MADness #53- Hell’s Kitchen!

It’s Monday, and that means another tasty episode from our ongoing menu of my work for MAD Magazine. For this main course, all I can say is if you can’t stand the %$#&@ heat then get out of my %$#!*& kitchen! It’s back to “reality” TV with MAD’s parody of the foul-mouthed Gordon Ramsey and his chef competition show “Hell’s Kitchen”. This spoof was written by MAD’s MADdest Writer Dick DeBartolo and appeared in MAD #470, October 2006.

I can’t remember if the deadline on this one was really short, but these “roughs” are about as rough as they ever got for me. I had the tendency to work the rough sketches I send to MAD for approval up to being fairly tight, except when the timeframe I had for the art was shorter than usual. There were times, however, when I thought I was wasting a lot of time working too tight on the roughs because I had to re-pencil it all out anyway on the final boards, so I essential drew it twice. I remember a few times I made an effort to keep my roughs really simple and so the heavy lifting with the drawing when I penciled the pages on the final boards. I just don’t remember if this was one of those times. Regardless, these are some ROUGH roughs.

Unlike many of the parodies of reality TV shows I did where the only real caricatures are of the hosts or judges, this one is a spoof of an actual season and all the competing chefs here are real participants from that season. I definitely leaned on The Lovely Anna‘s expertise with cooking shows for insights into the personalities involved… she loves all those shows. I do not.

See these pencils for the two story pages are a lot more “worked out” than the splash page. Weird. It’s been 16 years so I just can’t remember the circumstances as to why…

This final page has two panels with inside gags I did that have nothing to do with the show. The first panel with the two couples at the table is one. Those two couples are myself and Anna, and our friends Keelan and Barbie Parham. Keelan is a caricaturist and the two of them own a business in Orlando doing caricatures and other entertainment for Disney and events. Barbie is holding up three fingers. This is a reference to a very funny moment the four of us has when we went out to a fancy dinner in Las Vegas when we were there for a caricature artists convention.

We got dressed up and went to a swanky restaurant called Aureole at the Mandalay Bay resort. This was a really formal place, and each course was introduced by our waiter, who had a thick latin accent. When our main dinners came out, he announced: “For the third course…” but what he actually said was “For the TURD course…” All four of us looked up and into each other’s eyes, and spent the next 30 seconds stifling our laughter until the poor waiter finished and moved on. After which we spent several minutes laughing our heads off and wiping our eyes.

Writing it out it doesn’t sound all that funny, but in the moment it was hilarious… to be fair there was also a considerable amount of wine consumption involved.

Anyway that’s what that panel is all about. It would have been funnier if my caricature of Barbie actually looked like her… I’m not sure what I was thinking giving her Bob Hope‘s nose.

The other panel is the third (not turd, but third) panel with the guy coming out of the garbage can. That guy is “Pearls before Swine” cartoonist Stephan Pastis, who is an old pal from the NCS and who I’ve been on many USO tours with. Earlier that year Stephan drew me into a Sunday “Pearls” strip where I got into a caricature competition with Rat:

I returned the favor here, but I blew it. Not that this doesn’t look like Stephan… at least as he looked in 2006. It’s that I drew him in a garbage can amid a bunch of rotten garbage in an alley and DID NOT DRAW HIS CHARACTER RAT as well. I still can’t believe I didn’t think of that. Cartoonist fail.

Toon in next week for not one but TWO pieces I did for the same issue of MAD. One is a short gag piece for the Fundalini Pages (sort of) and the other a video game piece.