MAD Magazine: A Tribute

Chuck and Josh grew up on MAD Magazine and we hope you did too. What started out as a comic book that spoofed comic books grew into the foundation of American satire and cultivated a healthy skepticism in generations of kids. Hail to the clods at MAD!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we're going on tour and you can come
out and see us in Orlando on August twelfth, Nashville
on September sixth, and we're gonna wrap it all up
on September ninth in our hometown of Atlanta, GA.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
That's right, And these are the last shows of the year.
This has been a really good show this year. We're
super excited about it, and this is going to be
your only chance to be in the theater with us,
and you know, like fifteen sixteen hundred of your closest pals.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
So go to stuff youshould know dot com and check
out our tour page for links and information, and you
can also go to link tree slash sysk for the
same stuff. We'll see you guys this August and September.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,

(00:48):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here. You know, the usual gang of idiots,
and this is Stuff you Should Know. Very nuts. Yeah,
I kind of had to say something like thin stunt
you think.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Right off the bat?

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Oh, sure, right off the bat, like a bunt that
hits you yourself in the foot.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
So you were, of course referencing Mad magazine, and that
was how they referred to themselves to their staff.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
Yeah, basically forever.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Yeah, one of the great all time satirical rags, one
of the earliest. It's funny. Right before you got on,
Jerry said something about did the Cracked website come after
the Mad magazine? And I said, well, I think she

(01:43):
conflated them. And I was like no, I was like,
Cracked was Cracked and Mad was Mad, right, And I
very quickly looked up because I was like, you know,
I think Cracked was kind of like a Mad ripoff,
but they were pretty close together. Mad started in fifty
two and Cracked started in fifty eight.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Yeah, but was very far from the only Mad imitator.
I won't say rip off, but imitator. What else there was?
Hugh Hefner had one called Trump. Oh yeah, there were
other ones called Humbug, both of which Mad originator Harvey
Kurtzman worked on. There was apparently it was like a
thing like Mad made such a splash early on, as

(02:20):
we'll see that it basically created a whole new genre,
I guess.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah, and you and I were both fans as young'in's right.
I mean we've talked about this.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Oh yeah, I was going through. There's a site called
Doug Guildford's Mad Cover Site.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
Yeah, you can spend a lot of time there.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
Yeah, you can. I believe he has like, like, I
think there's five hundred and fifty three total original issues
that they ever released, and I believe he has them all,
at least the cover scan and then some of them.
He's gone to the trouble of scanning the contents too,
so you can read Mad Magazine online.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
But I went through and looked at covers until I
started recognizing when like I own that, and then kept
going through and then they started to taper off and
I didn't recognize them anymore. In doing so, I was
able to go back and figure out that I was
an avid Mad magazine reader from September of nineteen eighty

(03:17):
six through September of nineteen eighty eight, my entire tenth, eleventh,
and twelfth years of life.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
I did the same thing. Awesome, because I was kind
of curious too. I was like, when did I even start?
And man, I was, of course I'm a little older
than you, but I was earlier aged as well, because
I was into it from like eighty to eighty five ish,
so I was like nine through fourteen and fifteen and

(03:48):
then a little bit after that. I'm sure, but I
don't know if you were like me. Mad was an
expensive magazine for a kid.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
It was cheap and even said so on the cover.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
It was more expensive than other magazines, and one reason
is because they did not until two thousand and one
have advertisements to also bring in money, so they made
their money off of newsstands and subscriptions. And I just remember,
you know, throwing down for a Mad cost a little dough,
So I didn't have a ton of them. Got some

(04:20):
hand me downs from Scott, of course, nice, but so
many of those covers and movie parodies, especially from the
great Mort Drucker, really just stuck with me.

Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, no, same here, and he was far and away
the greatest of all the Mad illustrators, and all of
them were really great in their own way, but Mort
Drucker was. Yeah, if you're familiar with Mad, all of
the movie parodies, the TV parodies that were just that
looked dead on like the people. That was Mort Drucker.
And he was named at least in one of the

(04:54):
articles I read as possibly the greatest caricature artists of
all time, like in history. Yeah, and I would not really,
I wouldn't. I wouldn't go against that.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
Now. He did almost exclusively movies though, because their TV
guy was Angels. Yeah, angela tourist did mostly TV and
Drunker did mostly movies.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
But they, I mean, they had similar styles. It wasn't like,
you know, Night and Day, like comparing Don Martin and
you know, more Drucker or something like that. But and
no shade on Angelo Torres's work either. So but yes,
they were more expensive than comic books for sure, Like
even out of the gate the first Mad magazine cost
twenty five cents, which is like several hundred dollars today,

(05:41):
I presume. So, yeah, it was when you can get
a comic book for like ten cents at the time.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
Yeah. And and you know, it cannot be overstated how
much Mad sort of laid the groundwork for modern satire. Uh.
And then as we'll see, all so musical satire and
things like the Onion and the National Lampoon, things like
that probably wouldn't well, they maybe would have eventually existed,

(06:10):
but they certainly had a nice paved road in front
of them thanks to Mad.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine the
world without things like the Simpsons and The Daily Show
and all that. But I don't know. I mean, you
could argue that it would be at least a different world,
like you were saying, if not that they didn't exist
at all because of Mad magazine. It's crazy. And one
of the things that Mad magazine did is another thing

(06:35):
that it's really hard to imagine not existing in the world,
is teaching healthy skepticism to kids, adolescents basically. And I
guess Art Spiegelman he created mouse Right, I mean us,
the graphic novel. Okay, he had a great quote that
I think really kind of got it across. At the

(06:57):
point of Mad, especially early on through the mid seventies,
is that the entire adult world is lying to you,
and we are part of the adult world. Good luck
to you. And that was I mean, that's what they did,
and it was a I mean, I'm sure I learned
a lot of skepticism from Mad as well. Absolutely, you
just couldn't read it and not pick it up, you know.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
Yeah, that was the toly. So shall we talk history.

