MADs longest-serving contributor on comedy, art, and the origins of the Fold-in.
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This interview was originally published on March 13, 2023.
We are republishing itfollowing the news of Jaffees deathon April 10, 2023.
In 2009, I put out a book of interviews I conducted with my favorite comedy writers.
It was calledAnd Heres the Kicker.
But what made the Fold-in so brilliant wasnt merely the concept.
Deceptively simple and seemingly innocuous, it was a cache of subversive satire.
How else to explain the very adult punch lines likeSoaring Profits in Medical Prescriptionsor Hiding the Homeless Problem?
LOVE, STEPHEN COLBERT.
But when the cakes center was removed, it read, AL, YOU ARE OLD.
I spent six years in Lithuania, from the age of 6 to 12.
At that time, most of the Lithuanian Jews lived in ghettos.
I lived in one, too, in a town called Zarasai.
But you werent born in Lithuania?No, I was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1921.
But both of my parents were from Lithuania.
My mother was very religious, and she wanted to go back to a place where she felt comfortable.
She moved back, and brought me and my three brothers with her.
This was in 1927.
We would just sit there and read them for days and days.
We would provide our own dialogue, maybe with a Lithuanian joke or two.
Most of the comics we received were humorous.
Some were adventurous, in the Little Orphan Annie mold.
There was no TV or radio, so that was pretty much it for us.
I found religion sort of funny.
These very strict religious prohibitions against any kind of enjoyment just struck me as being very old-fashioned and strange.
Maybe I was bringing my Savannah influence with me; I dont know.
I was sort of straddling these two cultures: the New World and the Old World.
Oh, God, that was one of my favorites.
That resonated pretty well with me.
In addition, Crane was an absolute master cartoonist.
His work was realistic, but not super-realistic.
How so?The characters did not look realistic the way Superman characters looked.
They looked like cartoon characters, but everything was in perfect proportion.
Did you adopt this style for yourself later in your career?I did.
I dont consider myself a very good artist.
I really dont know anatomy.
Without having a story to tell, my art has no meaning.
Rembrandt may have been able to achieve meaning without a story, but I cant.
You just draw whats in your head.
They would take it seriously, but they would also ridicule and make fun of it.
The only thing you could do was laugh at it, make fun of it.
And yet this outlet of humor could have been quite dangerous for a Jewish kid.
Humor can cut deep.Well, we would do this in the privacy of our own homes.
My mother would mimic Gentiles in my grandfathers house and everyone would roar.
It became a kind of bittersweet laugh.
I just dont believe in fantasies.
And it seemed to me that 90 percent of the religious stuff that was being said was fantasy.
All of it was illusion.
But humor was an outlet for me, an escape.
It was an escape from what I saw as idiotic behavior by everyone.
I dont think humor is just here to tickle people.
Humor has much deeper roots than that.
Why did you eventually return to the States?My father brought us back when Hitler came to power.
This was in 1933.
My mother chose to remain behind.
She said that she would join us later, but she never did.
She died around 1939, although Ive never found out how.
There are no records.
Did you speak Yiddish when you returned?I did, yes.
He brought in a lot of Yiddish, as did some of the other writers.
The interesting thing about Yiddish is that there are no dirty words.
All the dirty words have other meanings.
How aboutschmuck?Schmuck is a jewel.
It comes fromschmucken, which means to decorate.
Its the perfect language for a publication likeMAD.
The words themselves cant always do it.
For a stand-up comic, its the inflection and even the buildup, setting the scene.
Sometimes you set the scene with just the way your eyes move.
A lot of stuff thats in the English language comes from someone making a funny sound.
Jerry Lewis used to make a sound like Melvin.
Harvey adopted it forMAD.
The word flatulence is funny.
The word coughing is not funny.
And there were others who came afterward, people I only got to know later in the comic business.
Did this school teach fine art or commercial art?Oh, it was all fine art.
The teacher was not happy.
I mean, she really reamed him out, because he was showing these drawings to everybody.
Hed drawn these characters from memory, from having watched the movie just once?Yes.
He had a fantastic eye and memory.
He drew them perfectly, without any reference source.
There were no books about the movie; it had just come out.
And there was no internet, of course.
He saw the movie, and he went home and just drew the characters.
So why was this teacher upset?Cartooning was not allowed.
It was looked down upon.
We were there to study painting and sculpture and engraving, and we did all of them.
Looking back, I think she was right.
What was your first comic-book sale?
How old were you?I was 20.
The opening splash pages were all so brilliantly conceived.
In the comics field, we all admired this strip tremendously.
Will was a genius.
He just did beautiful work.
I had created a parody of Superman calledInferior Man,and I wanted to show it to Will.
It seems so naive now, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.
Was this the first parody of Superman?
This would have been what, the early 40s?
I dont know if mine was the first Superman takeoff, but it really doesnt matter.
I came up with mine independently.
Since then, Ive seen a million takeoffs, but, at that time, there werent many.
But Will, who was only a few years older than I was, was already very successful.
He hired me on the spot to do Inferior Man as a filler for his comic books.
