Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  With the exception of the MAD trips, even the boys had very little opportunity to be “one of the boys.” “Whenever I run into MAD readers, they invariably comment about what fun I must have brainstorming and kidding around all day with the other writers and artists at the MAD offices. They imagine ‘the usual gang of idiots’ hard at play in the MAD conference room, inhaling cheese Danish, exchanging good-natured ribbing and cross-pollinating comic ideas for the next issue in an environment of ever-escalating high jinks and merriment. They conjure up images of Don Martin speaking in tongues—SPAZAT, KAZOP, SLURK, PLOBBLE, GLUNK; Frank Jacobs speaking in verse, and Sergio Aragones emptying a jar of rubber cement on Bill Gaines’s Eames chair. How, they wonder, do we ever get any work done surrounded by so much hilarity?”

  The demythologized truth is that there is no Danish, no Eames chair, no cross-pollinating, and no kidding around. Nor is there a conference or even a conference room to hold one in. The twenty-five or so writers and artists employed by MAD are freelancers who, like Al, work at home in their studios in what feels more like solitary than hilarity. It is MAD magazine itself that colludes in creating the false impression of bonhomie by referring to their contributors as “Madmen” and “the usual gang of idiots.”

  Al had been hoping for a family, but what he got was “a family at arm’s length. MAD wasn’t that cozy. I almost never went out after work with any of them. We didn’t get into each other’s lives all that much.”

  There wasn’t a lot of love lost at MAD between the paid staff and the freelancers. “Those on salary were the nobility. The rest of us were second-class citizens who brought our little offerings to them. We freelancers were dispensable. We were only as good as the last thing we brought in. That attitude was very clear to every one of us who worked for MAD. The staff sought and wanted our work; they tried to keep everyone employed, but working freelance for MAD was still like a shape-up. We were the longshoremen at the dock waiting for a day’s work. No one was nasty to us. Bill liked to regard us as a family, but we were the poor cousins. It was a two-class system. They were the power; we were the peons.”

  Just as MAD readers liked to imagine MAD writers and artists horsing around in the MAD offices, they imagined that the famous annual MAD trips were wild bacchanals. They weren’t. In fact, Al considers them maddeningly tame—“a lot of sightseeing, food, wine, adolescent humor—and no bordellos.”

  After each trip, to show their gratitude to Gaines, the freelancers presented him with a souvenir album filled with photos and cartoons. “We were in Russia before glasnost. People were coming up to us in the street, offering to buy our clothing. I was wearing Pierre Cardin shoes that I’d bought on Madison Avenue. This guy sidles up to me and offers me—I don’t remember—let’s say one hundred rubles for them. Bill was a known slob. He was grossly overweight, and he didn’t care about clothing. My contribution to the album was a cartoon in which Russians offer to buy our clothes, but the one who approaches Bill offers to sell Gaines his clothes.

  Over Al’s fifty-five-year association with MAD, it seems that no aspect of American culture has escaped his merry butjaundiced eye. “I’ve wandered all over the field.” The late Charles “Sparky” Schulz, creator of Peanuts, put it plainly and definitively: “Al Jaffee can cartoon anything.”

  Al doesn’t think of himself as a political cartoonist, but upon occasion his offended liberal feelings assert themselves. Al cannot abide fanatics. “A true believer is a danger to humanity.” Jesse Helms, the one-time ultraconservative senator from North Carolina, Al’s signature target, turned up frequently in Al’s cartoon crowd scenes, doing something reprehensible. “My secret passion would have been to be an editorial cartoonist. You get to vent your spleen.” Many of his fold-ins are origami-style editorials.

  During the Vietnam War, Al created a short-lived gag cartoon called Hawks and Doves in which Private Doves, an Inferior Man in army clothing, consistently outwits Major Hawks by contriving, in the last frame of each cartoon, to incorporate peace signs into whatever activity he’s been assigned—such as cleaning the major’s windows or mowing the parade-ground lawn. “The cartoon was kind of simple-minded, but if I say so myself, immodestly, it was the visual novelty, a departure from MAD’s usual kind of humor, that made it work.”