Speaker 1 (07:23):
Let's talk history, Chuck.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
All right, well we got we have to talk about
EC Comics. It was short for Education Comics, founded in
forty four by a guy named Maxwell Gaines, who was
one of the progenitors of comic books period, and EC
Comics was ended up merging with Detective Comics. But I
hope I didn't get this wrong to form what we

(07:47):
knew later on as DCAY and from the Maxwell gain
side and from EC Comics we got titles like The
Flash and Hawkman, Green Lantern and Wonder Women were probably
the biggest ones. And I guess I should say this
was the original incarnation as all American publications, right, and

(08:08):
then later became EC.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
Yes, But those characters he helped bring to reality. Yeah,
So he was a legend in the field, still is
in the field of comics. But he died early, I guess,
fairly youngish and at least suddenly I think I saw
a boat accident or something like that. And his son,
William Gaines Bill Gaines, took over the family business, and

(08:32):
he had slightly different tastes than his father. He wasn't
really interested in printing religious tracts or comics that featured
people who were hurting you know, camels and sheep and
talking about God. He wanted to basically go in the
exact opposite direction, so he changed the name of EC
from Education Comics Entertainment Comics, and he started publishing what

(08:55):
became some of the most notorious, gory, violent, gleefully sick
horror magazines around.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah, it was. It was sort of a way to
stand out because comics were huge, huge business. I think
by the nineteen fifties there were about one point two
billion comics sold a year.

Speaker 1 (09:19):
That's like the number of podcasts now.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
Yeah, exactly. In twenty five percent were crime and horror,
well kind of like podcasts actually, and so easy you know,
Tales from the crypt We have Easy to thank for that,
and just lots of that. You know. You could sort
of see the foundation of MAD being laid, even though
MAD didn't do horror sci fi per se. Of course,
they dabbled in that and satire, but they started to

(09:44):
tackle things with themes like you know, racism and police
corruption and bigotry and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yeah, so there's like the contours of teaching kids like hey,
these things exist. But it was in the form of
like horror comics or war comics or Cowboy comics or
something like that, right, yeah, yeah, And so this is
a time where I mean we're talking the early fifties, right,
this is like Pleasantville type America, and they're talking about

(10:11):
like drug addiction and stuff to ten and twelve year old.
So it was pretty groundbreaking what they were doing. And
they because of that, they drew the attention of the
moral panic that started to erupt over comic books that
apparently was brought on by a psychiatrist named Frederic or
Friedrich Wertham Vertum probably Fredrick Wortham, but he wrote a

(10:36):
book called Seduction of the Innocent and then he specifically
called out some of the ec comics and described, you know,
what was going on in them, and it was basically saying,
comic books are corrupting our youth. They're the reason that
juvenile delinquents exist. It's comic books. And the Senate and
Congress said, oh, we should, we should look into this. Then.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Yeah, so you know, they formed a Senate subcommittee in
spring of nineteen fifty four, as they do as they do,
and that Wortham or Wam as you I think probably
correctly pronounced thanks. He kind of opened up by saying
this is one original quote. I hate to say it's senator,
but I think Hitler was a beginner. Compared to the

(11:20):
comic book industry, they get the children much younger, so
you can kind of see the hysteria going on of
what they call the comic book menace.

Speaker 1 (11:30):
Plus completely ignoring the Hitler youth right exactly.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
And one very famous exchange that if you look up
anything on this these subcommittee hearings came between Gaines's son, who,
like you said, took over for Pops, and a senator
named Estes Kefalver Keith Keith Walver hm not Cafalver, Keith Aalver.

Speaker 1 (11:56):
I think it was Keith Aver. I can't remember if
this is the thing. Miss Keith fav hearings or if
he held some other stuff, but he he was. He
liked to hold hearings from what I understand.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
Of course, he was a Democrat from Tennessee. And there
was one exchange between Gaines and Keith Aalber where he says,
where they're talking about, you know, one of the covers,
and he said, this seems to be a man with
a bloody axe holding a woman's head up which has
been severed. From her body. Do you think this is
in good taste? And this is after Gaines had already said,

(12:30):
you know, our limit is to publish within the bounds
of good taste. Uh huh. And Gaines said, yes, sir,
I do. For the cover of a horror comic, a
cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as
holding the head a little higher so that the net
can be seen dripping blood from it, and moving the
body over a little further so that the neck of
the body could be seen to be bloody. And the

(12:50):
senator said, you have blood coming out of her mouth,
and gain says a little And Keithalver says, here is
blood on the acts. I think most adults are shocked
by that. So that was a very famous exchange where
Gaines he went on to basically make the point in
what may have been the first you know, mic drop.

(13:10):
I won't read the whole quote, but he basically is
talking about the fact of juvenile delinquency. He said, it's
a product of real environment in which the child lives,
and not the fiction he reads. There are many problems
that reach our children today. The problems are economic and social,
and they are complex, And he was right but it
didn't matter. No.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
I mean, looking back seventy five years later, you're just
kind of like, oh, that's neat that that happened. But
if you kind of put yourself in this moment, Bill
Gaines was the only comic book publisher, as far as
I could tell, who is willing to step up to
the Senate and be like, no, this is all wrong.
This guy's a crackpot. We actually have real societal problems

(13:51):
that are causing juvenile delinquency, and you guys are coming
after comic books. He took on the Senate, or at
least the Senate Committee, and it was a They were
very public hearings, and he stepped up when no one
else would. And I read an account of the whole
thing on the Comics Association site and they said that
at first he was just killing it, but then he

(14:12):
started to kind of slow down, lose focus, and he
ended up getting pummeled by the senators, and some of
his less desirable quotes ended up on the front page
of the New York Times. They equated it to him
taking Benza Dream too early so that he peaked and
started to get tired during the hearings. Because the hearings
were postponed, but regardless he got he was defeated. And

(14:36):
some people actually say, if he hadn't drummed up all
that attention and drew the ire of the Senate, who
knows what would have happened. But the upshot was that
the comic book publishers got together and said, who whoa, whoa,
You guys don't have to censor us. We don't need
government sensors. We can do this ourselves. We're going to
create the Comic Magazine Association of America, and within that,

(14:58):
we're going to create a committee, a review board called
the Comic Code Authority, and every single comic book that
is published in this country will be reviewed and either
given a stamp of approval or rejected by the Comics
Code Authority. And you can rely on us. Just stay
out of this.

