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

by Mike Sacks

  I don't think my semi-realistic style of artwork in Patsy Walker was anything special, but my writing must have been pretty good. Every time I went to Timely to deliver my work, I'd be handed a shopping bag full of fan mail. I had to spend hours answering it.

  Did you ever write yourself into a Patsy Walker plot, like you did with Squat Car Squad? Perhaps a young illustrator who wanders into town, looking to date a bundle of mischief ….

  [Laughs] No. I didn't belong in Patsy Walker. Not at all.

  When did you make the move to Mad?

  In 1955, three years after the magazine began. Harvey Kurtzman came to me and asked if I'd like to come and work for him. I had freelanced for Mad with a couple of pieces, and he liked my work.

  Did it help that you were both an illustrator and a writer? Were you considered a double threat?

  There was a bit of a special status if you could do both. If anything, it was easier to make a sale. Instead of describing a joke, you could just show an editor the illustration. To describe it is more difficult. How is the editor supposed to know if it's funny or not? It was more effective this way.

  Did you realize Mad was something different when you first saw it?

  When I saw Mad, I loved it. I loved the craziness and the funny drawings. I mean, it was just letting go and having a good time. It was much freer than anything else out there. Harvey knew how to cherry-pick the kind of people who would fit in perfectly with the kind of scripts he wanted. Mad had a wonderful crew.

  But was it still a big leap for you — leaving the comfort of Timely to go work for Mad?

  It was. I was making a very nice living at Timely, but it just seemed like the right time. I told Stan Lee I was leaving, and then I called Harvey and said, “I'm coming with you.” And he said, “Well, actually, I'm not with Mad anymore. But don't worry. I've got something in the works.” He had just left Mad for a new humor magazine published by Hugh Hefner, called Trump. This was in the mid-to late-1950s.

  Harvey bridled at the fact that he had to pass all editorial decisions through Bill Gaines, who was the publisher of Mad, and that bothered him a great deal. So when Hefner came along and offered to produce a slicker version of Mad, and it would be in color, no less, it seemed like the right thing for Harvey to do. It wasn't just a money thing for him. What he really wanted was control.

  What was Trump like? It was the first of countless Mad knockoffs throughout the years.

  There were only two issues produced, but it was a beautiful, sleek product. We took too long to produce it, and it was too expensive. Harvey was just too much of a perfectionist, which is what I loved about him. He made changes in my pieces that nobody else would have made. It really improved the quality of my work. As an editor, he was incredible.

  There's a group of Mad aficionados who feel that if Harvey Kurtzman had stayed at Mad, the magazine would not only have been different, but better.

  And then there's a large group who feel that if Harvey had stayed with Mad, he would have upgraded it to the point where only fifteen people would buy it.*

  Drew Friedman (current Mad contributor) said, “I think Al Feldstein was the perfect editor when he came in. He did a great job by gearing the magazine more towards kids. I think Harvey wanted to gear the magazine more towards an adult audience. It's been said that Harvey wanted to keep the humor in a jugular vein, whereas Gaines wanted the humor to be in a juvenile vein. I honestly think if Harvey had stayed on Mad wouldn't have become the phenomenon it became in the sixties and into the seventies.”

  How did you end up getting hired again by Mad after your experience at Trump?

  In the late 1950s, I went to Mad with some scripts, and the new editor, Al Feld-stein, bought all of them.

  Al was a very hands-on editor. Everything had to go through him. No Mad piece was ever bought without his approval. We respected each other's talents. And I think he was a very good editor and a very smart man. He also knew how to delegate, which Harvey never knew how to do. And he was a lot more flexible than Harvey, a lot less rigid in his outlook — at least in my experience.

  Al Feldstein brought on board a lot of the writers and artists we now associate with Mad.

  He did, yes. He brought Don Martin to the magazine, as well as Antonio Prohías, who created “Spy vs. Spy.” Also, Dave Berg, who created “The Lighter Side Of …”

  What was Dave Berg like as a person?

