What, Me Worry?

The Alfred E Neuman Show: Now that summer, by which Abq Jew means school's out summer vacation, officially ended in America over Labor Day weekend - if it hadn't ended in your community already - Abq Jew would like to remind you that

What, Me Worry?

The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine

the Norman Rockwell Museum's exhibit will continue in Stockbridge, MA (yes, that's in the beautiful Berkshires; see September 2019's The Night the Well Ran Dry) until October 27th ONLY. That's right after Simchat Torah, so you should plan accordingly.

Or, as Editor of Jewish Stuff Andrew Silow-Carroll recently wrote for JTA -

Americana meets meshuggeneh at a museum exhibit about MAD magazine

There’s a delightful “what if” moment at the start of “What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine,” a new exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum here. 

In 1964, MAD commissioned Rockwell himself to paint a portrait of Alfred E. Neuman, the humor magazine’s gap-toothed mascot, as he might have looked in real life. Correspondence featured in the exhibit suggests that Rockwell — grand master of gentle, folksy, even cornball Americana — was close to signing on with what MAD called its “usual gang of idiots”: goofball masters of sophomoric, anti-establishment satire.

In the end, Rockwell turned down the offer. “I think I better back out of this one,” he wrote. “After talking with you, and my wife who has a lot more sense than I have, I feel that making a more realistic definitive portrait just wouldn’t do. I hate to be a quitter, but I’m afraid we would all get in a mess.”

We didn’t lose just a marriage of comic sensibilities, but of ethnic ones: the “goyish” and the Jewish, mid-20th century style. Rockwell’s world is full of farmers and fishermen, country folk and small-town shopkeepers. 

MAD seemed to have been born on the Lower East Side, come of age in the Bronx, and found its voice somewhere between Brooklyn and Broadway.

And as the exhibit makes clear, that impression is not far off.... 

All right - the article appeared way back in July, as the summer was just getting started and you may not have had vacation plans yet. 

But Abq Jew is just getting around to it because ... well, just because. In any event (but specifically for this event), ASC tells us -

This Jewish sensibility abounds in the “What, Me Worry?” exhibit (whose name comes from Neuman’s catch-phrase). In a parody of “High Noon” from an early issue, a cowboy sings, “Do not forsake me oh-mah-dollink” in Yiddish dialect. In a later “Dick Tracy” lampoon, Al Pacino’s character, “Big Boy” in the original movie, becomes “Big Goy.” 

A parody of “Funny Lady,” the 1975 sequel to “Funny Girl,” mocks Barbra Streisand’s take on Fanny Brice’s put-on Yiddish accent. “With that ‘Jewish’ routine, I think she’s killing Vaudeville,” says one audience-member. “Yeah,” says another, “but she’s adding new life to Anti-Semitism!”

 

The apotheosis of this deeply ethnic, self-mocking and even self-protective Jewish voice is found in the 1973 parody of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Titled “Antenna on the Roof,” it’s represented in the exhibit by the original cover painting of Neuman as the fiddler. 

Drucker and writer Frank Jacobs set the musical in a tinseled, clearly Jewish suburb, and changed the Sholem Aleichem adaptation into an angry indictment of Jewish assimilation.

“Now that we’ve seen the Mess you’ve made,” the villagers of Anatevka sing to a cast of nouveau riche Jews, “We’re afraid God wants back his melting pot!” It’s an entire Philip Roth novel in a seven-page comic.

Did you grow up MAD? 

Abq Jew did - in Valley Stream (see June 2023's Let's Twist Again!), although it's almost too long ago (BC = Before California) for him to remember.