Speaker 2 (15:16):
Yeah, and this was this is about three months in
change after the end of the hearings, so they were
clearly kind of working on this. You know, I doubt
if they just threw that together last second, like they
saw the writing on the wall and got together. And
you know, this was good in a way because it
kept the Senate out of their business. But what it

(15:38):
also did was kind of self censor because you couldn't
all of a sudden get a comic out there unless
it had this stamp of approval from the Code Authority,
and if it had the word weird or crime or
terror or horror just in the title, it was rejected
right off the bat.

Speaker 1 (15:56):
Yes, so the I mean, the choice was clear. It
was either you know, fold your operation or start submitting
to these standards that the Comic Code Authority is laying
down now. And Bill Gaines said, We're okay, that's it.
We're just not going to publish those comic books anymore.

(16:18):
And he stopped publishing almost every single comic book he
had except for one. There was one comic book that
they had released previously, and it was a humor comic
and it was called Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad.
And that was the origin of Mad Magazine. It was
a humor comic book. That was the one thing that

(16:38):
remained after Bill Gains burned down his entire comic book
publishing empire. Rather than submit to censorship, you forgot the
colon I was leaving that for you.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
Calculated to drive you mad. And by the way, mad
is always in all caps colon humor in a jugular vein.

Speaker 1 (16:57):
Good. It is good. So it's not an overstatement to
say that Bill Gaines was a bit of a hero
for being willing to stand up to, you know, a
moral panic and put himself out there is potentially the
face of, you know, the evil that everybody was worried about,
and then just saying like, Okay, I lost, but I'm

(17:17):
not going to just you know, if you beat you
beat me, but that doesn't mean I'm going to join you.
I'm going to go figure out another way to do it.
So he just kept going in a different direction.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
All right. I think that's a very robust setup for us.
So we're gonna collect our thoughts and we'll be right
back jogging job. I know we're going to talk about

(18:05):
things we love with Mad. But two movie parodies that
really stood out were movies that I didn't even see
at the time, actually three of them. And that was
kind of the fun thing about Mad is I wasn't
allowed to see some of this stuff. Oh okay, but
I could read the parody, so I remember crime More
versus crime More instead of Kramer versus Kramer was a

(18:30):
big one. Being not all there for being there and
the one for the Shining, and I can't remember it
wasn't the Shinning that was the simbsence. I can't remember
what it was called. But I remember reading the Shining
parody too, like long before I could see that.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
Oh man, I want to read that one. I'll bet
it was just legendary.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yeah, it was good.

Speaker 1 (18:48):
I don't remember any particular ones, but I mean I
know that there were ones on like Alf and Rambo
and see here.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
Were just after me. Yeah, combined, we have a really
good swatch.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
But they would also do like like adult stuff. This
wasn't like they weren't like what's the cool movie with
teens right now? Like they did a cover one on
La law Well, Cramer versus Creamy, Kramer versus Creamer. It's
a great example too. But that's funny. That's like people
getting their news from the Daily Show. Today. You're getting
to watch movies that you weren't allowed to see through

(19:19):
Mad magazine.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
Yeah, well, and we'll kind of see why here in
a minute. That was a very nice setup. Actually think
so too.

Speaker 1 (19:27):
My thoughts still aren't collected, though, so we might be
in trouble.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
All right, So tales calculated to Drive You Mad is
the only title that Bill Gaines stuck with. He had
a cartoonist named from EC, named Harvey Kurtzman, who was
an army vet in World War Two and he did
military comics for EC, but kind of got tired of
this and was like, you know, I'm a funny guy,
I got a sense of humor. I'd rather work on

(19:53):
humor things because I'm a big fan of humor magazines.
And he said, why don't we spoof other comics, Like
do a comic that satirizes and spoofs comics, And so
they started doing that. They started spoofing horror comics, sci
fi comics. Bill Gains was beside himself. He thought it
was brilliant and mad sort of as we knew it

(20:15):
was really born when Kurtzman had that idea.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
Yeah, And one of the reasons it was so brilliant
was because they were using the same artists and writers
who were creating those comics for the spoof. So they
were really like dead on and they looked like they
were supposed to look, and like they had this like
the in joke humor that of anybody who was a
fan of those comics. So it was a pretty cool
idea to start, and it was right up Kurtzman's alley

(20:41):
for sure, because he'd kind of got on board with
some of the other comics like war comics and stuff
like that. But it wasn't It was not a hit
out of the gate at all. It was apparently I
think issue number four in nineteen fifty three, that was
the one that really kind of caught everyone's attention because

(21:02):
they lampooned Superman with the pretty obvious title super Duperman.
But it's it's really involved and funny, and it's still today.
I was reading it this morning, I was like, this
is pretty funny.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Yeah, no, I agree that very first panel has a
super Duperman punching an old person on crutches. It was
very dark character. Clark Bent was the the you know,
the alter ego and the reason it's noteworthy because they
had Dave Ruce helped us with this. He pointed out
they had already done these spoofs like Flesh Garden and

(21:38):
dragged Net instead of Dragnet for the TV side, but
they got sued, well not sued, but they got a
cease and desist from DC Comics and sort of strysand
effect before strysand was knew that there was going to
be an effect named for her, right, it got attention

(21:59):
and all of a sudden, kids were reading these comic parodis.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
Yeah, there was a good one in June nineteen fifty
four on Starchy, which was Archie, And I mean it
was again really like well drawn, really interesting if you
took a like a Archie and ran it through like
what would happen in the real world, but it's still
a parody. That's what they came up with. And like,

(22:24):
so comic books were incredibly popular at the time, Like
you were saying, they're billions being printed, right, Yeah, so
this magazine or this comic book was spoofing comic books.
So they just went in and just caught on like wildfire.
So this was the one that Bill Gaines had left
after he stopped publishing the horror comics and the Cowboy

(22:45):
comics and the war comics and the sci fi comics.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah, and so you sort of hinted that, you know,
Kramer versus Cramer and La Law these were sort of
it wasn't necessarily stuff for kids, And that happened when
they made this, which from a comic book perioding and
satirizing other comic books to a magazine satirizing other magazines.

