what they are. Since we don't have a point of view, we don't have to leave anyone out and that gives us a lot more material to work on.""

"Some of the people MAD has "worked on" over the years have taken offense at the magazine's irreverence. Gaines smiled as he recalled some of the magazine's more notable lawsuits. "One of the first was Ava Gardner who had just finished filming `The Barefoot Contessa.' She was upset because we ran a parody called `The Barefoot No-Contessa.' Then Dentyne got after us when we ran ads for Cavetyne Chewing Gum. There have been so many threats that after all this time they sort of blend together. "Especially when we were younger, it seemed like people got offended by these things. There were a lot of lawsuits but over the years we've always been able to jolly everybody out of it who took offense. We'd say, 'Aw, come on, this is only MAD Magazine. We're only fooling around.' We really haven't had any serious court cases in years.""

"He recalled the time when MAD was banned from Oklahoma for being communistic. The magazine had to go to court after being placed on what was called the state "smutmobile" by the state's attorney general. Gaines said the attorney general was said to be a friend of an Army general in Europe who "got up in front of a group of people and told them we were tainted with Communism." The state government put MAD in the same category as all of the dirty magazines of the day. Gaines had to sue to get back on the newstands."

"Another more serious lawsuit involved the magazine's parodies of songs. New lyrics are written to familiar songs and printed with the instructions, "Sing to the tune of ...." When Irving Berlin and a group of songwriters sued Gaines, the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court. "We made law on that one," Gaines recalled, noting that he had probably helped to pave the way for Weird Al Yankovic's parodies. "Now anyone is free to parody anything that way. You just can't publish the music.""

"Gaines founded MAD as a 10-cent comic book. Neither he nor editor Al Feldstein expected it to sell at all well. After publishing horror stories, science fiction, war and suspense comics with his father's company, he and Feldstein "just decided one day" to create a comic spoofing all the others. "We never expected it to achieve anything. I guess we basically just did it for our own amusement," Gaines said. "Of course, it took off and now everything else is long since gone.""

"Gaines said it usually surprises people to hear that MAD has a full-time staff of only nine. All of the writing and art work is done by part-timers. He says the organization started tiny and grew into something very big without any major changes in staff. "All of our freelancers work for other people, too," he said. "We can't support any of them. A lot of them are into record covers, Time and Newsweek covers, TV Guide covers. Some of our writers have won Emmys in Hollywood. In their spare time they knock out a MAD article now and then." He says most of the freelancers, too, have been with the magazine from the beginning, doing it now out of a sense of loyalty or as an alter-ego exercise. He says it takes a particular kind of crazy mind to write for MAD and new talent has not been easy to find. "These guys are getting old now but they still think young, Gaines said. "Still, though, I guess it might be our biggest problem — that we're losing touch with our audience because of the age thing. We just can't seem to find young ones to take over.""

"Q: Describe a typical day at MAD."

"It’s really a look at life, a look at the absurdity from a graphically visual point of view. If you illustrate some one-liners, it destroys them because that one-liner works better in the mind’s eye–you hear it and form a picture in your mind of what’s happening. But then when you actually see somebody draw that and make it graphic, then it doesn’t work anymore. For instance, Woody Allen in one of his early stand-up act lines said, “And I came home and there was my mother in a corner knitting a chicken.” Now everyone has always broken up at that line–there’s an insanity, an absurdity, that’s wonderful. It just sounds right. But if we did a drawing of a woman sitting on a couch knitting a chicken, it destroys it. Because once you graphically see it, once it’s in print, it’s no more a mind’s-eye absurdity; it becomes a graphic reality. And not every graphic reality is funny. So a MAD idea really translates well into a graphic reality–it’s not a mind’s-eye image."

"There is a MAD philosophy–not that we adhere to a policy, we have no policy. But the philosophy is really is that to be funny, it has to work on one of three levels. It has to be completely satiric, which means it really has to be like a funhouse mirror reflection; it’s not enough to do somebody as they exist because that’s already done. You have to distort the image so that everyone knows who it is, yet the distortion has to do with the humor we derive out of that image."

"Q: Do you ever worry about pitching the material at a certain age group?"

"Q: Has anyone accused you of having a political agenda?"

"Q: Is there any subject MAD won’t touch?"

"Put 1,000 writers in a room for 1,000 days and one will come up with a story about monkeys writing Hamlet. (#385 – 09/1999)"

"On their deathbed, no one ever wished they had spent more time at the office — or on their deathbed, for that matter. (#384 – 08/1999)"

"Most people don't mind a hard day's work — just as long as they're not in that day. (#383 – 07/1999)"

"When it comes to personal conduct, always set the bar high — it makes it much easier to sneak underneath. (#382 – 06/1999)"

"Telephone psychics are better at making fortunes than reading them. (#380 – 04/1999)"