"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."
January 1, 1970