Welcome to the Berkshires, Alfred E. Neumann
"What, Me Worry?" The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine" features iconic illustrations and cartoons by the Usual Gang of Idiots.
Alfred E. Neuman and Norman Rockwell, Richard Williams, oil on canvas, 2002, cover illustration for Mad Art: A Visual Celebration of MAD Magazine and the Idiots Who Create It (Watson Guptill, 2002),.
Mad magazine delivered more than 60 years of humor, satire, and stupidity during its run between 1952 and 2019, peaking in popularity with two million subscribers in the early 1970s. After its reformatting from a banned comic book to a magazine in 1955, Mad never really changed its approach and identity, appealing to a readership that was mostly pre- and early adolescent and largely (but far from exclusively) male. Mad’s artists and writers — aka “The Usual Gang of Idiots” —were guides who made fun and made sense of the adult world without talking down to their young audience.
The publication’s frantic, anarchic, and technically sophisticated visual energy is on full display at The Norman Rockwell Museum’s summer blockbuster, “What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine” running through October 27. The show includes over 250 original illustrations and cartoons across seven decades. Also on view is Mad memorabilia such as the official Mad straitjacket, Mad hats, a statue of Alfred E. Neuman, and a Gulf War chess set.
The art of Mad was “the graphic equivalent of slapstick,” in the words of Judith Yaross Lee, co-editor of a scholarly appraisal of the magazine, Seeing Mad. The connection to Rockwell, according to Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, the exhibition’s co-curator, is that the artist himself was a humorist. “Rockwell could do very serious works, but he was also extremely funny.” Some of the master’s work from the Norman Rockwell Museum collection will also be on view to illustrate the point.
“What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine” at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA
June 8-October 27
