Sunday Mailbag: American Sniper??

Q: Were you surprised that Mad Magazine picked “American Sniper” their next Movie Parody?

A: Actually that was a nice surprise. As I have written here recently, for many reasons MAD has been sort of forced to stick to big blockbusters for their film parodies the last decade or so. “American Sniper” is a great departure from that.

MAD‘s approach to the parody was also very clever. To do a straight parody of something as politically charged and controversial as “American Sniper” would have been hard to do without coming off as either left or right wing centric, and other than the silly “fake baby” thing there is not much you can make light of in the film. Instead they chose to make fun of how the right and left see the film as being a completely different animal than the other side sees it, and can make jokes from both perspectives while sitting back and enjoying the show themselves. Smart and effective. Writer David Shayne did a fantastic job with the script.

I’m always lobbying for more of this kind of thing. The big blockbusters are fun and all to do, but doing some more dramatic fare would be nice.

Thanks to Harry Thornton for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!