If you are of a certain age and perhaps a certain sensibility you will recognize a phrase in the title from your younger days. “The usual gang of idiots” was how the editorial staff of Mad magazine presented itself, and I have lately realized how much I owe to the gang: William M. Gaines and his co-conspirators.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when I was growing up, those of us in the privileged white middle class were expected to take things at face value. By and large, the evening news was never to be viewed as anything but gospel truth, and to be clear it covered the use of dogs and firehoses on civil rights demonstrators pretty straightforwardly, just as it offered up the toll of American and “enemy” dead in Vietnam every Friday night as an integer as certain as the number of Mickey Mantle’s home runs. What we learned in school was also gospel truth, from the one way to do math to the received interpretations of the famous literature by white people that we read. (I once had to write a letter of apology—on demand—to the venerated elder English teacher at my independent school over a disagreement, not uncivil but viewed as rebellious in tone because I had disagreed, over the meaning of a line in Keats.)
But a quarter exchanged at the newsstand for a copy of Mad revealed the reverse side, or perhaps the hidden and vulnerable underbelly, of the world: venalities in political life, the mendacity of Madison Avenue, corrosive hypocrisy here and there, and even the exaggerations behind the smarmy, happy faces in the saccharine movies and television shows we were served. With skewering parodies and arch “behind the scenes and stories” inventive humor, Mad’s usual gang of idiots invited me to think critically about just about every aspect of the world in which I lived.
For this lad, raised in comfort in the exurbs of a declining city and educated in what shamelessly called itself that city’s best independent school, Mad was my first hint that someone was seeing and taking note of the world’s imperfections and impurities. Sure, people died and divorces were happening, but not until Mad made the connection between advertisements and greed did I begin to question some of the rest of what I was seeing, hearing, reading, or even experiencing.
Reading Mad that prepared me for the discovery of New Journalism through the writing of Tom Wolfe in the Sunday supplement of the New York Herald Tribune (which happened to be called New York Magazine and is the forebear of today’s publication). This prepared me to see that there were layers of mixed motivations even behind the cartoons, newsbreaks, and “Talk of the Town” items in the New Yorker. Later I would emulate Wolfe in my choice of college major.
And then came 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were shot and the world began to turn upside down. Even Walter Cronkite, who ended each of his nightly news broadcasts with the reassuring words, “And that’s the way it is,” was questioning the war in Vietnam. After the protests and police brutality of the summer’s conventions, just about everyone began to understand that “the way it was” hadn’t been shown as straightforwardly as America had believed. This also happened to be the year I graduated from high school and packed up for college, where I still believed I might be an outlier for preferring “countercultural” rock and roll to classical music. (I got that very wrong, happily.)
The lasting and tragic downside of the unveiling that took place in 1968 and thereabouts has been millions of disillusioned people, and millions of disillusioned people are not what the world needed, then or ever. Disillusionment is not understanding and is more of an emotional than a cognitive state. Disillusionment may inspire people to be critical, to distrust and criticize and embrace a hard-edged cynicism, but it does not always inspire critical THINKING. For me, the seeds of critical thinking had been planted and watered by The Usual Gang of Idiots, who taught me that questioning my own cynicism was also part of the Tao of Mad. If looking behind the story meant seeing pain and suffering, it was on us to FIX that; clever humor was only a first step toward true understanding.
Alas, the past fifty-some years seem to have done little to transform all of that disillusionment and cynicism, though we have had some sparkling satire and parody along the way, from SNL to The West Wing to the brilliant inventions of Stephen Colbert and his ilk. Some of the disillusioned have moved from critical analysis to conspiracy theories, have become moon-landing, Holocaust, Sandy Hook, and COVID deniers—”if some official says it’s true, it must be a lie.” The political and cultural divides are only exacerbated by this cynicism.
But I thank The Usual Gang of Idiots, even if as a society we didn’t take full advantage of what they were offering us. But as a place where a kid could learn that taking something at face value wasn’t always the best way to understand it, the pages of Mad offered a path toward a more complete, critical, but potentially generous understanding of the world.
POST SCRIPT: I should mention here that two of the most influential adults in my early life, both of whom were also inclined to think hard and well about the the truth behind The Truth, were in their time devoted followers of the Walt Kelly comic strip Pogo. That strip has not aged well and might not bear much revisiting, but, like Mad, it encouraged readers to look behind the official version. “We have met the enemy, and he is us” (coined for an Earth Day poster in 1970) is our lasting gift from Walt Kelly.