Mad about this special

Occasionally, a particular piece of pop-culture entertainment lands at just the right time. Think of it as the mass-media version of the old saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears." 

Mad Special #22 fits this role for me. 

Dated 1977, the magazine is typical of the extra issues that Mad has published throughout its history and presumably still releases today. It's a mixture of mostly old work — "the usual bunch of articles and other garbage from past issues" — with a few new pieces. 

Not that the ratio of old to new work mattered to 9-year-old me. I hadn't read any of it before. This was only my second encounter with Mad. I had an earlier issue from the bicentennial year that failed to make much of an impression. 

Not so Mad Special #22, however. I damn near inhaled its contents, revisiting them many times over the next few months and even years after I probably begged my mom to drop an entire dollar to buy it. (My tearful negotiations for comics and comics-related merchandise were commonplace before allowances and part-time jobs.) 

Looking back, I find it hard to express just how big an impact this issue had on me. The contents introduced me to the world of satire and parody, helping to form opinions and forge directions that still guide me today. 

The special begins with a Jack Davis cartoon (written by Don Edwing) on the inside front cover that could have been my earliest introduction to race relations and white flight. Tarzan, swinging through the jungle, comes across his minority counterpart. In the last panel, he puts a "For Sale" sign on his treehouse. I'm sure explaining that punchline in 1977 made my parents squirm. 

The first feature is "The Milking of The Planet That Went Ape," a parody of the POTA saga that was already so much a part of my life. In retrospect, this is probably what attracted me to the book in the first place. I had definitely "Gone Ape" in the 1970s and was susceptible to anything featuring that pre-Star Wars cash-cow from 20th Century Fox. 

My crash course in topical humor continued with "Graffiti Through History." It included a cartoon where Muslim and Christian soldiers met at an intersection marked by corresponding "Allah Saves" and "Jesus Saves" graffiti. I doubt I understood the meaning at the time. Ditto "The Mad Car Owner's Hate Book" by the legendary Al Jaffe, which would surrender its full flavor only as I became more aware of automobiles, drivers, and mechanical breakdowns over the coming years. 

One piece that was simultaneously over my head and "just right" was "Rewriting Your Way to a Ph.D" by Tom Koch. It demonstrated how a writer could reuse the same topic, with increasing complexity, from grade school through graduate school. I have referenced the piece occasionally with my high-school and college students; it's still a spot-on skewering of academic writing. 

Again, it's hard for me to overstate the importance this piece had on my development. For one, it demonstrated the adaptability of writing over an academic career. Hell, it even opened my eyes to the possibility of an academic career! The article showed that success in composition required, at some point, a transition from handwritten to typed work. Koch perfectly captures the growing complexity of students' writing, including the elementary scrawl, the typos so common for those of us who grew up with manual typewriters, and the padded and pompous syntax of the doctoral thesis. 

The new material in the issue was also courtesy of Mr. Koch, who penned several 8 x 10" diplomas and certificates that could be removed from the magazine and displayed. Already keenly concerned about ruining a book's condition, I left all the certificates in the center of the book, although I did carefully write my name in cursive on the Messiest Room of 1977 award. Next to that certificate is the 1977-1978 Public School Teaching Certificate. I left my name off that one. Had I filled it in, it would have predated my first real teaching license by some thirteen years. 

Of course, the book ends with the traditional Mad fold-in, also by Jaffe. The cartoonist plays on the similarities between "capital" and "capitol" with several death-penalty scenarios which, when folded in, reveal the U.S. Capitol. 

So, a fun and formative offering from the Usual Gang of Idiots. Kids' brains are like sponges, and mine certainly soaked up a good deal of anarchy and liberal thoughts from this Mad Special. It came at the right time in my literary development, and Mad magazines from this era are probably the biggest single influence on my still-skewed sense of humor.