#1: After-school showdowns that get hyped all day like a Tyson fight, and end up consisting of two weaklings slapping at each other for four seconds before a security guard breaks it up.
In honor of today being the first day of school here in Minnesota, today’s Monday MADness is a look back at a feature called “35 Scholarly Reasons Why School Sucks” from MAD #464, April 2006. Written by Jacob Lambert, with with spot illustrations by myself and Peter Bagge. These are all the spots I did:
#3: Wearing “the wrong thing” to school, a humiliation that only lasts for six hours, but will scar you to the core for the rest of your years.#5: Schools that enforce strict dress codes, believing that students learn better when they’re dressed like Applebee’s waiters or centerfolds from Hustler’s Barely Legal.#7: Pretentious English teachers, who wail that “nobody reads anymore,” then promptly assign you unreadable garbage like Wuthering Heights.#9: Having to drag around half a ton of textbooks, which contain a combined four ounces’ worth of interesting, memorable information.#10: Interminable Spanish classes, where you’ll sacrifice precious weeks of your life to learn valuable phrases like “Yes, I love the donkey.”#12: “Spirit days,” which operate on the dubious premise that the only thing separating students from loving school is “Wacky Hat Wednesday.”#15: History teachers who can memorize microscopic details about the Whiskey Rebellion, but can’t get your name right ‘til mid-April. #17: Mandatory assemblies, which can magically transform a dull school day into a torturous, eye-clawing nightmare that makes you beg for the gentle caress of Death.#18: Wood shop, which imparts invaluable life skills—like how to slice off your left pinky with a table saw.#20: “Profound” senior quotes, which, without exception, will seem monumentally trite the instant the yearbooks are handed out.#23: Teachers who stubbornly try to teach through your class’ end-of-period paper shuffling and bag-zipping.#25: Getting busted for forging your parents’ signatures, which—for future reference, genius—aren’t usually full of pencil erasings, ruler marks, and white-out.#26: Self-consciously “cool” teachers, who foolishly assume that you’ll respect them just because they’re “down” with hip-hop lingo from 1998.#28: Pointless, freezing mid-winter fire drills that make being roasted alive seem like an enticing option.#31: Scary school bathrooms, where you’ll learn the hard way that the bully-administered “swirly” is no far-fetched urban legend.#32: Those dorky monogrammed L.L. Bean backpacks. You might as well just have a “Kick me, I’m an A-hole” sign.#35: Foreign exchange students, who girls inevitably think are “mysterious”, just because they wear weird socks and speak in baffling non-sequiturs.
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