"You Can Never Win With a Bigot", which makes fun of bigots' contradictory prejudices. Has a family of new German immigrants moved in? They'll just sponge off of welfare. Wait, isn't one of them an electrical engineer? He's taking jobs away from the natural-born American citizens! It's a rather effective bit of satire that shines a light on how hypocritical bigots can be.
In another comic about racism, a white woman and a black woman are talking:
White woman: I don't like the color of your skin!
Black woman: Neither do I, but they won't sell me a more popular shade at the cosmetics counter because I'm black!
Genius Bonus: While most characters in parodies are given a name that sounds a bit like their actual name, in the Dirty Harry parody, the Scorpio Killer is named Libra. For those who know their astrology, that's the last astrological sign one would associate with the character.
Growing the Beard: For the original Kurtzman comics, the first few issues got off to a decent start, but sold rather poorly. But come issue #4, with its landmark Superduperman story drawn by Wally Wood, and the series officially made its mark.
One of MAD's predicted headlines of 1962 was Marilyn Monroe checking into the hospital for a minor ailment, as a Worst News Judgment Ever joke. Monroe died in 1962, and her death was one of the biggest stories of that year.
"When Beavis and Butt-Head Grow Old" from 1995 had a joke about Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley celebrating their 50th anniversary together, with Jackson having not been seen in public since his face exploded onstage in 2018, along with Tito having 28 multi-platinum albums. Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley divorced a year later, and Michael and Lisa Marie died at age 50 in 2009 and age 54 in 2023, respectively. The year choice of 2018 is also very close to the release date of Leaving Neverland, the documentary that brought Jackson's alleged pedophilia back into the public consciousness, which came out in early 2019. Also, Tito only released one album in 2016, which came and went without a trace.
The "Dumbest Thing of 2019" was the assumption that MAD would stop publishing new content entirely. Just eight months later, they did.
A parody ad for Cadillac back in 1960, showing a woman wearing an emblem of the car like a necklace to show off her status symbol. Who knew rappers would adopt the same style decades later?
In a 60s parody of TV Guide, commercials are listed in the listings. Many online guides now list infomercials by the program's name instead of the standard Paid Programming.
In a 70s one-page comic about Mission: Impossible, Jim Phelps receives a secret briefing message informing him that he's become a threat to the agency due to wasting the IMF's money on impractical spy tools and endangering his fellow agents through reckless approaches to missions. In the first Mission: Impossiblefilm, released two decades later, Phelps ends up becoming the villain. Even better, Phelps realizes the IMF is on to him when he hears "Good morning, Mr. Phelps", and realized that Ethan used his glasses to expose him.
A 2002 issue showcased wedding photos that were fated to be left out of the album. The first one is "another would-be photographer who doesn't realize that cameras held at arm's length never yield flattering pictures".
The Return of the Jedi parody "Re-Hash of the Jeti" (#242, October 1983):
It includes a scene of the Lando Calrissian character in the Millennium Falcon calling the Death Star a "Mickey Mouse" operation, with Mickey drawn in the copilot's seat. Guess who owns the Star Wars franchise now?
And Luke's exposition dump on Leia where he mentions C-3PO being his brother, which is technically true after The Phantom Menace revealed that Anakin built him.
Their Pokémon parody "Hokeycon" made Meowth a cow-themed Pokémon called "Vermooth". In Pokémon Sword and Shield Meowth gained an evolution that gave it horns similar to a cow.
"The Comics Page of L'Osservatore Romano" (issue #396) featured religious-themed takeoffs of contemporary comic strips. One of said comics parodied was FoxTrot, which had Jason reading The Bible and saying to his mother, "God has an unseen power that's everywhere, inside everything. Satan tries to seduce Jesus over to the dark side, then Jesus comes back from the dead[…] If I'm not mistaken, George Lucas has the mother of all copyright-infringement lawsuits here". Five years later, FoxTrot ran a strip whose punch line was remarkably similar to the parody one in MAD.
