MADness #37: Celebrity Poker!

It’s Monday! That means it’s time to deal out another look back at my work for MAD Magazine, and this hand is definitely a 7-2 off suit. Today we have a look at “A MAD Peek Behind the Scenes at Celebrity Poker Showdown”, which took not one, not two, not even three, but FOUR people to write… Desmond Devlin, Steve Rosso, John Caldwell and David Shayne, and appearing in MAD #452, April 2005!

Honestly, not my favorite MAD job. Not that it wasn’t funny, I just don’t give a &*%$ about poker, and find it all extremely boring. I don’t know anything about it, and don’t want to know anything about it, which makes generating any enthusiasm or writing any chicken fat gags difficult. I added some obvious “gambling” cameo gags like Pete Rose, Paul Newman and Yosmite Sam, but otherwise I was drawing a blank (ha!) when it came to visual gags.

Somewhere between the pencil sketch as seen above and the final, I decided to do a complete non sequitur with the crowd and draw in famous MAD icons/characters rather than generic people. In the splash page crowd you’ll find Sergio Aragonés‘, John Caldwell‘s, and Al Jaffee‘s, cartoon versions of themselves, Roger Kaputnik, a Paul Coker style lady, Monroe, the spies, and a Don Martin© character. On the third page, you’ll see Melvin and Jenkins, a Duck Edwing executioner, Bitterman, a Tom Bunk and a P.C. Vey character and, of course, Bill Gaines.

Otherwise it’s mostly a lot of caricatures of people who played Celebrity Poker back in 2005, and most haven’t done a lot since. Talk about the flop.

Toon in next week, when we go back to the world of TV parodies and deserted islands… or is it???