(23:10):
A couple of stories why this happened. One was that
Gaines was like, hey, listen, we're not going to be
under the Comic Code Authority if we turn ourselves into
a magazine. But apparently one of the real reasons that
wasn't as public was Harvey Kirchman wanted to do this.
He was sort of bored with a comic book thing,

(23:31):
wanted to get into magazines, and so to keep Kertzman around,
who was just a key early COG, switched to a
larger format, to a glossy magazine, and all of a
sudden they were spoofing magazines. And Kurtzman specifically even said
for the past two years now, Matt has been dulling
the senses of the country's youth. Now we get to

(23:52):
work on the adults, right, even though I mean, I'm
sure there were some adults reading it, but every kid
I knew read it.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
But it did definitely like update their readership into a
slightly higher age category from you know, I think teenagers
read comic books back then, but this was like, you know,
you could find teenagers and now maybe college kids reading
it as well because it was just geared slightly differently
just by default, because it was parodying other magazines. Right,

(24:22):
So Harvey Kurtzman has like fans still today who are like,
if Kurtzman had never left, who knows how great Mad
magazine would have been, because he was a perfectionist genius,
which was his undoing, Like apparently he would miss publication
dates because he was just tinkering with stuff endlessly. Everything

(24:43):
needed to be tinkered with, and apparently he was really
good at it. I read an article or an interview
with Al Jaffey, who is the longest running cartoonists at MAD,
and he was saying, like Kurtzman was the best editor
he'd ever worked with, but everything needed editing, everything needed tinkering,
which ma everything delayed and more expensive. And the reason

(25:05):
Kurtzman left was not because Gaines said, hey, you need
to to rain all this in or fired him or anything,
but Gains very wisely retained editorial control. So Kritsman had
to go ask Gains for everything, and Chrismin did not
like that. Geniuses typically don't like that kind of thing,
and so he struck out on his own after just
a couple of years.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
Yeah, and you know this is you know, when they
made that switch to the magazine, This is when they
all of a sudden could do like TV shows and movies.
They got a whole lot more political and then as
we'll see song periods and stuff like that. Another big,
sort of long standing tradition with Mad was skewing marketing

(25:46):
and pr and advertising, and they because they didn't have ads.
And that was one of the things I loved about Mad,
even though it cost a little more, is that every
page was you know, some things were funnier than others, obviously,
but every page each had funny content on it. The
spoof ads, to me, were great. Everything they did was

(26:08):
funny because they didn't have to just sort of bow
to the advertiser. And it really would have been I
don't never saw any post two thousand and one editions.
It would be really weird for me to see a
Mad magazine with a legitimate advertisement in it. I wouldn't know.
I would look for the jokes still, somebody.

Speaker 1 (26:26):
Yeah, it's a little mind warping when you were used
to it for decades, totally, you know not And yeah,
that was a big part of it too. It's like,
I mean, that's probably the most ubiquitous way people are
lied to on a daily basis is through advertising. So
it was essential that they lampoon ads too, just to
They couldn't just leave those alone. It would have been

(26:48):
distinctly impure, and neither Harvey Kurtzman nor Bill gains would
have stood for that for sure.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
All Right, So Kurtzman and Leaves in nineteen fifty six,
this is what you were talking about with Hugh Heffner.
He had his satirical humor magazine called Trump Believe it
or Not, four issues. Then he went on to work
for the other one you mentioned, Humbug, which was only
about eleven issues. But he, you know, like you said,

(27:16):
he still has people that sort of bowed him today
because he laid the groundwork and the foundation for sort
of satire as we know it today.

Speaker 1 (27:25):
Yeah. He also went on to create a longstanding Playboy
cartoon from the sixties to the seventies called Little Annie Fanny,
and it was just a dirty cartoon that apparently, yeah,
really fulfilled him as an artist. But yeah, he was
just a legend, just as much as like Bill Gaines
was maybe more in some circles for sure, but after Kurtzman,

(27:49):
and Kurtzman is very much credited with establishing the tone,
the voice, the idea behind MAD that was carried on
essentially until twenty eighteen, maybe as we'll see, but and
in turn also creating laying the foundation for American sattire

(28:11):
to come. Right after that, a guy named Al Feldstein
came on board, and I get the impression a little
more of a workhorse and a little less of a
endlessly tinkering perfectionist. And he brought on some of the
names that you are familiar with, like Mort Drucker and

(28:31):
Al Jaffy and Don Martin and just these longtime MAD contributors.
They came on under Al Feldstein's overseeing ship. You like that,
Huh yeah?

Speaker 2 (28:45):
Sure. In fact, Senate committees should not be committees on
oversight anymore. They should be on overseeing ship.

Speaker 1 (28:52):
I agree, it's got a little more flair to it.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
So Feldstein, one of the key things, besides, like you said,
hiring you some legendary staff, was bringing on a legendary mascot,
and that is Alfredy Newman. He named Alfredy Newman or
attached that name. Apparently that was a kind of a pseudonym.
They used a lot of kind of goofy, funny pseudonyms
in the office for different things. ALFREDY Newman was one

(29:18):
of them. But if you don't know anything about Mad
magazine and you've never picked up an issue, you still
probably can look at the little little Opie Taylor, redheaded,
gap tooth, big eared. Well, I was about to say kid,
but it was always hard to determine Alfredy Newman's age

(29:40):
in a way, and that was part of the fun,
I guess. But that was the mascot. They wanted a mascot,
they got one, along with the the I don't know
what you would call it a slogan, yeah, catchphrase, which
is what me worry? What comma me worry?

Speaker 1 (29:58):
Oh that's funny. I always read it as what me worry?
Oh yeah, yeah, Wow, Well you're we got two different brains, huh.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
I guess, so, I mean still the same thing.