A 1998 issue◊ poked fun at South Park with a mock interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Among the things it mocked were Stan and Kyle being flat characters, the swearing being constantly bleeped out, Chef's songs, the Kenny running joke, and the idea that South Park is a passing fad and Matt and Trey may have to return to their less-popular film career. Nowadays: South Park has given Stan and Kyle some legitimate character arcs, Comedy Central allows every swear word but the F-bomb to go unbleeped, Chef not only ceased the singing running gag but was Killed Off for Real, the Kenny running gag being phased out until it only pops up about once a season, and South Park has become a Long Runner with a movie of its own, and survived even after MAD itself was cancelled.
In their Shrek parody, the "literal balloon animals" scene has Fiona accidentally turn a frog into a prince while trying to inflate him. Shrek 2 would reveal that her father, King Harold, is the frog prince, adding a new unintentional gag of Surprise Incest!
Their parody of the Hulk TV show brings up the alleged "Bruce isn't a masculine enough name" rationale behind Bruce's Adaptation Name Change to David, mocking it by juxtaposing the discussion with a report about Bruce Jenner winning a decathlon and being proclaimed "the world's greatest athlete" by an announcer. Bruce, of course, would later come out as transgender and change her name to Caitlyn.
In "The Force and I: The Mad 'Star Wars' Musical", Obi-Wan Kenobi tries to use the mind trick to make Han Solo pay him by check, only for Han to tell him that he'll pay cash or they're not flying anywhere. Luke comments that he thought the Force was all-powerful and Obi-Wan replies that there's one power that not even it can stand up. "What's that?" asks Luke and he tells him it's the power of money. A little more than 20 years later of real-world time, Qui-Gon Jinn would try and fail to get Watto to agree to agree to accept payment in credits using a mind trick in The Phantom Menace.
In 1960, the success of the Li'l Abner Broadway musical and movie inspired MAD to write a musical crossover between several newspaper comics including Little Orphan Annie. Seventeen years later, she'd also star in her own Broadway smash.
I Am Not Shazam: Those not too familiar with the magazine may assume that "Mad" is the name of the mascot, Alfred E. Neuman.
It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Tom Richmond's art style is criticized by some fans as being too similar to that of Mort Drucker.
Memetic Mutation: Alfred E. Neuman is ararepre-Internetexample; his image can be traced to as early as the 1890s and in several unlikely places from Europe to America. He seems to have originated as the titular character in a stage play from 1894, "The New Boy". The poster for the play had a striking illustration of the smiling jug-eared kid with a missing tooth, which was plagiarized for other posters and other uses like political cartoons and advertising dentists' clinics, gradually mutating under different artists. As early as the 1910s, the kid's distinctive facial features had already become virtually identical to the Alfred of MAD, and the catchphrase "What, me worry?" was attached to him by this time. Over the years he's been used in diverse ways like as a soft drink mascot, for funny postcard art, and for political paraphernalia mocking opponents' supporters. It's even been alleged that he was used in anti-Semitic posters in post-World War I Austria. MAD just named him and chose him as their mascot. In the 1960s they won a copyright lawsuit after the widow of an earlier artist who made such artwork of the kid sued them, with the kid being ruled to be public domain. But he's long since been indelibly identified with MAD.
Basil Wolverton loved hideously pock-marked, hairy, blemished women, and occasional Body Horror.
Tom Bunk is fond of Basil Wolverton-esque women, as well as gags relying on blood, guts, puke, snot, pus, eyeballs, et cetera. This is especially true if he's being paired with writer Michael Gallagher (who is usually very tame when working with other artists).
Al Jaffee loves drawing grossout gags and obese people.
Spy vs. Spy has become considerably more visceral since Peter Kuper took over.
Once Original, Now Common: MAD taught a generation of kids to take nothing too seriously and to question social norms, a role that the Internet and satire media influenced by MAD have filled all too neatly.
Seasonal Rot: After briefly being reduced to a quarterly issue (but then brought back to a bi-monthly process shortly after). Other events that led to MAD magazines Seasonal Rot include: when the comic went from black and white to color, when William Gaines died, when the magazine was adapted to MADtv (the FOX sketch show that was set up as a rival to Saturday Night Live, not the Cartoon Network one made after the FOX version got canceled), when the magazine started accepting advertisements and "sold out", and when they switched to reprints.
