The annual MAD magazine “20 Dumbest People, Events and Things” issue is out. To borrow a common sort of MAD logic, its editors are the dumbest thing about it. Not because the list isn’t spot-on and hilarious, as it has been for the half-decade that the annual project has been around. The editors are dumb because they they repackage MAD material so many different ways now, but they still stick this in the regular magazine and not make this some sort of special edition. My wallet thanks them, but their accountant probably thinks they’re morons.
With “it takes one to know one” savvy, this index of dumbness usually brings design and illustration talent on par with National Lampoon in its prime
MAD’s “20 Dumbest People, Events and Things” section is interrupted in the magazine’s centerfold. Not by an advertisement, though some of us still can’t get over that the once ad-free MAD has accepted paid advertisements for over a decade now. No, it’s a 2-page pull-out “Spy vs. Spy 50th Anniversary 2011 Calendar,” with illustrations not from the feature’s current artists Peter Kuper (the force behind the venerable underground political comics journal World War Three Illustrated) but by its late creator Antonio Prohias.
This reminds of another wintertime cartoon humor mag tradition—the Viz pin-up calendar. Viz began 30 years ago as a savage and salacious lowbrow parody of British comic books. The classic style of comics in which a child rails against his teachers or parents become, in Viz, bouts of rampant unhinged swearing and violence. The sort of strips where kids have a magic device that fuels countless identical adventures inspired such Viz features as “Felix and His Amazing Underpants” and Tin Ribs, the useless faux-robot who invariably gets used by his clever young owner to lacerate, disembowel or castrate his bad-tempered schoolteacher.
While having no more depth or dimension than the mainstream stuff they mocked, Viz’s snide satires—The Fat Slags, Sid the Sexist, Biffa Bacon—gradually became sustaining features themselves. Other recurring features—the Beckett-like Drunken Bakers—
And some non-comic, text-driven features have taken on a life of their own. Top Tips is a take-off on Hints From Heloise-type housekeeping frugality columns “Save time when counting to 10 by starting at the number four”), several items each issue are are current-events commentary written up in this odd journalistic format, which makes them doubly funny. From the current issue:
“Chilean miners: Take a large range of pornography and crossword puzzles to work with you, just in case.”
“Axl Rose: If turning up at a venue within twop hours of a pre-arranged time is too demanding for you, then why not consider a career with a more generous appointment window, such as a Parcel Force delivery driver or Virgin Media broadband installer?”
In the magazine’s back pages, the “Profanisaurus” of slang sexual phrases presided over by another Viz Comic icon, amoral broadcaster Roger Mellie (“The Man on the Telly”) has been getting added to for years, and is now a huge and hugely useful compendium which I imagine many academics would have been overjoyed to have compiled.
In any case, Viz does a calendar every year. A full dangly one, 24 pages. This year’s, “The Saucy Ladies of Viz,” isn’t very good and I would never hang it on my wall. But they’ve been funny in the past.