  Dave had a messianic complex of some sort. He was battling … he had good and evil inside of him, clashing all the time. It was sad, in a sense, because he wanted to be taken very seriously and, you know, the staffers at Mad just didn't take anybody seriously. Most of all, ourselves.

  Do you think Dave Berg's inner battle later expressed itself in his strip “The Lighter Side Of …”?

  It came out in a lot of the things he did. He had a very moralistic personality. I mean, he moralized all the time. And his gags were very suburban middle-class America. Plus, he was very religious. He wrote a book called My Friend God. And, of course, if you write a book like that, you just know that the Mad staff is going to make fun of you. We would ask him questions like, “Dave, when did you and God become such good friends? Did you go to college together, or what?”

  I think Dave had a feeling that his contribution to the success of Mad wasn't appreciated enough. And I think this bothered him. He once told a staff member that he received so much fan mail that they had to hide it from him. And he really believed this. Naturally, most of us would just roll our eyes, because we didn't expect tons and tons of fan mail, and if there was fan mail, we always received it. I guess Dave felt he was carrying the whole magazine, and he should have been treated royally.

  Tell me about the quintessential Mad contributor, Don Martin.

  Don Martin was the very opposite of what he drew. He was a very nice-looking guy; tall, handsome, extremely soft-spoken. You almost had to bend forward to hear what he was saying. He didn't crack jokes, and he didn't do funny stuff, but he was a great appreciator of the humor of other Mad contributors. He was a great listener, and he laughed a lot and had fun, but he was not demonstrative. Not at all. I guess he got it all out in his drawings.

  He was a fantastic illustrator. His work for Mad was almost like animation. You could visualize his characters moving on the page; you could feel the action. And those sounds he came up with, well, they were not easy to create. With most of the contributors, if we needed sound effects, we tended to stick to the tried and true. For instance, we would use sounds such as “boff” and “zock” and “pow” and “bam.” But Don went much further, by creating his own language: “pwang,” “splitch,” “splawtch.” If you read the words, you could hear those sounds. That is just universal and completely unique. And that material hasn't dated at all; it's just as great as it was when it came out. He was really special. Sui generis.

  Was there a sense of camaraderie in the golden age of Mad, say, from the early sixties through the mid-seventies?

  Oh, a great deal. Absolutely! Mad's publisher, Bill Gaines, did something very clever: He would take the whole staff on an annual trip abroad. And we lived together for anywhere from seven to seventeen days. We hung out together. We all went out to restaurants together. And we got to know each other. We became almost like a family. I mean, we weren't in an office environment day-to-day where we got to know each other. A lot of us worked from home. In fact, every artist and writer worked from home — only the editors and art directors worked in the office.

  These trips were also an inducement to produce more material; if you didn't hit your cutoff each year, you weren't allowed on the trips. In the beginning, it was twenty pages of published material, and later you had to produce twenty-five every year. The trip was a reward for increased contributions. I was one of a few contributors who was on every single trip. I never missed the cutoff.

  Our first vacation was to Haiti in 1960.

  Why Haiti?

  We went there to pay a visit to the one and
only Haitian subscriber to Mad. On the entire island, there was only that one subscriber, and he had let his subscription lapse. So when we got there, Bill Gaines took a bunch of writers and illustrators over to this guy's house, and knocked on the door. When the guy answered, Bill offered him the gift of a renewal.

  Was the subscriber Baby Doc Duvalier? The future ruler of Haiti?

  No, I'm pretty sure it wasn't Baby Doc.

  In re-reading your Mad articles, I found that you predicted, or perhaps even invented, quite a few modern-day products.

  I did?

  I'll give you a few examples. In a piece you did in March 1967, you drew an illustration of a machine, and wrote: “The Idiot-Proof Typewriter will include memory tapes and store millions of words, phrases and correct grammatical expressions.” Sounds very similar to the spell-checker on a word processor.

