Mad Magazine's Al Jaffee - Al Jaffee, p.3

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Tuesday, 15 December 2009 03:48

Written by Frank Lovece - intro; Danny FIngeroth - Q & A

"Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions": How did you come up with that concept?

You don't sit down and say, "Today I'm going to come up with a blockbuster idea." That gets you nowhere. I was working in the creative trades, so I was aware all the time of any idea floating out there. In my case with "Snappy Answers," I lived on Long Island and we had periodic storms which knocked down our TV antenna…. First you look at the television set and you see jagged lines, and then you go outside and wonder why, and there's this antenna hanging over the chimney. So I borrowed an extension ladder, I'm terrified of heights, I get up there, two stories, and I'm juggling this thing and trying to straighten it up, and I've got pliers, and I hear the thump of footsteps on the ladder. And finally, I can feel someone's hot breath right behind me and it says, "Where's Mom?"

"I have killed her and I'm stuffing her down the chimney." (audience laughs) My son didn't speak to me for the rest of the week.

And I thought about this. I came up with this under duress. I began to think about things that people ask where either there's no possibility in the world that you will have the answer to that question under the circumstances, or the answer is so obvious that the question is superfluous. You know, like you're standing, there's a line of people and a big sign that says "bus stop" and someone comes over and says, "Does the bus stop here?" We all go through this. So I did sit down at that point and try to think of things like that that were more common than someone fixing an antenna. Other things, like, "Are you asleep?" (audience laughs) I just did samples of it and Feldstein loved it immediately and assigned me to do a bunch more, and that was where it started. And then I milked it.

Where did the Fold-In come from?

 The first one actually was so simplistic that I'm almost embarrassed. It was supposed to be a gag commentary not so much on the subject matter, but on the ridiculous fold-outs. The most popular one at the time was the Playboy fold-out of naked ladies, but then other magazines, like National Geographic, Life magazine, even Sports Illustrated – I subscribed to all these magazines and I noticed that one by one they were starting to do this fancy, colorful fold-outs. Today "colorful" doesn't mean much to you because you can get color on your computer, but way back then in 1964, color in a magazine was such an expensive process. Mad didn't have any color. So it automatically got me to thinking in reverse again, the way I did with Inferior Man, which is the reverse of Superman, so I said to myself, "They're all doing this fancy color fold-outs that involve three pages of a magazine. Why doesn't Mad do a cheap, black and white fold?" And I did a sample and the sample was, as I said, very simple; it had Richard Burton, who at that time was rumored to have an affair with Elizabeth Taylor, it had Richard Burton on the left and Elizabeth Taylor on the right and you think it's going to fold in to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor…oh the question was something about who's going to be the next love interest for Elizabeth Taylor? Because she'd had so many. And it turned out to be some young man in the crowd. I mean that was the whole simple idea. It was one gag making fun of Mad itself trying to emulate the expensive trends that were in other magazines. I never expected another one. Suddenly, I get a call from Bill Gaines: "How would you like to do another one?" So I said, "Well, I don't know if I can come up with anything else; that was the only one I could think of." And I came up with [the second one, "Who Wants to be President More than Anything?"]

That was 1964, so you came up with a few more ideas since.

I've gotten one in every issue except three issues, and the reason for [those exclusions] was that they needed the inside back cover for something else. Oh, and one other reason was that I did a Fold-In front cover and they wouldn't pay me to do two.

How long does it take you to do one of these?

I usually came up with an idea – in recent years, they supply the idea, because they have a conference where they wanted to deal with subject matter that was hot, and I might come up with something bout the stock market. I used to have to come up with an idea and then make a sketch and try to sell them on the idea and the sketch, and then get to it, and that would take a total of about two weeks. Now the actual artwork takes me about a week to 10 days, depending on how complicated it is.

Your Mad paperback books are new material, not collected material.

All my paperback books are new material. I have to tell you why I had to write my own material: because I couldn't sell my artwork. (audience laughs) I'm not kidding; when I first started out I would come and peddle my funny cartoons and I thought, "Gee, funny drawings, everybody's gonna love them. All they have to do is give me a script and I'll draw funny cartoons." Nobody was interested. When I sat down and wrote my own script, then they would say, "Oh, well, go ahead and draw it," and that's how I was able to break in. The only [time otherwise] was when Stan Lee gave me that Squat-Car Squad story and said, "See what you can do with it." But he had me write them from then on; he only gave me one.