Speaker 1 (30:08):
Really, I guess.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
So he was the first one to bring that image.
I believe the first cover was issue number twenty five,
but he had been sort of used in the magazine
previous to that, and in the mid seventies there was
an interview where he said, you know, I got this
thing from this postcard in the early nineteen fifties that

(30:33):
had the caption me Worry, I like that me y,
Yeah exactly. And in nineteen sixty five this and of
course this is you know, ten years before he admitted this.
But in nineteen sixty five Man was actually sued by
the widow of a cartoonist named Harry Spencer, who said, Hey,

(30:53):
this postcard that you're going to talk about in ten
years was stolen from my husband's work and he's had
this copyright since nineteen fourteen. It's the name of the character,
is the original Optimist or the me worry guy and
mad and fighting the lawsuit said all right, listen, we
know this image has been used before besides us, so

(31:14):
readers find uses of Alfredy Newman out there. And they
came back with a bunch dating back to the nineteenth century.

Speaker 1 (31:22):
Yeah, they traced it all the way back. There was
a couple of historians that are mentioned in a Paris
Review article. It's really interesting. It chronicles the evolution of
Alfredy Newman. But they traced it back to an eighteen
ninety four play called The New Boy. And they think
that it's probable that the character that look that face

(31:47):
is a mashup of the two actors that played the
lead in The.

Speaker 2 (31:51):
New Boy, Ron Howard.

Speaker 1 (31:54):
Yeah, Ron Howard and Ron Howard sor ye. And this
play like took America by storm. It was a big
deal in the late nineteenth century. These actors were very
much celebrated, and this character entered the pop culture and stayed.
But over time people forgot where he came from originally
until I mean, we're talking like the twenty ten's before

(32:16):
somebody said it goes as far back as this for sure.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
Yeah, and Dave was kind of enough to include a
bunch of cool uses. There was an auto parts store
that used it, a soda Happy Jack soda in the
nineteen thirties, a pain reliever in nineteen oh eight, all
kinds of uses, and the judge basically was like, hey, listen,
this is in the public domain. Everyone is using this.
I don't know why, but everyone is using this goofy

(32:41):
guy's face. And the Mad magazine or I'm sorry, the
original affording human painting was by Norman Mingo, and for
Mad they had some pretty strict rules of usage, which
was you had to always have a forward, either a
forward face face like not from an angle or from

(33:02):
profile or anything like that, or just fully the back
of his head that had been done, and any other
usage of the face that was any different had to
go through what I sort of think was probably a
pretty strict like that was probably a pretty serious meeting
at Mad magazine. If they wanted to change that in
any way.

Speaker 1 (33:21):
Yeah, they'd be like, convince us, why right, exactly. But
that's why that that Alfredy Newman is just so recognizable
even when he's Yeah, I remember he was Lindy England.
Wasn't that the private Abu Grabe who had the picture
of her taken like pointing, like with with gun fingers

(33:42):
at a like a naked, hooded, tortured prisoner.

Speaker 2 (33:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:47):
Remember they did Alfredy Newman on the cover as her. Yeah,
and you knew exactly who he was spoofing, but you
also could totally see that it was Alfredy Newman. All
of it is because that Norman Mingo one just hit
it so perfectly out of the game that there was
just no reason to alter it at all.

Speaker 2 (34:05):
Yeah, And I don't know, I never really thought about
it's so ubiquitous and so just sort of burned in
my brain. I was a kid, and it never occurred
to me just what brilliant branding that was to not
only just have this mascot and slogan, but to not
change it and have it appear in much the same

(34:25):
way every single time that you saw it, and you know,
as a kid you were being I remember when I
was first thinking about tattoos, I thought about getting Alfredy Newman.
I would like it more than what I ended up getting,
so I probably should have. But it was such a
sort of iconic and still is such an iconic brand mark.

Speaker 1 (34:45):
Yeah. Same with the masthead too, the logo, the shape
of the letters spelling out MAD all caps, that kind
of thing just as much as him. The two went
together just so perfectly well for sure. Yeah, But because
they established that Harry's Spencer did not have any sort
of copyright over Alfredy Newman or over that kid, that image,

(35:08):
you could do and use Alfredy Newman yourself if you
wanted to be a big jerk, and Mad couldn't do
anything about it because they don't own the copyright to
the image. It's in the he's in the public domain.
But Alfredy Newman himself, any usage that has ever been
created for mad if you if you use that, they
could sue your pants off. It's just if you went

(35:29):
out and created a new ALFREDY Newman type named it
something different, then technically they couldn't do anything, but the
whole world would be mad at you. I think unless
it was really great.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
I know a certain jerk in Kansas that's a pretty
great at photoshop.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
And then one last thing about mister A. E. Newman.
That name was one of the hilarious, like made up
names that they would use to like sign fake letters
to the editor and that kind of stuff. That's where
they were like, I think this name goes with this
guy very.

Speaker 2 (36:01):
Well, totally one of the mini pseudonyms. I was just kidding,
by the way about the jerk part. He knows who
he is, sure, and he'll laugh at this, you hope.

Speaker 1 (36:14):
All right?

Speaker 2 (36:14):
Should we take a break, I guess all right, we're
gonna come back and talk, probably too briefly about some
of these legendary staffers that they had for you know,
fifty years or so.

Speaker 1 (36:26):
We're gonna staff it up.

Speaker 2 (36:46):
Things and jogging job.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
Okay, Chuck. So I mentioned ourselves as the usual gang
of videots. It's what everybody at Mad called themselves and
called the whole crew, and everybody was very happy to
be called that they were. Everybody had a really good
sense of humors another way to put it, most of them,
as we'll see. But I mentioned al Jaffe earlier and

(37:17):
he apparently holds the Guinness record for the longest career
as a comic artist. He started drawing for Mad in
nineteen fifty five. Yeah, and when did he retire.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
He retired in twenty twenty and very sadly, I mean
say sadly because he passed away. But he passed away
at one hundred and two on April tenth of this year,
on twenty twenty three. So had a I mean just
a legend, what a life. Ended up going away with
Kurtzman when he did Trump and Humbug, but came back

(37:53):
to Mad magazine and was most well known for doing
the fold, in which if you if you know Mad,
you know the if you don't. It was the very
last interior page of the magazine, like the inside of
the back cover, basically where you would it was a
visual trick where you would fold you know, it would
be a picture and it would have text at the bottom,

(38:14):
and then when you folded it over in a certain way,
it would form a new picture, and not only that,
but all new texts, Like I can't imagine laying these
out was easy considering the text, like the picture is
one thing, but to lay it out and have it
say something different is a whole other thing.

