Sunday Mailbag: MAD Censor?

Q: Could you always do whatever you wanted with MAD? Did you ever get suits threatened by some of the content holders for going too far? How often did the editor/publisher tell you to pull back on the content?

I certainly could NOT to whatever I wanted with MAD, although I seldom had any gags or ideas I wanted to do cut. This was not because the MAD editors would let anything fly, but more because I quickly understood what they would allow and what they would not. I didn’t “push the envelope” very often since what they would allow was quite enough to do some funny and sometimes risky gags, and what they would not allow was someplace I didn’t want to go anyway.

MAD‘s editorial staff were all world class humor writers, but they still had a job to do in making sure nothing appeared in print that might get the magazine into legal trouble or reach past the boundaries of good taste… if “MAD” and “good taste” ever belonged in the same sentence. MAD never does “victim humor” or does any “punching down”. They steered clear of overt nudity or anything too “R rated.” Almost anything else was fair game.

I was told a story by the editors early in my MAD tenure that was meant to warn me about trying to sneak something past them in the background or disguised as something else. A very frequent contributing artist who shall remain nameless managed to sneak a drawing of a couple having sex in the background of one of their panels. I cannot remember if that panel actually made it past the editors and into print or if they caught it in time, but I do remember that from then on the artist in question had to have their art meticulously screened by multiple editorial people to make sure nothing got past them. That waste of time and effort did not please the staff in the slightest. It was strongly hinted to me that the result of such attempts would be detrimental to my being considered for future jobs. I totally got that. It’s one thing to write relevant or irrelevant chicken fat gags into the backgrounds… that’s a visual artist’s job. It’s another to try and sneak something that makes to real humorous contribution to the story and whose sole purpose is to embarrass the editors into your art.

As for trouble with lawsuits, I’ve never heard of any legal issues with any of the art I did for MAD. I doubt there ever were any but maybe there was and no one ever told me. I am certain had any lawsuits actually been filed I’d have heard about it. There may have been some letters written threatening something that never went forward, but I seriously doubt it. By the time I started working for MAD the magazine had been around for 48 years and intellectual property owners had not only long ago given up trying to unsuccessfully sue MAD but in fact embraced being ridiculed in its pages. I think most lawsuits stopped when the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against plaintiff Irving Berlin when the composer sued MAD for copyright infringement over their spoof of his song “A Pretty Girl is like a Melody”. The decision scolded Berlin saying he could not “claim a property interest in iambic pentameter.”

I have had a couple of visual gags nixed by the MAD editors, though. The one I remember most was for the splash page of the “Green Lantern” movie spoof. I originally had GL’s ring doing a gag “hand construct” giving the finger to the main protagonist:

This did not fly with the editors. I’m still not sure exactly why, since the middle finger was on the cover of MAD #166 (although considering the fallout from that, maybe it does makes sense) and I’d used the “bird” in panels before. I thought it was funny and worked since the “punching fist” ring construct is a staple of Green Lantern imagery. Regardless, I was told to rethink that. Here is the splash as it appeared in print:

There were a very few others that got rejected, but it was always pretty easy to make the editors happy and still come up with fun and sometimes edgy gags.

Thanks to 249ba36000029bbe9749 (via Reddit) 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!