[DF shows photos of Jaffee receiving the Reuben Award, flanked by fellow Mad artists, including Jack Davis]

AJ: Jack Davis … is a phenomenal artist, and also the fastest artist I've ever seen in my life. I was on a "Mad" trip with Jack – he was my roommate, I think – and he was late for breakfast or something, and what had happened was that he had been drawing a "Time" magazine cover on the bus, and when the bus stopped he went into the post office to mail it to "Time" magazine. He was such a phenomenal artist.

How did the comic strip Tall Tales come about?

Again, the life of a freelance is really quite insecure, especially when you have the whole catastrophe of a wife and children and a mortgage and all that. You cast about all the time for ideas, and in my early years the road to security was a newspaper feature. There you got contracts and if they sent the stuff out and it was successful you got more and more papers, you made more and more money. Sparky [Charles] Schultz, who did Peanuts, he started that way, and his feature, Peanuts, was almost dropped because they had a meeting and found out they only had about six newspapers after about a year and they felt they were not going to go anywhere with this thing. But one of the salesmen told me a couple of people had said, "It's such a delightful feature, let's hang it another six months and see what happens," and of course, as they say, the rest is history and it started to become popular. And at one point he was making more money than Oprah, which is an achievement.

So security was in newspaper work, so I tried to figure out how I could get in. And someone told me that you could only get into newspapers by pushing out another comic strip, and that's not that easy to do. The other information I got at that time – this is in the 1950s – was that newspaper space was condensing, and it was becoming more and more difficult to sell comic strips because of shrinking newspapers. So I tried to figure out what kind of space can I get into that isn't being used, like the want-ads and other undesirable spots, and a one-column thing would do it. And the Herald Tribune took it on immediately and they did sell it to a lot of these dead-end spaces. Then we started to pick up a lot of foreign papers because [the strip] didn't have any words, it was all pantomime, and I had a bigger list abroad than I had in America. And then the manager of the syndicate, whose name I will not say, came to me and said, "You know, Americans don't like comic strips without words. You have to put words in them." So I forced words in and immediately lost 35 foreign papers and I didn't pick up any American papers. But it did last about six years, so it paid the bills.

…

Audience question: Can you talk a little bit about the [1950s] comic-book bans and hearings that resulted in lots of popular titles disappearing or being "cleaned up," and how that affected your career?

The people who really suffered that were the people who were, well, Bill Gaines, who was doing horror comics: Tales from the Crypt and [others]. Bill Gaines went out of business; Mad saved his neck. But a lot of other outfits that were doing, not specifically horror, but [comics that] had a lot of violence in them, whether it was Westerns with lots of shooting and killing, after the psychologist Dr. [Frderic] Wertham came out with a book, Seduction of the Innocent, and the [U.S. Senate's] Kefauver Committee investigated and connected juvenile delinquency with comic books, the comic business could only save itself by creating a censorship board – the Comics Code. … I wasn't affected because at first I was doing "Super Rabbit" and, y'know, little animal things, although (jokes) there were rumors about Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal (audience laughs). And then, of course, I did the teenage stuff like "Patsy Walker," which basically was a rip-off of Archie Comics, just another aspect of it. So I was working all the time; I didn't have a problem. And Mad was alright – although the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, had a complete file on Mad and everyone in it. But I wasn't there at the time. I would have been proud to have a file. (audience laughs)

Audience question: Did all you guys working at Mad in the ‘60s realize how cool you were?

How cool? Or how cruel? (audience laughs) I thank you for the compliment, because I certainly thought it was cool, personally, but as to how other people felt, you never know. I heard from a lot of grown-ups that they wouldn't let their children read it because it was attacking our institutions, among them advertising. It took a long time for people to grow up and realize that making fun of things that deserve it, or that are really begging for it, that that's legitimate comments. But there were a lot of grown-ups who were very uptight about it and I was very proud to be in league with the children; I thought more along their lines than I ever did with adults, and I think it goes for today too. I mean, I think the kids are way ahead of the adults in knowing what's funny.

Audience question: A lot of the comics creators in the ‘50s or even the ‘60s wouldn't want to say they were in comics when they were socializing. What did you say when you were out socializing with your family and your wife and people said, "What do you do for a living?"

AJ: You're absolutely right. A lot of my friends would refer to themselves as illustrators instead of cartoonists. It's fine to be an illustrator, and everybody would like to be Norman Rockwell, but Rube Goldberg was just fine, too. I would get into arguments [when] some people said they wouldn't allow their kids to read comics; they would prefer for them to read fine literature. I said, "Your first job is to worry about your kid learning to read. [audience laughs] And your kid will learn to read a lot faster by letting him read what he enjoys reading. And then he'll move on to literature." Children aren't idiots. I mean everybody's read comics and then they go to classics. I was never ashamed to admit that I did this stuff.

