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BOB EDWARDS, HOST: A magazine born 45 years ago as a rebuke to the repressions of McCarthyism became an American institution. It had one of the most consistent styles and stable group of employees in the history of American periodicals. But it did not keep up with the times and lost its edge -- and many of its readers.
Last month, it launched a tough new issue with an old, familiar face.
NPR's Brooke Gladstone reports.
BROOKE GLADSTONE, NPR REPORTER: On the cover of the April Mad magazine, Alfred E. Neuman sits with his trousers down, atop a glowing photocopier while pictures of his face fly out of the machine. What, him worry? That's what editors are for.
JEANETTE CONN (PH), PRESIDENT AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, D.C. COMICS AND MAD MAGAZINE: That the butt end of Alfred should end up also being his face seems a natural collision of images.
GLADSTONE: Spoken like a true art history major.
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CONN: Some things are hard to shake.
GLADSTONE: Jeanette Conn, who has an art history degree from Harvard, is the principal reason Alfred finds himself in that compromising position. When she became president and editor-in-chief of D.C. Comics and Mad magazine four years ago, a shutter ran through the perpetual post-adolescents over at Mad. A girl in charge?
CONN: Certainly the people putting out Mad were almost entirely male. And there was this thought, what would a new person bring to Mad? Would I want Mad to be younger? Would I want Mad to be tamer? Would I want to domesticate Mad? How corporate would we become?
Luckily, we were able to get over this hurdle because I was one of the girls who grew up reading Mad and loving it, and I only wanted Mad to be the best Mad that it could be.
GLADSTONE: She found the magazine had become a classic, and not in the best sense of the word. Its readership had dropped from more than two million at its peak to about half a million.
It still had most of what had made Mad great in its bad old days when it thumbed its nose at Eisenhower's America and all the presidents thereafter. It still had the inimitable writers and artists it started with, like Mort Drucker and Dave Berg (ph). It still featured the movie parodies, the fold-in back cover, "Spy vs. Spy," and the "Lighter Side of." It was still printed on cheap pulp paper.
But in the ironic '90s, Mad's satire was pretty weak tea. Mad had started on the edge, but now the edge had moved far away, pushed by Letterman, "Saturday Night Live," "Beavis and Butthead," and "The Simpsons." The new girl said, get tough, get current, and don't be afraid to get a little gross.
Co-editor John Ficaro (ph) was hired in 1980, the first new employee in 23 years.
JOHN FICARO, CO-EDITOR, MAD MAGAZINE: She felt that Mad had become too comfortable, too safe a read. You know, us being in the forest so long, it's very difficult sometimes to see the trees. Did I just make that up?
I mean, we toyed with not using Alfred on the cover for about two seconds. But it was a real challenge to make sure that we didn't throw out the baby with the bath water. Although, as we frequently say, a lot of people say all of Mad is bath water.
GLADSTONE: Then came April, the relaunch, project X. The front cover: Alfred atop the Xerox. On the back: a silhouette of Absolut Vodka artfully urinated into virgin snow. The fold-in targets racism on Texaco's board. Along with "Spy vs. Spy" and the "Lighter Side," there are send ups of the Ebonics issue and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals; Louis Farrakhan and Howard Stern tell their versions of children's classics. And there are new characters, among them a tortured would-be punk called Monroe.
It's a melange of the subversive and the silly, written for an undefined audience. Recent research says the median age of a Mad reader is 16; the average age is 24. People seem to drop it in their late teens and pick it up out of college, often at an airport.
Co-Editor Nick Meglin (ph), who's been at Mad so long he even precedes Alfred E. Neuman, says they write it for the only readers they really know.
NICK MEGLIN, CO-EDITOR, MAD MAGAZINE: We do this magazine for ourselves. We don't condescend, we don't patronize, we don't write down to what we think our target audience is.
GLADSTONE: Since the magazine doesn't take advertising, it doesn't worry about scaring it off. It's ruthlessly political, full of blatant sexual references, and Meglin says not quite appropriate for young kids. Besides, they probably wouldn't get the jokes.
BACKGROUND CROWD NOISE
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: This is the tallest volcano in our solar system. It is called the Likus Maz (ph). And it is on Mars.
GLADSTONE: I took the April Mad to the science fair at Packer (ph), a private school in Brooklyn Heights, and collected a knot of sixth graders immediately.
SIXTH GRADER #1: Looking at it now, and it was really funny.
SIXTH GRADER #2: I know.
GLADSTONE: Describe this to me.
SIXTH GRADER #1: 'Cause you have a fat guy.
SIXTH GRADER #2: When magazines resort to featuring nude celebrities on their covers and it has naked pictures of funny celebrities, like Woody Allen and Bob Dole.
SIXTH GRADER #1: Where's Bob Dole?
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SIXTH GRADER #2: And if you like a particular person, if they like dis them or something, you can't say, oh, well, I hate this Mad magazine, 'cause they make fun of everybody.
GLADSTONE: Do you notice a difference between the April issue and the other issues that you've seen?
SIXTH GRADER #1: Yeah, yeah.
SIXTH GRADER #2: It's still fun to read, like, you know, even though we are, like, only 12 and 11. Like, if my dad found that, he'd like kill me.
SIXTH GRADER #1: My parents know that it's, like, a little obscene and all, and it can be sickening, cruel, racist, but it doesn't go over the limit.
GLADSTONE: How do you feel about the fact that 50-year-old guys write this magazine.
SIXTH GRADER #3: It's like really funny because to think that someone really old could, like, write this stuff down.
SIXTH GRADER #4: I think it's kind of cool that they still have this kind of sense of humor and they're like 50 years old.
SIXTH GRADER #5: It's funny, but you might think that the people who write this are slightly odd.
SIXTH GRADER #6: I think that's it's also really hard to write magazines like this. You have to keep up to date with, like, everything.
GLADSTONE: Gradually Mad has been adding issues. With the relaunch, it becomes a monthly for the first time in its history. That means new staff is augmenting, not replacing the old. There are female writers and a female art director and lots of other new perspectives, and a better chance of keeping up with the culture.
But this race for the edge happens at a problematical time. In Washington, politicians are condemning just the sort of cultural enterprise Mad undertakes with renewed vigor. Mad is owned by Time- Warner, a media giant and a prime target for Mad's pranksters. But do the editors worry?
FICARO: We even altered our logo to make it look like Time's logo. And, you know, if they didn't like it, we didn't hear anything too bad about it, you know. It's one of the risks that you have when you have a sprawling empire like Time-Warner.
MEGLIN: The fact that we haven't had raises in 20 years, I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that they're not happy with us.
GLADSTONE: In the May issue, Martha Stewart, the military, Disney, America Online, bestsellers, religions, same-sex marriage, and sexual politics all go under the knife.
Some of it is hilarious. Some of it falls flat. But all of it fulfills the aim of the new editor-in-chief. Mad is still Mad, only more so: an equal opportunity offender.
This is Brooke Gladstone reporting.
SOUND OF MAN CLEARING HIS THROAT
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: My name is Albert B. Feldstein, and I am the editor of Mad.
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It's my job to...
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I am the editor of Mad and it's my job...
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EDWARDS: This is NPR's MORNING EDITION. I'm Bob Edwards.
