Celebrating a Mad marriage of ethnic comedy

(JTA) — There’s a delightful “what if” moment at the start of “What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine,” a new exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum here. 

In 1964, MAD commissioned Rockwell himself to paint a portrait of Alfred E. Neuman, the humor magazine’s gap-toothed mascot, as he might have looked in real life. Correspondence featured in the exhibit suggests that Rockwell — grand master of gentle, folksy, even cornball Americana — was close to signing on with what MAD called its “usual gang of idiots”: goofball masters of sophomoric, anti-establishment satire.

In the end, Rockwell turned down the offer. “I think I better back out of this one,” he wrote. “After talking with you, and my wife who has a lot more sense than I have, I feel that making a more realistic definitive portrait just wouldn’t do. I hate to be a quitter, but I’m afraid we would all get in a mess.”

We didn’t lose just a marriage of comic sensibilities, but of ethnic ones: the “goyish” and the Jewish, mid-20th century style. Rockwell’s world is full of farmers and fishermen, country folk and small-town shopkeepers. MAD seemed to have been born on the Lower East Side, come of age in the Bronx, and found its voice somewhere between Brooklyn and Broadway.

And as the exhibit makes clear, that impression is not far off. The MAD team in its heyday included founders William Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman, editor Al Feldstein, and artists and writers from Mort Drucker, Al Jaffee and Dave Berg to Larry Siegel, Stan Hart and, more recently, Drew Friedman, all Jews (and all men, I know). Its pages dripped with Yiddishisms, some real (shmuck!) and some imagined (furshlugginer!).