  The sight of a chest full of medals on a military man puts Al in a ranting mood. “I hated the Vietnam War. And then on top of it, to pour acid into an open wound, you’ve got these fucking generals and colonels coming home from the war and they have the temerity to fill their chests with medals announcing how wonderful war is and how many people they killed.” Al’s anger was explosive, but his satiric response was sly and subtle, like a stone hidden in a snowball. “If soldiers are awarded medals for valor, why not award satiric medals to civilian heroes like teachers, doctors, and corporate executives? And why not more than one medal to each profession?” To honor doctors, Al painstakingly crafted, among others, the Missing Forceps Medal, the Golden Scalpel Award, and the A.M.A. Medal of Honor for “heroically fighting the battle against Socialized Medicine, Public Health Care, [and] lower fees.”

  If “Why not?” is the question that ignites in Al a creative and lucrative chain reaction, “Why don’t they?” is the springboard that launches him into the wild, blue yonder of mad invention. It’s true that Al can and does cartoon anything, but he understates the case when he says, “I tend to be MAD’s inventor and product satirist. It’s an easy angle for me, and I love the engineering of it.” So far, in addition to those that have appeared in MAD, there’s a bookful of originals, Aljaffees MAD Inventions.

  Al is convinced that no matter how you put it together, life doesn’t work, which is why he likes to invent things that look as if they’ll work but don’t. Pet peeves are his inspiration. “I’ve heard people say ‘Why don’t they’ so many times in so many situations. You’re sitting on a bus and somebody will say, ‘Why don’t they have the people get on in front and get off in the back?’” By Al’s standards, that’s too tame and practical a solution. It might even work, which to Al’s way of comical thinking would not be funny.

  More to his absurdist inventive fancy is a pet-powered energy-generation system in which a dog, chained to a pole, chases a stuffed cat in circles on the lawn, thereby producing the energy to meet the home owner’s needs. Why don’t they make a pock-etbook wired with heating coils to foil purse snatchers? Why not a Rube Goldberg-ish extra-knot-finger contraption that holds down the knot, thereby allowing you to use your two hands to tie up the package, or a window rigged with a powerful yokelike gripping device that holds the intruding burglar tight? Al doesn’t want to solve the problem, he wants to over-solve it. It’s in the overkill that fun and satire reside.

  Sometimes Jaffee’s so-called patently absurd inventions have inadvertently crossed over the line between fantasy and patentable reality. This is not surprising, since Al believes that the most effective satire gets so close to the real thing that they are virtually inseparable. “A lot of inventions that have actually been produced looked ridiculous when I did them. They were bizarre when I thought of them, but they aren’t bizarre anymore.” In 1976 he invented an ashtray that sucked up and then filtered the captured smoke. A patent for a smokeless ashtray was issued in 1994. A hand-powered, rotating four-bladed razor was satire to Jaffee when he invented it in the late seventies. In 1998, the triple-bladed Mach 3 looked like a really good idea to Gillette. (Gillette has since gone on to parody itself with the five-bladed Fusion.) What seemed to Al to be one of his maddest inventions, a Ferris wheel parking garage that was part of a 1977 MAD article about solutions to big-city parking problems, was proposed for the city of Providence, Rhode Island, in 2008.

  Al made satiric mincemeat out of the puzzle pages that appeared in popular children’s workbooks. In Al’s perverse version of the classic needle in the haystack, the reader examines the drawing of the haystack but cannot find the needle. The reader turns the page upside down to find the answer.
“Couldn’t find it? Boy, are you blind. This is not a haystack! It’s a big pile of needles!”

  The puzzle pages, in turn, gave Al the idea for the sometimes grisly MAD Book of Magic and Other Dirty Tricks, in which a magician swallows a hand grenade with predictable results, or gets blood from a stone by concealing glass shards in the hand that’s squeezing the stone. (“Remember to inform the stage manager of your blood type before each and every performance.”)

