And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft

by Mike Sacks

  Have you come to appreciate — if that's even the correct word — the role you played as a contributor to The Simpsons and the effect that the show has around the world?

  I feel honored to have surfed such a glorious wave. I've gotten to entertain people, spew leftist propaganda, laugh like hell, and meet Keith Richards [“How I Spent My Strummer Vacation,” Season 14, Episode Two].

  Any advice for the humor writer wannabe? Specific writing tips or otherwise?

  Yes. Experience as much as you can and absorb a lot of reality. Otherwise, your writing will have the force of a Wiffle ball.

  Al Jaffee

  Although writer and illustrator Al Jaffee has created some of Mad's most memorable humor since the magazine's inception in 1952 — from “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” to the Vietnam–era, anti-war cartoon “Hawks & Doves” — his legacy will forever be tied to the “fold-in.”

  Originally intended as a onetime parody of Playboy's foldouts, Jaffee's recurring feature — which has appeared in almost every issue of Mad since 1964, numbering more than four hundred total — has become almost as recognized and imitated as Alfred E. Newman's gap-toothed grin. Located on the magazine's inside back cover, it features a drawing that, when folded vertically and inward, reveals a hidden picture and a surprise joke.

  What makes the fold-in so brilliant isn't merely the concept. Deceptively simple and seemingly innocuous, the fold-in is a cache of subversive satire. Judging from some of the references over the years, Jaffee has always trusted the intelligence of his audience, even when they were no more than pre-or just-pubescent boys looking for a quick laugh before bedtime or during math class. How else to explain the very adult fold-in punch-lines, such as “Heated Anti-American Sentiments” or “Soaring Prescription Profits” or “Hiding the Homeless Problem”? Or the gag in which an American bald eagle transforms into another, perhaps even more popular cultural icon … the Big Mac?

  One can easily imagine generations of young humor writers, including notorious fans Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, reading one of Jaffee's fold-ins for the first time and realizing what could be done with the written word and with the slight tweaking of an image. After all, Colbert celebrated Jaffee's 85th birthday on his Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, in 2006 by creating a fold-in vanilla birthday cake. It included the message: “Al, YOU HAVE REPEATEDLY SHOWN ARTISTRY & CARE OF GREAT CREDIT TO YOUR FIELD. LOVE, STEPHEN COLBERT.” But when the cake's center was removed, it read: “Al, You Are Old.”

  Al Jaffee is the eldest surviving Mad “usual Gang of Idiots” who still contributes to the magazine — which makes him more than just a senior comedy writer who has stubbornly refused to grow up. It wouldn't be a stretch to call Al Jaffee the elder statesman of adolescent humor.

  For someone who's spent more than fifty years contributing to such an American comedic institution, you spent a fair amount of your childhood in a country not necessarily known for its humor.

  That's right. I spent six years in Lithuania, from the age of six to twelve. At that time, most of the Lithuanian Jews lived in ghettos. I lived in one, too, in a town called Zarasai.

  But you weren't born in Lithuania?

  No, I was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1921. But both of my parents were from Lithuania. My mother was very religious, and she wanted to go back to a place where she felt comfortable. She moved back, and brought me and my three brothers with her. This was in 1927.

  How did those six years in Lithuania affect your comic sensibility?

  My father remained in America through those six years, and I made him promise to send me American comic strips. Every few months or so, my brothers and I would receive a package of rolled-up Sunday color comics and daily comics. We would just sit there and read them for days and days. My brother Harry, who was also artistic, would take these Sunday comic pages, and we'd cut them up and turn them into little books. A lot of the comic strips were divided into twelve equal panels, so it was very easy to cut these panels into little squares and then place them between two pieces of cardboard and bind them. We loved to make our own comic books. We would provide our own dialogue, maybe with a Lithuanian joke or two.

  Most of the comics we received were humorous. Some were adventurous, in the “Little Orphan Annie” mold. You know, there was no TV or radio. So that was pretty much it for us. But I would see humor in everything, even in the religious practices, which didn't quite register with me.

  I found religion sort of funny. There was something that just didn't make sense about not being able to play ball or not being able to walk too far on the Sabbath. These very strict religious prohibitions against any kind of enjoyment just struck me as being very old-fashioned and strange. Maybe I was bringing my Savannah influence with me; I don't know. I was sort of straddling these two cultures: the New World and the Old World.

  Beyond “Little Orphan Annie,” what were some of your other favorite comic strips then?

  I loved “Wash Tubbs,” by Roy Crane. Oh, god, that was one of my favorites. Crane created these comic strips about a mythical kingdom somewhere in Europe, and I could identify with those things. The mythical kingdom that Crane created was closer to the village I was living in at the time than anything else. That resonated pretty well with me. In addition, Crane was an absolute master cartoonist. His work was realistic, but not super-realistic.

  How so?

  The characters did not look realistic the way “Superman” characters looked. They looked like cartoon characters, but everything was in perfect proportion. And all of the elements, whether it was a train or an automobile, it all looked very real — but in a sort of animated way.

  So these drawings looked authentic within their own world, the world of comics, but not authentic in our world, the real world?