Shallow Parody: See the page for examples, some of which are based off early drafts, and others involve getting things wrong or not doing the research.
Strawman Has a Point: In one "The Lighter Side of" strip, a born-again Christian man talks about how he was saved after he gave up his sinful ways, and demands that a woman do the same, lest she go to Hell. When she insists that she's never sinned and has nothing to repent, he contemptuously says "Then there's no hope for you", and walks off. He's meant to come across as a self-righteous fundamentalist, but many Christians believe that everyone has sinned, and are unworthy of salvation unless they repent and accept Jesus into their hearts. From their perspective, he's not wrong to think that the woman is blind to her own failings, or that her attitude will keep her from being saved.
Tear Jerker: The October 2018 issue "updates" the classic children's ABC book The Gashlycrumb Tinies for modern audiences, but notes that unfortunately there seems to be only one way for children to die nowadays - in a school shooting. The end result is satirical in the darkest way possible, pulls absolutely no punches, and exactly as heartwrenching as it sounds. It doesn't help that it was in one of the last issues before the magazine stopped publishing new content.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Ask longtime readers when MAD went downhill and you'll get answers ranging from "When it became a magazine" to "When Kurtzman left" to "When Gaines died" to "When they started accepting ads" to "When they switched to reprints". Art director Sam Viviano says that MAD was funniest "whenever you first started reading it".
"The second issue of MAD goes on sale on December 9, 1952. On December 11, the first-ever letter complaining that MAD 'just isn't as funny and original like it used to be' arrives".
In "Star Roars", their parody of A New Hope, Barstool (R2-D2) calls Cree-Pio (C-3PO) a "fag robot". Acceptable in 1977 when the issue came out, but not so much nowadays. Some reprints change the line to the less-offensive "gay robot".
In the parody of Tim Burton's Batman, "Battyman" says that he doesn't want to hear people say that his costume is "faggy".
In their parody of the Pokémon anime, the parody of the opening song has the following lyrics, which contains an ableist term that wouldn't be published today.
Our Game Boy junk and trading cards Sell across the map All bought by parents of retards Who "have to" own this crap!
Similarly, issue #396 ran with two different covers lampooning the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The cover art featured Alfred holding up signs in front of each candidate's name to make them spell "BUmbling SHmuck" and "GOofy REtard" respectively. A similar cover running in later years would no doubt use different words. (Gag writer Duck Edwing's original concept art, as seen in MAD Cover to Cover, had "BUll SHit" and "GO home... REtire" instead. While it's obvious why the former was changed, it's not known why the latter was too.)
A lot of their movie parodies relied on Queer People Are Funny, where the simple "reveal" that some male characters were gay and in love was treated as something inherently shocking and funny (such as in their Beauty & the Beast, Spider-Man and Shrek parodies).
Lampshaded in a disclaimer preceding their 2020 reprint issues, saying that some material was unedited and may be offensive to some readers.
YMMV tropes related to the TV series (the Cartoon Network one, not the FOX one):
"Gaming's Next Top Princess" shows that they are very definitely One of Us (or, at the very least, actually did research on female characters in video games). They even got Samus Aran's birthplace right!
The "And That's What Superfriends Are For" sketch features countless B-list & C-list DC characters.
And for actual Genius Bonus points, in the episode with "Undercover Claus", the sketch with the boy who got a time machine has him knock out the boy who becomes his dad with a "Titor" aluminum bat. It sounds like an example of Brand X, unless you remember the guy who posted on various internet forums under the name John Titor - who claimed to be a time traveler from the future.
Downplayed in "Yu-Gi-Bear!". Ranger Smith challenges Yogi to duel to stop him from stealing a picnic basket. While the rules are largely ignored, nobody mentions magic or trap cards and Yogi summons fictional-bear themed monsters (one of which is a combination of Boo Boo and the Blue-Eyes White Dragon), the monsters that Ranger Smith uses are real, bing the Amazon of the Seas and Gigaplant.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The show seems to have a cult following in Latin America, to the point that there are MAD videos on YouTube that are in Spanish.
