MADness #133- The Handmaid’s Tale!

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I warned you I was going to stubbornly finish this pointless trek through my work at MAD magazine, even if it killed me and bored you to death as well. To that end, here we go with another chapter of this idiocy. This week we look back at what I thought might be the last TV show parody I would ever do for the magazine, but the issue that drops tomorrow proved me wrong (more on that later). This piece was a parody of the delightfully uplifting and light situation comedy “The Handmaid’s Tale”. This spoof was written by Tammy Golden and first appeared in MAD #10, Dec 2019.

So why did I think this might be the last of the MAD TV spoofs? I was given the script for this piece in July of 2019, and right at that time MAD announced that is was going to start start publishing issues with a “mix” of new and classic reprint content. There were no details as to how much content would be reprints and how much new, but I was told in no uncertain terms that movie and TV parodies were definitely NOT going to be part of any new content. MAD stopped accepting solicitations for new material, and there were a lot of rumors flying about. As it turned out, the next issue (MAD #11, and the last “MAD 20 Dumbest…” issue) would be the last issue with basically entirely new material. In the meantime, this was one of two pieces I did the art for in #10.

Often when doing TV show spoofs the story isn’t a scene for scene replaying of key moments in the show but is written like an original episode and makes fun of the tropes tendencies of the show itself. In this case, Tammy turned the show on its ear by making the men into the kept reproductive slaves rather than the women, but part of the gag is the men aren’t slaves at all they are just overreacting to no longer being the slave masters. I thought it a clever approach in making a humorous piece based on what is a seriously bleak and dystopian show.

Getting back to how this ended up NOT being the final TV spoof in MAD… this is because the issue that drops tomorrow (MAD#43) contains a new TV parody! Desmond Devlin and I did a spoof of “Squid Game”. I’ll post a sneak peek of that tomorrow.

Toon in next week for the other feature I did the art for in MAD #10… mini horror movie parodies!