  Wow! I don't remember that.

  You pre-dated the re-dial option on telephones and a cell phone's address book when you came up with the “automatic dialer” in 1961. Punch cards were inserted into a phone, which then automatically dialed the saved numbers. And you created “snow surfing,” basically, snowboarding, in 1965. “Using a regular surfboard, the Snow Surfer has trees, rocks, and annoyed skiers to lend dangerous excitement.”

  No kidding.

  You don't remember these?

  I don't remember, no. I'll have to read your book.

  You're being too modest. You also came up with the peel-away, non-lickable stamp in January 1979; the three-blade razor in July 1979; the “vandal-proof building” that repelled graffiti in 1982; and, my personal favorite, from the January 1975 issue, the “acrylic plastic squirt gun” for “doggie doo.” When the bulb is squeezed, “two chemicals are forced to mix and squirt from nozzle,” covering up excrement. That device has since actually been invented.

  Ah, yes. I remember that one.

  You should have patented those! You would have made a fortune!

  No, no, no. I could imagine those types of things, that was the fun part. But I never had the problem of trying to figure out how to manufacture them.

  Did you have any scientific training?

  None at all. My father used to manage a department store in Savannah — later, during the Depression, he had to earn a living as a postal worker. Before we all left for Lithuania, my father would take my brothers and me, every Saturday, to the toy department, and we'd just have a ball there. Then we wound up in this little village in Lithuania with no toys whatsoever. We invented toys, out of just scraps of wood lying around the yard. My brother Harry actually made a fire truck that sprayed water. Oh, god, we invented all types of ingenious things! We came up with a device that enabled us to steal fruit from neighbors' yards. It was a pole with a knife attached to the end, and then a basket for the fruit to fall into. So I think all of the inventions came from an interest in seeing what you can make for yourself if you're not able to go to the store and buy it.

  Speaking of ingenious invention, tell me about the Mad fold-in. How did you first come up with the idea?

  At this time — this would have been in April of 1964 — every major magazine was publishing some sort of foldout feature. Playboy, of course, had made it big by having a centerfold. So did Life magazine. They would have one showing, say, the geography of the moon, or something like that. Even Sports Illustrated had one at one point. So, naturally, how do you go the other way? You have a fold-in, rather than a fold-out. I created a mock-up, and wrote on it something like: “All good magazines are doing a foldout, but this lousy magazine is going to do a fold-in.” I went to Al Feldstein and showed it to him, but I didn't think the idea had a chance in hell of being used.

  Why not?

  Because it mutilated the magazine.

  There were no advertisements in the magazine at that time. To mutilate an ad might have been a problem, but why would it have been a problem just to bend an article?

  Yes, that's a good point. All I know is that when I showed the idea to Al and said, “You're not going to want to do this, but I think you'll get a kick out of it,” he looked it over and said, “I like it. Let's do it.” I figured it was a one-shot deal. Just a gag. Everybody had these beautiful color foldouts. And we had a stinky black-and-white fold-in.

  What was the first fold-in? Do you remember?

  Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. Rumors were flying around at that time — this was 1964 — that Liz was involved with Burton. I drew a crowd scene outside a Hollywood event, with reporters and fans. Burton was on the left and Liz was on the right, and Eddie Fisher was somewhere in the middle. Liz and Richard were looking at each other from a distance. When you folded it in, they wound up kissing. And Eddie Fisher was completely out of the picture. So, you know, it was a very simple thing.

  It was so simple at first that it was almost childish. But I kept working on it and honing it through the years. Eventually, the fold-in evolved into what we have now, more than forty years later, which is far more complicated. I've done more than four hundred.

  You took on a lot of serious issues with these fold-ins over the years, such as Vietnam, the Exxon Valdez, abusive parents, and homeless veterans. Was this an outlet for some of your concerns and anger over what was going on in the world?

