12 The New York Review
walls (see illustration on page 9). When
he sees just how out of their minds the
people out there are, he flees back to
Nuttycrest, where his pup rapturously
welcomes him home, as the Count
exclaims, “Iggy, keep an eye on me.”
Gross’s theme is an inverted way of ex-
pressing what Salvador Dalí famously
said a few years later: “There is only one
difference between a madman and me.
I am not mad.” Count Screwloose de-
ploys Gross’s spontaneous and flexible
pen line to search for the difference be-
tween the delusional and the rational.
The clearest expression of that search
can be found in the subversive work of
Harvey Kurtzman, the cartoonist who
founded MAD. He is not included in
SCREWBALL!, since Tumey felt he
had to limit himself to newspaper car-
toons from the late nineteenth cen-
tury through World War II to keep
his project manageable—and Kurtz-
man’s MAD, originally a comic booklaunched in 1952, falls outside those
parameters. But in a short afterword,
Tumey writes, “Much of the material in
MAD belongs to the lineage traced in
this book. In fact, this book could be
seen as the road to MAD.”
Indeed, the early Mad is the apo-
theosis of the aesthetic presented in
SCREWBALL! Kurtzman’s precisely
timed comics look like a slower, more
methodical and cerebral take on
Gross’s mishegoss. The core tropes of
the Smokey Stover take-no-prisoners
chaos—its wacky signage that fills
up all extra white space along with
backgrounds that burst with sight
gags—deeply informed the MAD that
Kurtzman wrote and edited. Those
“Easter eggs” in the backgrounds
(what he and his lifelong collaborator,
Bill Elder, called “chicken fat,” and my
generation of underground cartoonists
called “eyeball kicks”) are clear symp-
toms of a cartoonist irrepressibly inter-
ested in amusing himself as well as the
reader.If the road to MAD was a loopy roller-
coaster, the road from it has been rid-
dled with potholes and has finally run
into a wall. MAD was a revolutionary
comic book. (Kurtzman transformed it
into a magazine in 1954 and left in 1956
after an altercation with the publisher.)
Its pointed parodies and satires, its an-
archic questioning of authority, and its
class-clown silliness shaped the genera-
tion that grew up to protest the Vietnam
War. Kurtzman was concerned not onlywith being funny but with interrogating
and deconstructing his subjects with a
self-reflexive irony: he needed to locate
something he could say that was true. (In
MAD’s parody of Mickey Mouse, Kurtz-
man and Elder find something sinister
in Disney’s Magic Kingdom—“Mickey
Rodent” has stubble on his face and rat-
traps on his nose and finger. In the splash
panel, the Disney police are seen drag-
ging off “Horace Horseneck” for not
wearing the mandatory white gloves.)
Reflecting on his work in 1977, Kurtz-
man said, “Truth is beautiful. What is
false offends.”^7 Even after Kurtzman
left the magazine, MAD retained just
enough of its promethean spark to wise
up the generation or two after who found
it. It has influenced American comedy—
from Saturday Night Live to The Simp-
sons and Colbert’s Late Show—where
the spark continues to glow.
But, alas, revolutions grow old and
die. I was once told that Rudolph Giu-liani grew up with a complete set of
MAD. It may have been “fake news,”
but the information crushed me: the
vaccine that inoculated us against the
suffocating 1950s was not a panacea.
This past October, the geriatric re-
mains of MAD were put into cryonic
deep freeze, to exist mostly as bi-
monthly specialty-shop reprints with
a planned annual of new material to
keep it in half-life in case any swell
merchandising opportunities come
along. The death knell was sounded last
May, when Trump, hoping to tar the
Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg
with one of his sophomoric and indel-
ible zingers, announced that “Alfred E.
Neuman cannot become president of
the United States.”^8 Asked about it, the
thirty-seven-year-old mayor responded
(either cannily or candidly, or both),
“I’ll be honest, I had to Google that.
I guess it’s just a generational thing. I
didn’t get the reference.”
Yet the legacy of MAD is still with us.
Trump is often referred to in the press
as a “screwball,” but “screwball”—an
ironic term of endearment, a synonym
for “lovable eccentric”—just won’t do
for a pathological, lying narcissist with
dangerous sociopathic tendencies.The existential threat facing screw-
ball humor today comes from a “screw-
ball” president who has weaponized
postmodernism. MAD taught me to
be skeptical of all mass media and to
question reality (including my beloved
MAD), but the lesson requires a belief
that there might actually be something
like consensual reality. Nonsense as-
sumes there’s such a thing as sense
and puts it in relief by denying reality’s
power even if just for a moment.Foolish Question # 25,743,001:
“So, is screwball humor dead?”
“Sorry, I can’t hear you, I have a
banana in my ear.”In early December, a banana duct-
taped to a wall—Maurizio Cattelan’s Co-median—sold for $120,000 at Art Basel
in Miami. It made headlines all around
the world for a minute, as either an im-
mortal work of twenty-first-century art
or an event destined to be more ephem-
eral than any of the pages in SCREW-
BALL! A few days later a New York
City–based performance artist pulled
the banana off the wall and ate it, declar-
ing the installation “very delicious.”
T his caper brings to mind Goldberg’s
“warning” at the front of Chasing the
Blues, his first anthology of cartoons,
in 1912:I must burden you with a terrible
confession. This is not a work of
art!...
My artistic deficiencies re-
move me far from the sphere of
Rembrandt and Michael Angelo.
My ever-present realization of the
material virtues of kidney stew
and gorgonzola cheese has perma-
nently destroyed whatever of the
ethereal that may have been born
within me.... A touch of art may
nourish the soul, but a good laugh
always aids the digestion.Foolish Question # 25,743,001.75:
“So, can screwball comics ever be
art?”
“No, you sap. Humor is the last
thing one can take seriously—it’s
priceless.”(^) Q
The Squirrel Cage by Gene Ahern, January 5, 1947
K
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(^7) Bill Schelly, Harvey Kurtzman: The
Man Who Created Mad and Revolu-
tionized Humor in America (Fanta-
graphics, 2015), p. ix.
(^8) For those kiddies too young to know,
the venerable “What—Me Worry?” gap-
toothed grinning idiot served as MAD’s
mascot from 1956 until its demise.
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