To have made a major sale at the age of 20 must have been very exciting.
Not to mention a real boost to your career.It was, certainly.
Our families had either just come out of the Depression or were still in the Depression.
No one opened the gate and said, Depression over!
So with the comic-book field, the buzz was, Theres work.
you’ve got the option to get so much money per page.
All you have to do is write and draw cartoons.
I was making three times as much as my father was making as a postal worker.
After a while, though, I realized that I was being exploited.
I was being paid eight dollars a week.
So I became disillusioned and skipped the middleman and went to work directly for Timely Comics.
Stan Lee, later the creator of Spider-Man, had just become the editor at Timely.
He was about 17 years old, maybe 18, and I went to see him at his office.
So I did a lot ofSquat Car Squad, which was a simple comic about two policemen.
But I had a great time with it.
I did this for about five years.
I didnt create this character a woman by the name of Ruth Atkinson did but I worked on it.
The American public goes through cycles, and the cycle at that time was teenage humor.
We were coming out of an economic depression and then war.
Many of us were starting to get married and have families.
So things were changing.
But we were living fantasy lives through our work.
We were creating these worlds, in the comics, that we wished our childhoods could have been.
Did you have an advantage by being not only an artist but also a humor writer?Yes.
I didnt have that advantage.
I really could not break down any doors just by showing my drawing skills.
And then if youre lucky, they will let you do the artwork.
You once said that you werent producing work at this time to be hung in museums.
You were working to pay the rent.Thats pretty much what I think all of us were doing.
But the irony is that a lot of this work is now being hung in museums.That is ironic.
But ultimately, all you could do is do your best.
But Stan was a pretty nice guy from my experience.
So it wasnt cutthroat.
When did you make the move toMAD?In 1955, three years after the magazine began.
Harvey Kurtzman came to me and asked if Id like to come and work for him.
I had freelanced forMADwith a couple of pieces, and he liked my work.
Was it a big leap for you leaving the comfort of Timely to go work forMAD?It was.
I was making a very nice living at Timely, but it just seemed like the right time.
And he said, Well, actually, Im not withMADanymore.
Ive got something in the works.
He had just leftMADfor a new humor magazine published by Hugh Hefner, calledTrump.
This was in the mid- to late 1950s.
It wasnt just a money thing for him.
What he really wanted was control.
We took too long to produce it, and it was too expensive.
Harvey was just too much of a perfectionist, which is what I loved about him.
He made changes in my pieces that nobody else would have made.
It really improved the quality of my work.
As an editor, he was incredible.
Harvey was a purist.
He was interested in new boundaries to conquer.
He just wanted to create and create and create.
He sounds like a dreamer, in a sense.He was a dreamer.
But there was also a very practical side to him.
He knew what he was doing, but he didnt find compromising an easy thing to do.
And if you have to depend on other peoples money to subsidize you, you have to compromise.
Is it true that Harvey wanted to reach out to Norman Rockwell forMAD?It is.
I really dont think we could ever have gotten Norman Rockwell.
But Harvey was not a relegator.
Could you dothatinstead ofthisandthisinstead ofthat?
Where did you go afterTrumpfolded after the second issue?Harvey then created a humor magazine calledHumbug.
And we all invested in it.
Invested not only time, but money?Yes.
I invested all my money.
And how long didHumbuglast?I think about 14 months, 11 issues.
It was a big influence on a lot of the illustrators and humorists at the time, though.
I met R. Crumb when we were doingHumbug, and he was very complimentary to me.
Al was a very hands-on editor.
NoMADpiece was ever bought without his approval.
He also knew how to delegate, which Harvey never knew how to do.
Al Feldstein brought onboard a lot of the writers and artists we now associate withMAD.He did, yes.
He broughtDon Martinto the magazine, as well asAntonio Prohias, who created Spy vs. Spy.
He had good and evil inside of him, clashing all the time.
He had a very moralistic personality.
I mean, he moralized all the time.
And his gags were very suburban middle-class America.
Plus, he was very religious.
He wrote a book calledMy Friend God.
We would ask him questions like, Dave, when did you and God become such good friends?
Did you go to college together, or what?
I guess Dave felt he was carrying the whole magazine, and he should have been treated royally.
Tell me about the quintessentialMADcontributor, Don Martin.Don Martin was the very opposite of what he drew.
He was a very nice-looking guy: tall, handsome, extremely soft-spoken.
You almost had to bend forward to hear what he was saying.
I guess he got it all out in his drawings.
He was a fantastic illustrator.
His work forMADwas almost like animation.
You could visualize his characters moving on the page; you could feel the action.
And those sounds he came up with, well, they were not easy to create.
With most of the contributors, if we needed sound effects, we tended to stick to the tried-and-true.
For instance, we would use sounds such as boff and zock and pow and bam.
But Don went much further, by creating his own language: pwang, splitch, splawtch.
If you read the words, you could hear those sounds.
That is just universal and completely unique.
And that material hasnt dated at all; its just as great as it was when it came out.
He was really special.Sui generis.