Speaker 1 (38:33):
And it also sents some like significant stuff too, like
it was often about like taxes or the government doing
something shady or something like that.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
Yeah, the two would always be they would always sort
of link together. So whatever you had on that first
initial thing might be it was kind of set up
punchline basically, is how it worked for sure.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
And he in that interview I read with him, he
said it take it to about two weeks to make
one of those things. I believe it, and that the
artists and I guess writers were all expected to produce
twenty and then later on twenty five pages of material
a year, and that was just the requirement. And if
you hit it, it's not like you or didn't hit it.

(39:17):
It's not like you were fired. But they did an
annual trip abroad for like a week or two, all
expenses paid by MAD and if you didn't hit your
your quota, you weren't on that trip.

Speaker 2 (39:31):
Wow, it's pretty funny. I'm sure I'm not the only
kid who tried to guess what the fold end image
would be just by looking at the unfolded image. Sure,
I used to stare at that thing trying to guess
what it might be. And Jaffie was also popular for
something that I had, the little side books I bought
of snappy Answers to Stupid Questions?

Speaker 1 (39:52):
Did you like those?

Speaker 2 (39:54):
Loved them?

Speaker 1 (39:54):
So? Do you have a favorite? Oh? No, okay, you
just loved.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Them all, like a favorite joker, a favorite book, a
favorite edition Anne.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
Oh yeah, favorite snappy Answers to Stupid Questions page?

Speaker 2 (40:06):
Do you have one?

Speaker 1 (40:06):
No, I was just asking for you.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
Okay, no, no, no, but I loved him.

Speaker 1 (40:10):
Okay, what about So that's al Jaffy. That's right, We're
moving on to Dick Department. I've never known how to
say this man's name, Dick de.

Speaker 2 (40:20):
Bartolow de Bartolo.

Speaker 1 (40:22):
I think he was the one who wrote most of
the parodies of TV movies. Just essentially any satire of
like one of those two things was probably written by
him between nineteen sixty four to twenty seventeen.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
Yeah, and de Bartolo was born in nineteen forty five,
so he was submitting by nineteen sixty one as a
like sixteen or seventeen year old and getting some of
that stuff in there. And the best I can figure
is he was kind of a full time staffer either
at twenty or twenty one.

Speaker 1 (41:01):
It's really cool.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
He's just a kid, and like you said, partner with
Mort Drucker and the great Angelo Taurus, who, as you
will see, is one of a sort of group of
legendary Latin American or Latin and then American writers. He
was Puerto Rican. And then they also had a couple
of guys that we're going to talk about named Stregio

(41:24):
Aragones and Antonio Prohyas.

Speaker 1 (41:27):
Very nice. Oh, we're going to talk about it now.
So pro Hyas was the creator of Spy versus Spy, right.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
Yes, And one of the reasons Cuban, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:36):
One of the reasons why he was so interested in
the Cold War and all of the horribleness of it
and futility of it. That was basically the ultimate message
of Spy Versus Spy is you know, like, yeah, you
can nuq one another, but we all lose was just
like that's the general theme. But because he was Cuban
and because he had been expelled from Cuba by Castro,

(41:59):
which like, man, if you were in the sixties, that's
like one of the most political things you can do,
be expelled from Cuba by Castro.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
Yeah, go to America and be famous and make lots
of exactly.

Speaker 1 (42:10):
But he was famous already in Cuba when he showed
up at the offices of MAD and apparently did not
speak a lick of English, but his fourteen year old
daughter did, so he brought her with him and she
helped translate the interview and basically got across that her
father was interested in working for MAD and Bill Gaines said,
you're hired, or he probably said tell him he's hired.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
Yeah, exactly. He passed away in nineteen ninety eight. Sergio
Aragonis is still with us at eighty five years old.
He is Mexican and was a very successful cartoonist in Mexico.
Showed up in nineteen sixty two asked for prehia, saying
you know, I know, you've got a guy here that

(42:55):
could probably help interpret. Apparently that didn't work out, so
He just said, all right, well, here's my cartoons, these
one panels, and Mad was like, we don't really do
these one panels. But then someone said, you know, I
really like these. Maybe we can do Like our magazine
is so chock full of stuff, maybe we can squeeze
in even more by doing what's called marginals, which is

(43:16):
in the margins of the magazine. They would sneak in
these little one panel cartoons.

Speaker 1 (43:21):
Yeah, like just very they just made Mad that one
more thing. It was just one more thing that was like, oh,
this is Mad magazine, you know.

Speaker 2 (43:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (43:30):
Yeah. I wonder if he also was responsible, you know,
like the interstitial little cartoons of you know, like the
guy sweeping up the logo of bloopers and practical jokes
with Dick Clark and Ed McMahon. They were very much
like that, And I'm wondering if they hired him to
do that too. I hope they did, because if not,
they kind of ripped them.

Speaker 2 (43:50):
All, you know what. I seem to remember knowing that
to be true. But I'm not gonna say absolutely, but
that does really ring a bell.

Speaker 1 (43:59):
Okay, good good, I'm glad, So.

Speaker 2 (44:01):
We're gonna say definitely.

Speaker 1 (44:02):
Maybe there's another guy too that was worth mentioning. His
name was Dave Berg. He did the lighter side of
Oh yeah, pretty funny, like multiple panels of you know,
I guess, pretty funny stuff. The one that I always remember.
His drawing was amazing too, not quite as it was
much more linear and angular than more drunker stuff, but still,

(44:25):
you know, visually interesting. There was a guy shaving in
his beard and he was halfway done when his like
wife or girlfriend calls from the other room, like, I
changed my mind, keep your beard, and he's like making
this face in the mirror. For some reason, ten year
old Josh thought that was remarkable and remembered it. I
don't even think I laughed at it, but for some reason,

(44:46):
it just stuck with me.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
Right, It's funny how that stuff happens.

