By mid-May, the 500th
issue of Mad, the last monthly issue
after 57 continuous years of monthly publication, was on the stands.
Understandably perhaps, the 500th issue is more impressed with its
being the 500th issue than with its being the last monthly issue:
various of its content celebrates 500ths — four pages tightly packed with Sergio
Aragones’ favorite 500 minuscule Mad marginals, f’instance; he’s been doing
this every month since the early sixties, a record of continual presence in the
pages of the manic magazine — but no mention is made of the magazine’s going
quarterly with No. 501. It probably happened too fast for the Madmen to know
what was happening to them. Virginia Linn at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that “the usual gang of suspects”
is at fault for the change: bad economy, drop in advertising, changing
demographics. “Mad’s circulation
peaked at 2 million a year in the early 1970s,” she said, “but the numbers have
slipped to about 200,000.”
Mad shifted its sense of humor in the
last decade or so, approaching a vulgarity never dreamed of during its birth
pangs. “People's taste in humor always changes and we hope Mad has reflected that," says John Ficarra, 53, who has been editor-in-chief since 1984 (he was
co-editor with Nick Meglin for much of that time).
"We have a lot more political humor, the language has been ramped
up," he said. "We always mirror society. There's been a coarsening of
society, and things that wouldn't have been printed years ago are in there
now." What's really changed, he told Linn, is how people get their humor
today: "It's now on the Web, where people are creating humor, 'The Daily
Show,' Letterman's Top 10. There's an immediacy in humor that wasn't there when
Mad first started." And the
Madmaniacs are joining the webworks, working on a new website to update their
acerbic satire 24/7.
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