Growing the Beard: Season 2 saw this with more features from the magazine and a new look for Spy vs. Spy along with less use of gross-out humor and more variety in their sketches.
In "I Hate MyTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", Leonardo says his mom looks like a "creepy Kardashian", specifically (as she was known at the time) Bruce Jenner. Her date, Shredder, later says that she's as beautiful as Bruce Jenner. If this sketch was made today, people would assume a more offensive joke at the expense of the transgender woman we now know Caitlyn Jenner to be.
John Lasseter forcing Pixar characters to become 3-D against their will in "TakingNemo" becomes a lot worse after allegations of sexual harassment came out against him in 2017 and he eventually left Disney and Pixar the following year.
The double-length 100th Episode contains a segment called "In Madmoriam" that honors characters who had died in previous episodes while assuring viewers that their spirits will live on in reruns. The show would end up getting canceled just 3 episodes later and be quickly removed from Cartoon Network's schedule.
The teaser for the episode featuring the Once Upon aToon sketch includes a crack at how Cartoon Network was now 20 years old but "still [wasn't] old enough to stay up past 9:00". The joke got a bit awkward in the following decade when expansions to [adult swim]'s hours meant that, eventually, Cartoon Network could no longer stay up past 5:00, either. Although a two hour block of [adult swim's] increased run-time would be dedicated to the positively received "Checkered Past" block that showed reruns of past Cartoon Network shows, fans nevertheless became worried that the current Cartoon Network itself was becoming devalued in the eyes of the network executives.
"MouseMD", as a sketch, may or may not have originated as a parody - namely, a 2009 storyline◊ on Topolino, that is, the Italian Mickey Mouse magazine parodying the House TV series. Which, in turn, got its inspiration from a commercial, still from Italy, which celebrated the fact TV network Mediaset would start airing both franchises. Hell, even the cover you can see on the first link alludes to that commercial.
None of their "Rejected Transformers" would look out of place as a BotBot. (With the possible exception of Headgear.)
Alex in Outtagascar boasts about The Avengers (2012) "[making] more money than any movie ever." Fast forward seven years later with the release of Avengers: Endgame and that film would be the highest grossing film of all time from July of 2019 to March of 2021.
The "Lesthe Miz / TheLexFactor" Episode had a segment called "Real Life Heroes" where a guy shoots down the antenna broadcasting Whitney. A little over two weeks later, Whitney was cancelled. Looks like his plan worked!
In "Diary of a Wimpy KidIcarus", Pit and Kirby fight Mega Man, Sonic, Pikachu, and Donkey Kong in a fight obviously based on Super Smash Bros.. Only Mega Man wasn't in the game and six players couldn't fight at once. Until the fourth entry, when it became possible.
The sketch "Staking Dawn", parodying the Breaking Dawn film (with a bit of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), brings a Batman wedding cake topper representing Edward (Bella says it was the closest thing to a vampire she could find). Then, in the upcoming The Batman (2022) film, the titular character is played by Robert Pattinson, who played Edward in the Twilight film franchise.
Ho Yay: Accidental, but the PokéHarmony skit features a male Machamp hooking up with a Hitmonchan, which is an all-male species.
Memetic Mutation: "ThunderLOLcats is better than ThunderCats Roar." explanationAs part of the backlash against Roar when it was first announced, many fans declared that MAD's "ThunderLOLcats" parody was a much better reboot than the actual reboot.
Nausea Fuel: The two adaptations of Tom Bunk/Michael Gallagaher back cover gags from the magazine: the first involves a boy who deflates and spews goo and guts all over the place after popping a zit, and the second, a fat woman who says that her kids "eat like a bird" — which she then demonstrates by vomiting up worms into their mouths.
A mini-sketch shows a guy trying to pop his zit — which pops, and floods the room with his pus, causing his organs and skeleton to come out as well. That's right, that dude just died on camera in the most horrifying way possible. And before you ask, yes, he screamed.