And we lived together for anywhere from seven to 17 days.
We became almost like a family.
I mean, we werent in an office environment day-to-day where we got to know each other.
A lot of us worked from home.
The trip was a reward for increased contributions.
I was one of a few contributors who was onevery single trip.
I never missed the cutoff.
Our first vacation was to Haiti in 1960.
When the guy answered, Bill offered him the gift of a renewal.
What was the mood like in that office?Very strange.
It was so controlled.
Its almost like the archetypal Soviet scene where a group of politicians are sitting around the table.
But basically, they couldnt do anything but the official propaganda.
Ill give you a few examples.
Sounds very similar to the spell-checker on a word processor.Wow!
I dont remember that.
You dont remember these?I dont remember, no.
Ill have to read your book.
FromMAD#98, October 1965.
FromMAD#172, January 1975.
FromMAD#66, October 1961.
Youre being too modest.
That rig has since actually been invented.Ah, yes.
I remember that one.
You should have patented those!
You would have made a fortune!No, no, no.
I could imagine those types of things, that was the fun part.
But I never had the problem of trying to figure out how to manufacture them.
Did you have any scientific training?None at all.
My father used to manage a department store in Savannah.
Later, during the Depression, he had to earn a living as a postal worker.
Then we wound up in this little village in Lithuania with no toys whatsoever.
We invented toys out of just scraps of wood lying around the yard.
My brother Harry actually made a fire truck that sprayed water.
Oh, God, we invented all types of ingenious things!
We came up with a machine that enabled us to steal fruit from neighbors yards.
Speaking of ingenious inventions, tell me about theMADFold-in.
They would have one showing, say, the geography of the moon, or something like that.
EvenSports Illustratedhad one at one point.
So, naturally, how do you go the other way?
You have a fold-in,rather than a fold-out.
Why not?Because it mutilated the magazine.
What was the first Fold-in?
Do you remember?Liz Taylor and Richard Burton.
Rumors were flying around at that time this was 1964 that Liz was involved with Burton.
I drew a crowd scene outside a Hollywood event, with reporters and fans.
So, you know, it was a very simple thing.
It was so simple at first that it was almost childish.
But I kept working on it and honing it through the years.
Ive done more than 400.
Its a strange duck.
One picture turns into another picture.
But you have to say something.
You cant just have an illustration.
Its better to make a comment about the world around us.
And I guess thats true.
How long does it take to create each Fold-in?
Whats the process?Id say about two weeks from start to finish.
But its still a challenge.
FromMAD#273, September 1987.
FromMAD#248, July 1984.
FromMAD#168, July 1974.
FromMAD#109, March 1967.
FromMAD#208, July 1979.
So how do you know if its going to work?I just do.
The final illustration is on a flat cardboard piece.
But I do see to it that everything connects, and I do that very simply.
I have a strip of transparent tracing paper.
And anywhere that it doesnt match, I make the correction.
Ive looked at some old issues ofMADwhere I dont remember what the Fold-ins answer is.
Why do you think the Fold-in is so popular with readers?Because its a puzzle.
They soak those pieces up, and then they come to my piece and cant absorb it.
All they can absorb is half of it.
Then they have to do something to get to the other half.
I think that creates a little element of interest.
Some of your pieces inMADover the years have been very, very dark.
The family turns away and walks out.
I think a lot of it has to do with the execution.
And the caption reads Touche, which is brilliant.
Apparently another cartoonist was going to draw this cartoon, but he was too realistic an illustrator.
But Thurber could get away with it, because his style was less realistic.
So everything has to do with how you carry it out.
That one I did with the artist jumping off the building, he was clearly a cartoon character.
Its all a matter of execution.
Also, I watch my children and grandchildren and see what theyre doing.
Ive always been on the outside looking in.
But Id sit off to the side and say, What do they see in that guy?
Hes just an old goat.
Suddenly, I heard my son climbing up this ladder.
He asked me a question that he asked every time he came home from school: Wheres Mom?
And I answered, I killed her and Im stuffing her down this chimney.
Up on the roof, how the hell would I know where Mom was?
Thats why Im always very, very flattered when someone remembers something that I did.
What are your thoughts on the future for comic-book illustrators?
For a humor writer, one would assume there will always be television or the movies.
But illustrating for a comic book likeMADseems so specific a talent.
No longer will it be Peanuts with four panels and static little figures.
All of that is bound to come.
Truthfully, I dont know what were going to gain or what were going to lose.
Of course, you both gain and lose from the advance of knowledge and technology.
But humor, I dont think any race of people can survive without it.
Youve been atMADlonger than any other writer or artist.
Youve been published in more than 400 issues.
My question is how much more do they need to surge?
Youre still going strong.Im taking the easy path now.
I find it really satisfies my creative instincts to do just a Fold-in once a month.
I think the Fold-in is my last hurrah.
Will you be willing to give me a snappy answer to a stupid question?
How do you think youll be remembered?Is space available on Mount Rushmore?
Special thanks to Christopher Bonanos and Ian Scott McGregor.