Speaker 1 (44:49):
Yeah, for sure. But he apparently was the one conservative, religious,
white suburban dude gentile. Most of the other well, I
shouldn't say most, but a lot of the others in
the whole conceit of mad especially earlier, was like Jewish. Yeah,
so Dave Berg was just very much intension, I guess

(45:13):
with the rest of the staff. Yeah, and al Jeffie
said that he kind of acted like he felt like
he was keeping carrying the whole thing on his back.

Speaker 2 (45:23):
And the magazine or just the conservative man.

Speaker 1 (45:26):
The magazine, like it was all him or something like that.
So he seems like a pretty interesting dude. But if
you remember that that comic The Lighter Side of There
was very frequently a late middle aged gentleman with like
a pipe and a leisure suit. Yeah, he's always being
put upon by hippies. I'm under the impression that that
was him doing himself.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
I'm trying to remember. I'm trying to remember what that
character looked like.

Speaker 1 (45:52):
He had glasses, whitish, shortish hair, and it was everything
was almost always done from the bust.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
Up with the pipe. Yes, okay, I'm looking at him now.

Speaker 1 (46:04):
I think things like Hank Hill. Yeah a little bit,
now that you mention it, for sure.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
I bet that totally is him.

Speaker 1 (46:10):
So that's Dave Burg, and I think he was worth
calling out for sure.

Speaker 2 (46:14):
Yeah, you know, we did mention mort Drunker, but I
wanted to recognize that he passed away in twenty twenty,
and I think he was in his nineties, So like
these guys are living in their mid eighties to nineties
and into the hundreds, not all of them, but like
maybe there's something to humor and laughter, right being medicine.
Who knows, But we did mention Don Martin briefly. I

(46:37):
wanted to talk a little bit more about him because
he was there from nineteen fifty six to nineteen eighty eight.
Was known as Mad's maddest artist. He did. He had
a very distinct style that, like you said earlier, was
nothing like the sort of caricature realism of a mort
Drugger or Taurus, but very distinct style. Did a lot
of poem parodies, did these singld character like single page

(47:02):
character parodies, like it would just be a big picture
of like Moses and then just a bunch of little
like things about Moses, like a comment on the sandals
or you know how he did his nails, and you know,
a line pointing to this part on Moses's body. So
a lot of those, but mostly did he had these
comic strips. They were he did two to three per

(47:24):
issue and they were maybe a couple of pages usually,
but it was just sort of a good old fashioned
comic strip, and that was sort of Don Martin's jam.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
Yeah, and everybody had a very long face and very
long feet. Yeah, it was just yeah, his stuff is unmistakeable.
You could spot it anywhere even with your eyes closed.
So the thing is, like you said, these people were
living into their eighties, nineties, hundreds even, and a lot
of them were working like up until very shortly before

(47:55):
their deaths. So these people worked at this magazine putting
this magazine out for decades upon decades, and as a result,
Mad had the same voice like all throughout. It was
just the thing that changed was the stuff that was parodying,
you know. So I just think that's really cool. It
also explains why in the Simpsons that when bart and

(48:19):
Milhouse are reading Mad magazine that they're talking about Spiro
Agnew and Barton Milhouse go, they're talking about that Spiro
Agnew guy again. He must work there, And I remember
thinking the exact same thing, because these guys are by
the way, Spiro Agnew was vice president to Nixon, right.

Speaker 2 (48:39):
Just a I remember that's how that name exactly.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
Yes, for sure, me too. I knew that name for
a good six seven years before I knew who he was,
and that that was like this kind of unspoken, unwritten
tradition for kids that started reading it in like probably
the early eighties onward, because these dudes were still talking
about spear Wagnu in like nineteen eighty six.

Speaker 2 (49:03):
Yeah, there's no reason that a twelve year old in
the mid eighties should know anything about spiritual now.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
But I just thought that Simpson's joke was just dead on.

Speaker 2 (49:11):
That's pretty good. I don't remember that joke, but that's awesome.
So another thing we need to talk about is a
very big lawsuit. They were no stranger to lawsuits. They
were no stranger to the FBI kind of sniffing around
every now and then because they were subversive and counterculture,
and so the FBI of course would always be interested
in that. But a big lawsuit happened in nineteen sixty

(49:36):
one when Mad released a special called sing Along with Mad,
which had twenty song parodies popular music, and the first
exhibit in the trial was a musical salute to a hypochondriac,
sung to the tune of Irving Berlin's A Pretty Girl
Is Like a melody called Luella Schwartz describes her malady.

(49:58):
So the estate of Berlin was not happy about this,
sued and the judge, and this ended up being a
landmark decision because it went all the way to the
Supreme Court, like any any satire and that we you know,
enjoyed today, we can kind of trace back to this
lawsuit where a judge said, as a general proposition, we
believe that parody and satire are deserving of substantial freedom

(50:22):
both his entertainment as a form of social and this
is a key part, and as a form of social
and literary criticism.

Speaker 1 (50:28):
Yeah, Mad magazine did that boom, So yeah, the Estate
of Irving Berlin didn't know who they were taking on,
but that's.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
Pretty cool and they're taking on freedom.

Speaker 1 (50:39):
Right, Dave. Dave traces that straight to weird Al Yankovic,
which I mean, that's a pretty obvious example. Like his
parody music, you can like he can just do that
apparently he asks typically, but weird Al to bring it
full circle is a huge Mad fan. Not that surprised.
Sure who made it onto the cover in twenty fifteen,

(51:03):
and it was one of those rare covers where alfredy
Newman's expression is different. He actually looks concerned and weirded out,
being close to weird out and weird it all has
the alfredy Newman expression on his face.

Speaker 2 (51:16):
Oh, very interesting, man.

Speaker 1 (51:18):
We just wrapped up like eight different parts of this
episode into the one cover.