Beauty Tips with Megan Fox. And not just the scene where Megan Fox turns out to be a cyborg, but her overall appearance makes her look like she crawled from the deepest trenches of the Unintentional Uncanny Valley. The photo cut-out head and cartoon lips and eyebrows look really bizarre. Doesn't help that HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey is in her circuits.
There's the music video parody of Katy Perry's "Firework" video (called "Flammable" by Katy Putty). Much like the actual song, the parody song does have lyrics that speak out and give hope to those who are often ostracized or feel like they're not special and need to look to their inner light and let it out. The parody (like most good parodies) takes this a bit too far with the fireworks causing the clay man, the stock paper woman, and the puppet man to catch fire. While the puppet is just singed [he is saved by a man with a fire extinguisher. He is shown running around on fire at the very end though.], the stock paper woman is screaming as most of her is now blackened ash, and the clay man's head melts and falls off his neck as Katy Putty [who inexplicably survives] is carted off by a police officer for arson and murder — but not jaywalking.It's also the last skit of the episode, AND the lastskit of the first season.
The Cars parody with Lightning McQueen being slowly and graphically crushed while he pleads for his life.
"This has been a nightmare brought to you by MAD."
Older Than They Think: A sketch show based on MAD magazine's parodies, cartoons, and random doodles is nothing new (besides MADtv [which had the TV and movie parodies and the cartoons on occasion, but the doodles were phased out after season three], there exists an unsold pilot/TV Special of a MAD-based sketch show in the 1970s that included parodies of Columbo and The Godfather; the pilot was never picked up and made into a series).
While sometimes they're able to get the actor voices of the characters, when they don't the impressions tend to be rather hit-and-miss, though the latter might be intentional. Kevin Shinick's impressions of Manny, Kermit, Melman, and Marvin in particular are pretty lousy.
Retroactive Recognition: Mikey Day was a recurring voice actor on the show, several years before he would gain greater fame and recognition as a Saturday Night Live cast member.
Naru210: The writers apparently only saw the first three episodes of Naruto. "Why do all these Naruto fights happen off-screen?" The relationship between the Genin, which is similar to a group of high school students' interacting, is also skimmed over.
"PokéHarmony" (a parody of Pokémon and the dating website eharmony) depicts a female Hitmonchan pairing up with a male Machamp. Anyone who knows their Pokémon would know that it should be the other way around—Machamp has a 25% chance of being female, but Hitmonchan is an exclusively male One-Gender Race.
"Kung Fu Blander" depicts Reshiram and Zekrom as small enough for Po to hold in both hands◊, although by the episode's premiere (October 2011) Reshiram and Zekrom had already been known for at least a year ahead of time to be as big as the vast majority of their fellow cover legendaries up to that point. Though given their appearance in the sketch amounts to little more than a two second sight gag as one of numerous black and white objects and characters Po tries unsuccessfully to use against Shen, it's possible that this may have been deliberate.
Special Effect Failure: The CGI, whenever it's used. This appears to be deliberate, though.
The Twilight Saga, Jersey Shore, many celebrities and musicians, along with some ofCartoon Network's very own series are made fun of, especially the first in the series' early episodes. These date the series fairly specifically to the early 2010s. Many of their celebrity sketches also parody a specific outdated image of that celebrity, such as making fun of Justin Bieber's bowlcut hair, Lady Gaga's extravagant outfits, or Kristen Stewart's stoic attitude (back when she was only known as Bella Swan). Several of the shows and movies they parody were largely forgotten by the mainstream after the 2010s, such as I Hate My Teenage Daughter or Escape from Planet Earth, making it more obvious that they were parodied when the works were still fresh in people's minds.
The internet meme references that the show uses firmly date the show to the early 2010s as well, with sketches (such as ThunderLOLCats, most notably) being chock full of references to then-current memes such as LOLCats and Rage Comics.
The final episode has a bit that was instantly dated upon release, which contained an extended parody of the sitcom We Are Men. That episode aired on December 2, 2013...almost two months after the sitcom it was based on ended, having crashed and burned after only two episodes.
. For those who know their astrology