  Yes.

  Did you adopt this style for yourself later in your career?

  I did. I don't consider myself a very good artist. I never have. I really don't know anatomy. I can't draw a specific automobile or a specific train out of my imagination, but I think I can do a pretty good job of imagining an automobile or imagining a train. So I can't compare myself to Roy Crane, because he was head and shoulders above me, but I do have an affinity for the kind of things that he did — when you don't have to go and get a reference book to draw a Chevrolet and reproduce it in perfect detail.

  People might be surprised when I refer to myself as not such a great artist, but I only try to meet the needs of the story. Without having a story to tell, my art has no meaning. Rembrandt may have been able to achieve meaning without a story, but I can't.

  Then again, if you put a Rembrandt-style artist into Mad, the reader would focus so much on the artist's style that it would overwhelm the comedy and the writing.

  It's sort of complicated to figure this out, but I really feel that the idea has to precede the artwork, and if the idea says this is a fantasy … well, then there's no point in going out and getting reference materials. You just draw what's in your head.

  How prevalent was anti-Semitism in Lithuania when you lived there?

  There was a great deal of anti-Semitism, which was a source of humor for me — dark humor. I'd sit around with my friends in their houses and listen to the grownups talk about the latest prohibition against Jewish commerce, or whatever. They would take it seriously, but they would also ridicule and make fun of it.

  A lot of the children's jokes that went around at that time had to do with restrictions against the Jews that were set by the government. Between the restrictions coming from our own religious community and those coming from the anti Semitic government, you were caught in such a ridiculous situation. The only thing you could do was laugh at it, make fun of it.

  I suppose there's another response, which would have been to become angry.

  Well, I was angry at my mother, because she was very strict and she spent a lot of time with her religious activities, leaving both my brothers and me feeling neglected. I just don't believe in fa
ntasies. And it seemed to me that 90 percent of the religious stuff that was being said was fantasy. It's like Santa Claus. There was no Santa Claus, and there was no magical rabbi, and there was no magical anything. All of it was illusion. But humor was an outlet for me, an escape. It was an escape from what I saw as idiotic behavior by everyone.

  I don't think humor is just here to tickle people. Humor has much deeper roots than that.

  Why did you eventually return to the States?

  My father brought us back when Hitler came to power. This was in 1933. My mother chose to remain behind. She said that she would join us later, but she never did. She died around 1939, although I've never found out how. There are no records. The Red Cross thought it might have been caused by the local partisans eager to help the Nazis after they invaded Lithuania.

  Did you speak Yiddish when you returned?

  I did, yes.

  When you look at the early issues of Mad there's a lot of Yiddish used.

  Harvey Kurtzman, the founding editor of Mad, lived in Brooklyn, and his parents were born in Russia and spoke Yiddish. If you were living in New York, or the Jewish section of the Bronx, which is where we moved after I returned, you heard Yiddish everywhere. All the words that were used to make fun and to insult people were in Yiddish. You know, “Look at that shmegegge.”

  When Harvey started Mad, he just got a kick out of that. He brought in a lot of Yiddish, as did some of the other writers.

  It's the perfect language for a publication like Mad. The words were funny in and of themselves, and they also sounded adult and a little dirty.

  When you're doing humor, you use every device you can think of, like funny sounds or words that seem insulting when they're really not. There are elements in humor that have to do with sound and timing, and how the syllables are separated. But a lot of credit has to go to the person who is making it funny. The words themselves can't always do it. For a stand-up comic, it's the inflection and even the buildup, setting the scene. Sometimes you set the scene with just the way your eyes move.

  But it's one thing for a stand-up comedian to achieve this, and another thing for you, as a comic book writer and illustrator, to pull this off on the page.

  I see images. I see the scene, and I see the characters, and I see whether the guy has a big nose or big feet or buckteeth. I see it, and I fashion the dialogue or a caption to it. It's just something that happens automatically for me.

  You attended New York's High School of Music & Art with seemingly half of the future Mad's original “Gang of Idiots.” Who were some of your classmates?

  Harvey Kurtzman; Al Feldstein, who took over for Harvey in 1956 and became the editor for about thirty years; John Severin, who was a brilliant illustrator; Will Elder, another brilliant illustrator. And there were others who came afterward, people I only got to know later in the comic business.

  Did this school teach fine art or commercial art?

  Oh, it was all fine art. In fact, I remember one day in the late thirties, when Will Elder came into school and he had meticulously drawn all of the Seven Dwarfs from the movie Snow White. The teacher was not happy. I mean, she really reamed him out, because he was showing these drawings to everybody.

  He'd drawn these characters from memory, from having watched the movie just once?

  Yes. He had a fantastic eye and memory. He drew them perfectly, without any reference source. There were no books about the movie; it had just come out. And there was no Internet, of course. He saw the movie, and he went home and just drew the characters.

  So why was this teacher upset?

  Cartooning was not allowed. It was looked down upon. We were there to study painting and sculpture and engraving, and we did all of them. We had very good teachers, but the head of the art department, Miss McDonald, was very strict about not introducing commercial art into the curriculum. Looking back, I think she was right. Getting a good background in fine art is very, very helpful when you go on to do even silly cartoons.