  Not vehemently, but sometimes it became an outlet. But, you know, the fold-in is not supposed to be funny. Who knows what it is? It's a strange duck. One picture turns into another picture. But you have to say something. You can't just have an illustration. It's better to make a comment about the world around us. One of the editors at Mad, Nick Meglin, once said to me, “The fold-in is the only editorial cartooning done in Mad.” And I guess that's true.

  How long does it take to create each fold-in? What's the process?

  I'd say about two weeks from start to finish. I no longer look at it as being something formidable, because I've done it for such a long time. I have the feeling now that no matter what it is, I can find a way to do it. But it's still a challenge.

  Is it true you never know whether the final version will work or not?

  I never see it folded until it's printed.

  So how do you know if it's going to work?

  I just do. The final illustration is on a flat cardboard piece. But if I have any doubts, I can make a Xerox copy and then cut it and move the two pieces together. But I do make sure that everything connects, and I do that very simply. I have a strip of transparent tracing paper. I lay it down on one side and I use a pin to hit all the points that are going to touch. And then I move that over to the right side and I do the same thing on the left side. And anywhere that it doesn't match, I make the correction.

  Have you ever looked at a fold-in you created years ago and actually tricked yourself?

  Actually, I have, yes. I've looked at some old issues of Mad where I don't remember what the fold-in's answer is. I can't figure it out — which either means I'm a numskull or I'm doing a pretty good job on this thing.

  Why do you think the fold-in is so popular with readers?

  Because it's a puzzle. It's a participation thing. Whereas with the rest of the magazine, even though a reader may come across pieces that are ten times more interesting or hilarious, they just absorb it. They soak those pieces up, and then they come to my piece and can't absorb it. All they can absorb is half of it. Then they have to do something to get to the other half. I think that creates a little element of interest.

  Over the years, how have you managed to keep up with the current pop-culture trends?

  To be truthful, I don't. I'm a little too old to be able to keep up with the fashion trends of 20-year-olds and their music tastes. All you can do is read the newspapers and magazines and try to get a feeling for it. Also, I watch my children and grandchildren and see what they're doing.

  Did you feel the same way twenty or thirty years ago?

  I think one of my strong suits is I never became infatuated. I've always been on the outside looking in. It goes all the way back to Lith
uania, where some of my friends were obsessed with certain leaders of the community — as if they were rock stars. But I'd sit off to the side and say, “What do they see in that guy? He's just an old goat.”

  How did “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” get started in 1965?

  The way it got started is how a lot of things get started. You experience something, a little experience, and that leads to an idea. I happened to be standing on the roof outside my house on Long Island trying to fix an antenna, which had been blown over in a storm. And I'm afraid of heights, so I was very nervously tightening the band around the chimney that held the antenna. Suddenly, I heard my son climbing up this ladder. He asked me a question that he asked every time he came home from school: “Where's Mom?” And I answered, “I killed her and I'm stuffing her down this chimney.”

  He knew I was kidding, obviously, but I thought about this afterward, and it occurred to me that there must be a million times a day we all get asked questions to which you either don't know the answer or it's a pointless question. Up on the roof, how the hell would I know where Mom was?

  I think the brilliance of “Snappy Answers” is that the last entry is always left blank for the readers to fill in with their own jokes. I wonder how many professional humor writers got their start writing jokes in those blanks?

  Oh, I don't know. Those of us who work in the world of writing and drawing have very little idea of what kind of connection we're making. I mean, some people might come up to you and say, “I loved that thing you wrote,” but there are thousands of others who've read it and you never hear anything from them. And that's why I'm always very, very flattered when someone remembers something that I did.

  Do you feel that Mad has changed over the years? There's been some criticism that the magazine has become too gratuitous.

  Certainly I don't have the right to say I'm happy or unhappy with it. I think Mad is being produced by very knowledgeable people who are putting out a magazine for the current generation of readers. And I think it's very successful in that regard. There are things in there that, frankly, I'm not too familiar with, because they're for a much younger generation. But I think the editors are doing a wonderful job.