  Of all the thousands of cartoons Al has produced, the one he enjoys the most is the retch-ingjackal, drawn to accompany a piece about the rare discovery of the animal, written by Larry Siegel for the National Perspirer, MAD’s parody of the National Enquirer, a tabloid still notorious for reporting Elvis and Bigfoot sightings. Al might have drawn the jackal heaving over a cliff or spewing out on all fours, but instead he chose to anthropomorphize the jackal and drew him standing on his two hind legs, leaning against a tree, exhausted and teary-eyed from his ordeal. One paw hangs on for dear life to a tree branch, the other rests on his belly. The vomited contents of his stomach lie in a puddle on the ground. Look closely and one can detect, among the gastric detritus, a chicken bone, a severed finger, and the jackal’s false teeth. Look again to enjoy a classic Jaffee double take—a tiny mouse running from the deluge toward the edge of the panel, holding a leaf over his head.

  “Every once in a while I have an inspired moment. It’s only a tiny piece of my entire oeuvre, but the jackal stuck. Sometimes I’m introduced as the retching-jackal guy, especially to other cartoonists. Often I don’t remember my work, but the retching jackal has always stayed with me. It may be my most successful drawing. It’s utterly silly, I know, but I’m utterly silly. I’m eighty-nine years old, and I’m the silliest person in the neighborhood. Serious people my age are dead.” If you want to pay Al a compliment, call his humor “sophomoric,” “tasteless,” “irreverent,” or just plain “off-the-wall.”

  His fellow comic artists have tried to define that certain je ne sais quoi that makes Al’s humor unique. MAD’s current art director, Sam Viviano, remembers a prototypical Al moment that took place on a MAD trip to Zermatt, Switzerland, the site of the Matter-horn, one of the world’s most spectacular mountains. The sheer size and jagged beauty of the mountain rendered all of the MADmen speechless, except Al, who enthusiastically flung his arms outward as if to embrace the scene and pronounced, “Only in America.”

  Al’s particular brand of hu-mor reminds Arnold Roth of a joke. “A friend takes Henny Youngman to see Swan Lake. Youngman had never been to a ballet before, and when the ballerinas come out en pointe, Youngman leans toward his friend and says, ‘You’d think they’d just get taller girls.’ Al’s humor is just like that. Ridiculous. He sees common sense and then he skews it. That’s the essence of his sense of play.”

  AL WAS BUSY FREELANCING for MAD and turning out Tall Taleswhen, in 1963, he received a frantic phone call from the former family patriarch, Uncle Harry. He had been calling Al’s father, but Morris wasn’t answering his phone. Al and his brother Harry drove in from Babylon to their father’s Rego Park apartment. Apparently, Uncle Harry had alerted David as well. David arrived before Al and Harry to find his father on the floor, dead of an apparent heart attack. He was seventy-three years old. “As we were heading for my father’s apartment door, David emerged in tears and told us.

  “I dealt with my father’s death the way I dealt with every disaster in my life. The first thing that came into my mind was ‘What do I do now?’ I shifted into operational mode. I called Uncle Harry and told him the news. He advised me to call the police. Then I negotiated the funeral and, in spite of my reluctance for confrontation, almost bit the casket salesman’s head off when he suggested the gilded, top-of-the-line moveable mausoleum. I told him I’d leave my father with him permanently if he didn’t come up with a no-frills casket to match my father’s no-frills life. A simple pine box was provided.

  “I don’t have time in a crisis to beat my chest and go ‘Woe is me.’ I have to take care of the situation. I keep my emotional reactions inside.”

  Al’s “inside reaction” to his father’s death took the form of a dream. “After the funeral was over, my father came to me in a vivid dream. He was covered with dirt. ‘Look what they’ve done to me,’ he said. The dream was so clear. He wanted me to help him, and I couldn’t.”

  In 1964, Al Jaffee invented the masterpiece for which he won a National Cartoonists Society award in 1972. Al Jaffee’s MAD fold-ins, all (so far) 412 of them, have appeared in MAD from 1964 to the present day. Almost every issue of the magazine has included one. Ultimately, the Al Jaffee fold-in would distinguish him to the point of defining him, just as surely as Rube Goldberg’s contraptions defined him.

  The sixties were the heyday of glossy magazines. Foldouts were trendy. All the magazines Al subscribed to—Playboy, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, and Life—had them. As he folded out the nude women in Playboy and the wild African animals in National Geographic, he was thinking. “MAD is so cheesy compared to all of these magazines, yet MAD ought to do something about this new publication phenomenon. What kind of a twist can I put on the foldout?

