We are dismayed at the news out of New York this morning: MAD Magazine — the most successful humor publication in the history of mankind if you don't count The Washington Post — is downsizing. Its frequency of publication is being slashed from monthly to quarterly and all its ancillary publications, like MAD for Kids and the reprint books — are being axed. There is or will be a corresponding cut in its staff.
I am a devout MAD fan, having followed it through good times and bad. I have a complete collection. I've published a book on the history of the magazine and have interviewed just about everyone who ever was a part of it. I've written a few articles for the publication. And you see that painting up above? It's from the cover of MAD #46 and the Kelly Freas original to that painting hangs on one of my walls downstairs.
That 1959 cover was a joke but the new cutbacks aren't so funny. Which is a shame because lately, the magazine has been. Its current editor, John Ficarra, and his crew have kept the old tradition but made it relevant to today with sharp writing. (John is being quoted today as saying, "The feedback we've gotten from readers is that only every third issue of MAD is funny, so we've decided to just publish those.") The only thing really wrong with the magazine is that, perhaps unavoidably, it's a magazine.
Being a lover of its heritage, I'd be the first to trash Ficarra if the current MAD was unworthy of its name. It absolutely is not. But this kind of decline is very common in the periodical business. Playboy, this year, will only publish eleven issues and it isn't because the public is losing its interest in gorgeous nude women. Even before we all began living on the Internet and doing 90% of our reading there, magazines were on the way out. And since everyone got a computer, it's only become worse and worse. MAD has evolved to survive, adding color and advertising when that was necessary…but it can't escape the fact that people just don't read things on paper these days.
MAD will not go away. It's too valuable a brand name to ever disappear. (National Lampoon is still around. It just hasn't been a magazine since around 1988.) Today's announcement probably translates as follows: "We need to keep the name alive and to keep key staffers and contributors in the family. But it's losing money and we're going to scale it back and minimize those losses while we figure out what to do with it." Its new configuration is not a long-range plan…and maybe that long-range plan, whenever they arrive at it, will restore MAD to its former glory in some venue.
In the meantime, it's a shame. One of the best things about the magazine lately has been its topical humor, especially of a political nature. Being quarterly will kill most of that. Some of its best people (i.e., "The Usual Gang of Idiots") will probably go elsewhere, which will further wound it. I don't know what they can do with it but I hope they do it soon.