Thursday, May 01, 2003

I dug out an old MAD magazine last night. I used to have a bunch of these, but the collection seems to have dwindled down to this one, from April 1968.

I think this was an especially fruitful period for MAD, which was anti-establishment when anti-establishment wasn't cool; and this issue, the cover of which sees Alfred E. Neuman bedecked in flowers and love beads, is as scathing about hippiedom as it is everything else.

This issue also has no small amount of feeble shtick, but then that was always true of MAD. Still, there's something comforting in knowing that even as we grew older and came to favor more sophisticated satire, MAD stayed (and stays) about the same.

Here's an excerpt from the April 1968 issue that I found particularly hilarious.

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