  “It’s almost as if there’s a little buzzer in my head that goes off when I’m looking for something. The buzzer says, ‘How about a foldout-foldout-foldout, one that goes on for twelve feet?’” He immediately rejected the idea of satire-by-exaggeration as impractical. Then he heard another inner voice say, ‘If I can’t do foldouts, how about fold-ins? MAD could do a cheesy black-and-white fold-in.’ I don’t know where the idea came from, but ideas come when I’m looking for them.”

  Ever since graduating from high school, Al feared that while he was skilled at many artistic disciplines, he wasn’t outstandingly good at any one in particular. His judgment turned out to be half true. In the judgment of his peers, he is good at a lot of things, and in particular, he is outstandingly good at the fold-in. “The fold-ins drew me to Al,” says Arnold Roth. “His mind works well with concrete construction and composition. Not all artists have that ability. He can see order in chaos. He sees behaviors; he sees cause and effect.”

  For his first fold-in, in the April 1964 issue of MAD, Al chose the hot news of the day, the affair between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. “There were dotted lines showing the reader where and how to fold the page, which kind of gave away the gag, but we knew we were onto something.

  “Nine out of ten times even aficionados can’t guess the fold-in. I work very hard to misguide them. Black and white has fewer limitations than color. Suppose a woman’s dress has to turn into an upholstered chair. With black and white, it’s no problem.” But when Al has to do it in color, he’s multiply challenged because both women have to be wearing the same-colored dress in order to form an upholstered chair. This means he needs to have a lot else going on to divert the eye. When Gaines asked Al how he’d feel about doing the fold-in in color, Al jokingly replied that he’d throw himself out the window. “It presented a new challenge, but it didn’t cause me even the slightest hitch. I’ve had to leave old worlds and go into new worlds before.” It also didn’t hurt that Gaines offered him three times the money to do a color fold-in. Al was thrilled until he realized that color took three times the work.

  People who are interested in the fold-in invariably want to know which he does first, the full-page image or the folded image. The answer is the folded image; Al works backward. “I carefully draw the folded image and then cut it down the middle and separate the two halves. Then I try to fill in the center so that it becomes a cohesive whole. It’s pretty elementary,” Al says with the same easy confidence that Sherlock Holmes displayed to Watson, but he “sweated” the first two hundred or so.

  First he has to have an idea. What does the Zeitgeist have to offer? A presidential election? A war? The gay rights movement? A resurgence in Mafia activity? In April of 1969, for two unrelated reasons, Al chose to depict Snoopy, Lucy, and Charlie Brown. First, he wanted
to make a satiric commentary on a new cultural phenomenon that everyone was talking about—nonrepresentational modern art. He also intended the fold-in to be an homage to Charles Schulz and his extremely popular Peanuts cartoon. (It was so popular that MAD satirized Peanuts a number of times. “Happiness is a warm puppy” was curdled into “Misery is a cold hot dog.”)

  The artists at MAD, including Al, were contemptuous of the stripes and squiggles that were earning millions for abstract artists. Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoon portraits really annoyed them. The way Al says it, “Lichtenstein was doing what all of us at MAD were proficient at doing.” And he was getting a lot more adulation and money. But Al knew he had allies among bewildered museumgoers who were standing in front of Mirós and whispering, “This is art? I’ve got a drawing on my refrigerator done by a four-year-old that’s as good as that.”

  Al had his idea. The fold-in would ask the reader, “Which American artist is most successfully communicating with his audience?” Under the folded-in image of the Peanuts gang, the answer would read, “Good Grief.”

  “I can always make the words work. The English language has so much leeway. Trying to figure out word character counts on a typewriter was a nightmare, but with the advent of the computer, the job is simpler. Still, it’s a huge puzzle. On the left you had half of what the final response would be, and on the right you had the other half, and what you’re filling in between has to relate to the picture you’re looking at, but that’s not all—it has to disappear after you fold it. If the letters run too long, I look for shorter synonyms. But then you have a double problem. When you read the full paragraph under the big picture, it has to pertain both to the full-page image and, after it’s folded, to the folded image and the answer. They can’t be separated. The whole thing has to work together. Shiite Muslims relax by flagellating themselves. I do fold-ins.”