Comics and graphic novels This article is more than 7 years oldInterview95-year-old Mad cartoonist Al Jaffee: 'The world is full of bloviators'
This article is more than 7 years oldSam Thielman in New YorkThe Guinness record-holder for longest career in cartooning talks about his life in satire
At 95 years old, Mad Magazine’s Al Jaffee is the oldest working cartoonist, and he has the certificate from Guinness World Records to prove it. The satirist has worked with everyone from Stan Lee to EC Comics founder William Gaines over his career’s 73-year span, though he will probably go down in comics history as the inventor of the “fold-in”, a transformable painting that originally mocked lavish centerfolds in magazines like National Geographic and Playboy and later became Jaffee’s calling card. Earlier this year he made time to discuss political satire and the way cartoons have changed with the Guardian. The presidential campaign hadn’t yet kicked into high gear, but Jaffee’s observations have aged well.
At the risk of starting at the very, very beginning I thought I’d ask how you got started in comics.
Well, I got started with comics a century ago – it seems that way, anyway. I think it was 1941. It was shortly after I graduated high school and I’d been playing around with ideas for a syndicated comic strip or a comic book, and comic books were just getting to be very big at that time. I thought I’d create a funny comic book idea and I did, and I brought it up to the legendary Stan Lee, who was only a 19-year-old kid editor at the time. I was about 20 or 21. He liked my work and I guess he was so new at it he wasn’t sure of himself, but he picked up a script, threw it at me and said, “If you can do this, you can work for me.”
The script was something called Squad-Car Squad about two bumbling policemen, and it appealed to me greatly. I got carried away with it and Stan and I worked for a long time afterward on many titles – Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal, Genie, Patsy Walker – and then along came a guy by the name of Harvey Kurtzman, who had just created Mad Magazine, and he was a schoolmate of mine. And he said, “Oh, I’d love to have you on board.” I said, “Well, I don’t know. I’m doing so well with Stan Lee’s company.” It intrigued me – I had done so many comic books that something new and exciting like the early Mad Magazines was appealing to me. It’s been quite a long time – 65 years ago or so I joined Mad.
When did you start at Mad?
Somewhere around 1955, I think. I don’t remember exact dates. I don’t even remember my own birthday. I’m very old, you know. I probably sound it.
No, but it was an intriguing idea to do an Americanized version of Punch – here and there, there were little attempts to do satire, like in Esquire Magazine or even in Playboy and others, but no sustained, monthly publication that dissected the baloney that was in the American scene.
Was there a particular kind of baloney you were attracted to satirizing?
Well, yes. The world is full of bloviators. And you find them in politics, and even religion, if I may say so, where somebody appoints themselves the spokesman for God. And this kind of stuff, when there’s someone on the public scene who’s really going beyond his duties as a politician or a religious leader or a sportsman, he’s fair game. The main thing about Mad is that it’s not a preachy magazine. It’s not selling one kind of politics or one kind of religion or sports team or anything like that.
The main thing is to keep your eyes and ears open and when you hear something that’s clearly baloney, such as “eight out of 10 doctors smoke Chesterfield cigarettes” – these are ads that actually ran! One of the tobacco companies had the nerve to claim that doctors prefer their cigarettes. So it’s easy to shoot down that kind of bull.
But you do it with a gentle hand, you don’t preach and say “tobacco kills! How can these doctors do that?!” No, you just go them one step further and say, “In addition to eight out of 10 doctors smoking this brand of cigarette, in their time off, they each drink a gallon of bourbon, which also has health benefits.”
You can can let the air out of individual bloviators but they keep cropping back up.
Oh, they do.
They’re very inventive, too, and we have to be inventive to expose them, not to insult them, but simply to take what they say and expand on it to the point of ridicule. It’s enjoyable, and in a way we think it’s kind of a public service. We don’t favor one particular politician over another, we’re just looking for the politician that’s trying to pull the wool over our eyes and just exaggerate what they’re saying and then it speaks for itself.
What do you think of the current political scene? There’s so much now that’s so far afield it’s a little hard to blow it out of proportion.
You’re absolutely right. I think they’re defeating Mad, because they’re going beyond anything we can think of doing to show the clownish nature of their claims. It used to be that politicians claimed that they would make jobs for everybody in the country within two years or something like that; now they claim that they’re going to make jobs for everybody on Mars. It’s just so outlandish.
Do you see satire now that you admire or think is headed in the right direction?
I think satire is becoming more and more difficult because as people caught on to what the the thing was all about, it’s appearing in social media. It’s appearing all over the place. And, like in all matters that involve the public, or especially entertainment, you have to keep topping yourself.
You started doing the fold-ins in 1964 – was that something Mad came up with as a team or was it something you just decided to do; a drawing that does this extra thing?
I noticed that what was becoming popular – and it might have been the Playboy magazine started it – but even household magazines like Life magazine and National Geographic started to have these elaborate full-color fold-outs, and it immediately clicked in my mind that if they’re doing all of these sumptuous fold-outs, Mad ought to do a cheap, black-and-white fold-in.
I walked into the editor and I said to him, “Al, you’re not going to buy this because it would mutilate the magazine but I just thought I’d show it to you for the fun of it.” He grabbed it and ran in to the publisher’s office, came bouncing back in about five minutes, and said: “Bill loves the idea. Do it, and if it mutilates the magazine, the kid’ll buy a second one for his collection.” Ever the money man.
So I did and about three weeks later he came to me and said “Where’s the next fold-in?”
I said, “Oh, this is a one-shot gag! You can’t do this over and over again.”
He says, “I want another fold-in. Get to work on it.”
And you’re still doing them for Mad.
Yes, I worked all morning.
What was it like working in 1954 when the Senate held a full-blown inquest into whether Bill Gaines’ other comics were contributing to juvenile delinquency?
There is no direct connection there. Juvenile delinquency was probably created by poverty more than by comic books. There was an inquisition and a lot of people lost their jobs and fortunes were lost by comics publishers and the Comics Code [board of censors] came about, which in some ways I think helped the industry but in other ways hurt it. I don’t think censorship in any form is useful. I think that healthy discussions are more important.
What do you think is funny that’s being produced right now?
I can’t pretend to be an expert at this sort of thing. I’m way beyond retirement age – I enjoy working almost as a hobby now, rather than a method of making a living. My children are full-grown, my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren.
For me it’s pleasurable to do the things I do at Mad, which is largely doing fold-ins, but occasionally I come up with a poster idea for the back cover. Sometimes it gets used and sometimes it doesn’t. I can’t say I’m a very active member of the Mad staff, although the fold-in does take a long time.
From scratch to finish, it takes two weeks. Because you know, first you have to get an idea that’s workable, and then make a multitude of sketches to try and get it to work exactly the way we’d like it to work, so that the reader cannot guess what it is before folding it, and then the editors put … they input ideas and say, “Well, how about if you move this to the left and bring that down? That should hide it better.” And I’ll say, “You’re right. I’m going to go back and redraw it.” That takes a lot of time. Then there’s the painting of it. I don’t kill myself nowadays – I just passed my 95th birthday. I’m lucky to be able to pick up a pencil, let alone draw the damn thing.
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