"If opera is entertainment, then falling off a roof is transportation!" - Alfred E. Neuman

I guess it was inevitable. When Donald Trump picked on Pete Buttigieg by saying the mayor looked like Alfred E. Neuman recently, Buttigieg said he had to Google "Alfred E. Neuman" to find out what the aged real estate salesman was talking about.

There is no greater failure than an insult that lands flatter than a McPancake.

Children, trust me on this.  There was a time when every adolescent male had this picture of Alfred on his wall, and we all read the magazine avidly every month like young seminarians poring over a new Dead Sea Scroll. We managed to save a quarter to buy it ("Our Price - 25¢ - CHEAP") and we saved each issue for later reference to Dave Berg's "The Lighter Side of..." cartoons, "Spy vs. Spy," Don Martin cartoons, and the MAD Fold-in.

Now we elect people with Alfred's perspicacity and sagacity to govern us, and the jokes are on us, and that means they aren't as funny.

I picked up a recent edition of MAD in the library not long ago. It was about as funny as a grocery list, and I notice two additions to the pages that weren't there long ago. 

First, there were advertisements. The old MAD would never run advertisements; they were too busy running spoofs of real ads for cigarettes, cars, alcoholic beverages and hair product to take money for advertising the real thing. They would not sell out like that.

Second, there were off-color words, and it's funny; my quotidian lexicon is dotted with profanities (as needed) like jimmies on a sundae, but they seem so out of place in MAD. As my wise old Dad used to say, curse words are for those who don't know the real words. (I always replied, "Damn right, Dad!")

So the word is that MAD will no longer be so on newsstands, so there goes my chance to go to Read's Drugstore with my quarter. It will be sold by subscription only, and with no new material, but, rather, reprints from the vaults.

As the Washington Post points out, correctly as ever, "a journal of subversive humor is funny only if there’s someone up front attempting to maintain order," and there seem to be no adults trying to get the class to come to attention and act right anymore, so what's the use?

MAD used to call their writers and cartoonists "The Usual Gang of Idiots" and there are just too many people answering that description anymore to fit on the masthead of a magazine.

So, goodbye to another fond memory. What's next? What, me worry?