[Audience question about why Trump folded after two issues]

AJ: I think Trump had problems which surpassed just the problem of the funding. Harvey Kurtzman, bless his soul, was a good friend of mine, he was just a smart guy and had a brilliant career at Mad magazine. But I think he just wanted to move up and become America's Punch magazine or an illustrated New Yorker magazine, and it was the wrong time with the wrong product. The reason Mad was successful right from the beginning was that it stirred the rebelliousness that was inchoate in a lot of people at that time. There were wars going on, there was a draft going on; colleges were decimated by the draft, or potentially decimated. There was McCarthyism. We were going through some really bad times in the ‘50s. And here comes this cheap little, rebellious rag on cheap paper and it's making fun of our institutions: It's making fun of politics, it's making fun of advertising, it's making fun of itself. It's making fun of radio shows, it's making fun of movies, and it's making fun of comic books, of Superman, of Batman. It was rebellious through and through, all just for the fun of it. And it was 25 cents – it was 10 cents to begin with, then it was 25 cents. I think this had great appeal. And Hefner decided we were going to do this for the upper class – put out a 50-cent magazine, all slick with fancy color like Playboy. But it wasn't going to fly, I think, even if he didn't get into trouble financially; it just wasn't going to have the rebellious feel that it needed at that time. And he also interfered by telling us that the funny stuff Kurtzman was doing at Mad, he would ask for that to be toned down or taken out because it was a little too kiddish; he wanted it to be a bit more for the grown-ups. In my view, that's the whole story.

[Audience request for a story about Mad's famous vacation trips]

Well, I think the funniest one was really Mad's first trip. How that came about, I don't know. I suspect it was because a man by the name of Lyle Stuart was a publisher – he put out sex books and stuff like that – [who] was a good friend of Bill Gaines, and he took his people on an all-paid vacation once a year, and somebody said to Bill, "Why don't you do that with your group? They'll get to know each other and become friendly and all that." So our first trip was to Haiti. (audience titters) Well, it's kind of funny now to think of going to Haiti – that would be a typical Mad kind of thought: Lyle Stuart's taking them to Paris –we'll go to Haiti. (audience laughs) But I have to be honest with you, that wasn't the reason. Haiti was peaceful and really quite beautiful at that time; 1963, I believe. It was run with an iron hand by [dictator] Papa Doc [Duvalier], so it was peaceful – peaceful because there was a Nazi at every corner. But the hotel was well-guarded and everything was beautiful. And Bill hired four jeeps for us to take – one driver and three other people – and go drive around. And one of the things that was suggested, that Bill had in mind, he said, "We had one subscriber in Haiti, and he didn't renew." (audience roars) So four jeeps pull up to [his house], Bill walks up and says [to him], "You had a subscription. Why didn't you renew?" (audience roars) "All right, I'll give you a year's free subscription!"

I went on a total of 30 trips. I was on every one of them; I and one other guy were the only two on every one. It sort of made a family out of freelance people. You know, they had a small staff and the bulk of the staff was freelance; we would never get to know each other because you're coming to deliver your work and no one else is there, just the staff. But going on these trips coalesced the whole group and we all became distant friends from then on and we had some wonderful, wonderful trips. And for that I am very grateful to Bill. I enjoyed those trips.

One of the things we did when we came back from a trip is we gave a party for Bill Gaines. And it was in a funky little place down in the Bowery, a very nice little restaurant, a seafood restaurant And we would go there and we were supposed to bring all the photographs we took on the trip. And then we started the policy of creating an album where everyone who was on the trip did something in the album: If you were a writer you wrote something, like a little funny essay; if you were an artist, you did a cartoon, whatever you wanted. Even photographers, too. Then we had a trip to Russia and I can only tell you what I did. Bill Gaines was a notorious slob; I think he travelled on these trips with one set of clothing, the one he was wearing. … When we were in Russia, what was happening to all of us was that people on the street, it was still the Soviet Union, people on the street were coming up and one guy sidled up to me and told me he would give me 50 rubles for my shoes, which happened to be Pierre Cardin, because it was going out of business and I bought them for about a tenth of what they cost. But still, these Russians knew, they knew the stuff. So he comes up to me and he says, "I'll give you 50 rubles for your shoes," and then he said, "60 rubles for your jacket." And everybody experienced this. So when it came to drawing a picture for the album, I had one guy with a Russian who comes up and says, "I'll give you 50 rubles for your shoes." A second [Russian] comes up and says, "I'll give you 60 rubles for your jacket." And a third [Russian] comes up to Bill Gaines and says, "You give me 50 dollars and I'll give you my clothes!" (audience laughter)

Interview transcription by Allie Finkel.

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