  What was your first comic-book sale? How old were you?

  I was twenty. I went to see Will Eisner, who was the creator of a comic strip called “The Spirit,” which was beautifully drawn and very creative. The opening splash pages were all so brilliantly conceived. In the comics field, we all admired this strip tremendously. Will was a genius. He just did beautiful work.

  So, I had created a parody of Superman called “Inferior Man” and I wanted to show it to Will. It seems so naïve now, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

  Was this the first parody of Superman? This would have been — what? The early forties? Superman had only been around a few years at that point.

  At that time, there was another character who was called Stuporman — it was published by DC Comics. I don't know if mine was the first Superman takeoff, but it really doesn't matter. I came up with mine independently. Since then, I've seen a million takeoffs, but, at that time, there weren't many. When I brought this idea to Will, I had no idea whether I was doing something stupid or not. But Will, who was only a few years older than I was, was already very successful. He hired me on the spot to do Inferior Man as a filler for his comic books.

  It's interesting that it took a Lithuanian, Jerry Siegel, to co-create Superman, and another Lithuanian, you, to parody that character.

  The Jewish character of the golem must have influenced Superman. When a people live under extremely oppressive circumstances, humor and fantasy, I think, are necessary for survival. When you're beaten down constantly, what are you going to do? You have to create a fantasy. And either the characters are superheroes, like a golem, who have come down to save the whole community, or they're fools, and they just make fun of their own misery. I suppose Superman and Inferior Man are the two sides of that example.

  Has Lithuania ever acknowledged you or Jerry Siegel in any way?

  No, and I don't really have a warm spot in my heart for Lithuania.

  To have made a major sale at the age of twenty must have been very exciting. Not to mention a real boost to your career.

  It was, certainly. But whenever I read news reports or stories about that time, or I hear people talking about it, one element that's usually left out is the realistic atmosphere. Our families had either just come out of the Depression, or were still in the Depression. No one opened the gate and said, “Depression over!” You had a lot of baggage, and some of that was trying to figure out how to become self-sustaining and not have to rely on your parents. So, with the comic-book field the buzz was, “There's work.” You can get so much money per page. All you have to do is write and draw cartoons. I was making three times as much as my father was making as a postal worker.

  You were working only on your Inferior Man comics?

  No, I was also making extra money doing some penciling for a cartoonist who worked for Timely Comics, which later became Marvel Comics. After a while, though, I realized that I was being exploited. I was being paid $8 a week. So I became disillusioned and skipped the middleman and went to work directly for Timely Comics.

  Stan Lee, later the creator of Spider-Man, had just become the editor at Timely. He was about 17-years-old, maybe eighteen. And I went to see him at his office. He looked at a few of my samples, then handed me a script called Squat Car Squad and said, “Let's see what you can do with that. Go illustrate it.” When I brought it back, he said, “I don't have any more scripts for you to illustrate, but why don't you keep writing and drawing this one?” So I did a lot of Squat Car Squad, which was a simple comic about two policemen. But I had a great time with it.

  In doing research for this interview, I read some Squat Car Squad comics. You and the other writers and illustrators did a remarkable thing. In a few instances, you wrote yourselves into the plot — a very modern device.

  I'm not sure why we did that. I'm assuming illustrators had done that before we came along; I can't imagine we invented something like that. I don't want to sound noble about it, and it's embarrassing t
o be transparently self-promoting. So I didn't do it for that reason. It just seemed like a funny situation when the story wasn't going anywhere, or these two cops were having some kind of difficulty, and I burst into the panel to berate them and tell them what to do.

  It's almost like a Marx Brothers movie, breaking the fourth wall. Or a Warner Bros. cartoon.

  That's just part and parcel of thinking funny, of being creative. Don't we all become sick and tired of formulas after a while?

  Did you work on any other characters at Timely?

  After the war, I wrote and illustrated a teen character named Patsy Walker. I did this for about five years. I didn't create this character — a woman by the name of Ruth Atkinson did — but I worked on it. You know, the American public goes through cycles, and the cycle at that time was teenage humor.

  The idealized version of that carefree teen life wasn't the sort of lifestyle you and the other comic artists were leading, I take it?

  That's absolutely correct. We were coming out of an economic depression and then war. Many of us were starting to get married and have families. So things were changing. But we were living fantasy lives through our work. We were creating these worlds, in the comics, that we wished our childhoods could have been.

  Do you remember any of the gags you created for Patsy Walker? In one of the promotional items from that time she was described as a “wonderfully fresh college girl and a bundle of mischief.”

  I didn't do gags, I wrote stories. I tried to insert humor into those stories, because I think I would have become very bored if things stayed serious. What you had were two women who were fighting over one guy, and that, basically, was the whole thing. But in order to give it some kind of a life, I would have stories in which there'd be a new person in town, a shy or a homely character, and the bad girl — the snooty girl — would make fun of her and not invite her to the party. Then the good girl — Patsy Walker — would convince everybody this was a lousy thing to do, and everything would come out all right. So there was a little moral in there.