Speaker 2 (51:23):
I have to look that up. Mad magazine was very popular.
It reached its peak in the sort of the late
sixties and seventies at a circulation rate that topped out
at a little more than two point one million magazines,
which is a lot. It was like just behind Time

(51:45):
and Newsweek and circulation numbers. I never really kind of
knew how many people read magazines back huge. Yeah, I
mean two point one in circulation is there's a lot
of folks reading that.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
Yeah. I think people really kept eating like news Newsweek
in Time and US News and will report until the
early early two thousands, like magazines worth thing until then
in the internet said I got this.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
Yeah, And that's sort of you know, the story of
MAD to a large degree. Even though their readership did
slip after the nineteen seventies, I think it was probably
doing all right in the eighties. And Dave makes a
great point that like everyone probably says, you know, my
five or six years with Mad were the best, because
those are the ones that you knew and loved so much.

(52:32):
But I think we all know that the eighties Mad
magazines were the best ar away and you know, they
screwed everyone. They didn't pick sides obviously they were you know,
lefties in general, but they would they would make fun
of all politics. But you know, as with all magazines,
it would eventually dwindle. They tried to save it at

(52:52):
various points. I remember when they moved to LA in
the late twenty teen, I knew a few people, like
they basically hired a new staff of like kind of
cool young comedy people, and I knew a few of
them that ended up working for the newer iteration of Mad.
But sadly that wouldn't last too long either, Right.

Speaker 1 (53:16):
Yeah, who anybody you want a name check? I'm curious.

Speaker 2 (53:20):
I'm trying to think. Oh, Brian Possain worked for him,
I think, and then well that's true, saying's like, all right,
you're a little older. Ali Gertz she did I'm not
sure if she still does it, but did a Simpsons
podcast for Max Fun and as a singer sort of
song parody person herself, and met her to Max Fun.

(53:42):
She co hosted a trivia with me. Ali's great. She
was one of the editors. And then there was someone
else too. I knew, and I was just they were
all very excited, you know at the time obviously to
sort of take on this huge mantle like comedy brand.
But you know, with these huge corporate mergers a time
Warner I believe own them in the two thousands, they

(54:06):
merged with AT and T and that was sort of
the death knell.

Speaker 1 (54:09):
Yeah, and so finally in twenty nineteen, Mad magazines stopped
publishing original content. They still put out issues once in
a while, and if you look at the cover of
the issue, you're like, oh, this is new, Like they're
parodying everything everywhere all at once. But or say, like,
what was another one? Oh, I can't remember right now,

(54:30):
but current scept Westworld, right, but that West World issue
was all about tech. So they would go back and
look through all the archives and find some good stuff
about tech, put it all together in a compilation issue,
then slap like a current thing on the cover. That's
what they're doing today. So there's still that's got to
be a pretty fun job going through the Mad archives

(54:51):
to pull together new issues compilation issues.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
I know a couple of guys who might be pretty
good at Yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:58):
But that's the state of Mad today. Hey, for sure,
and I wanted like seeing what happened to Mad or
where it is today really kind of drives home what
our colleague Jack O'Brien did for Cracked. Cracked had gone
the way of Mad easily in the nineties, like long before.
While Mad was still doing pretty good, Cracked had just

(55:19):
kind of limped off and was just a brand somebody
owned somewhere. And apparently Jack went to the owner, found
out who owned it, and went and said, hey, can
I try to revitalize Cracked on the internet, and whoever
owned it said do your best, and he did, Like
Cracked the website like just kind of blew up and

(55:41):
introduced the whole new generation of people that Cracked.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
Yeah, it was great. Hello, Jack listened to the daily
es Eyite guys, he's in Miles, been doing that show
for a while.

Speaker 1 (55:50):
Yeah, they've been at it daily for a long time.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
You've been a guest more than once, and I've never
been two times.

Speaker 1 (55:57):
I'm remember of the two timer club.

Speaker 2 (55:59):
That's right, I'm a no timer. Mad TV is something
we should mention that ran for fifteen seasons, believe it
or not. And I watched at first from ninety five
to two thousand and nine, and they had little nods.
Alfredy Newman was there early on for a few seasons

(56:19):
Spy versus Spy. They would do these little animated spy
versus Spy shorts. But it was it was a good
show man and they and if you look at their
roster of people like well, a lot of them went
on to be big, big names in comedy Ike Barnholds,
Deborah Wilson, Nicole Sullivan, of course, the great Alex Borstein,
Orlando Jones, Will Sasso. It's where Key and Peel met there. Yeah,

(56:42):
Andy Daly, Terran kill him, just like a sort of
a who's who of comedy people.

Speaker 1 (56:48):
Okay, great?

Speaker 2 (56:49):
Yeah, So did you never watch that?

Speaker 1 (56:51):
Really? I mean here or there?

Speaker 2 (56:52):
Oh it was good.

Speaker 1 (56:53):
It was not in my wheelhouse at the time. I
don't know what I was into, but it wasn't that.
It might have been like when I would have watched
it would have been during a time when Saray Night
Live was actually good, So I might have been watching that.
Or I'll bet I was watching Mystery Science Theater three
thousand instead. I'll bet that's what I was watching.

Speaker 2 (57:12):
Were you only allowed one comedy show?

Speaker 1 (57:15):
Okay? I had a lot of self discipline back then,
and I was only I only allowed myself one comedy show.

Speaker 2 (57:21):
No, that's good stuff.

Speaker 1 (57:22):
So you got anything else about Mad Magazine?

Speaker 2 (57:25):
No, I mean that's that's the briefest of overviews that
this is one that you know, we could go on
for days, but we'll keep it at an hour.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
Yeah, we'll keep it in an hour, and we'll always
keep Mad Magazine in our hearts.

Speaker 2 (57:36):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
Since Chuck said, that's right everybody, that means it's time
for listener mail.

Speaker 2 (57:42):
I'm gonna call this a Lady Trucker or Lady Trucker,
Lady Trucker one more time. Hey, guys, love the show
and listen to it at least three or four days
a week. I was listening to the Trucking episode on
my way to work. Really loved it. I work for
a three p L third part party logistics company, and

(58:02):
we are basically a company that rents truckers to move
shipments for our customers, basically where the middleman. The industry
is currently only made up of thirteen point seven percent women,
And there's a really cool organization called Women in Trucking.
You can find Women in Trucking dot org. Their mission
is to help bring more women into the industry and

(58:24):
help them overcome any obstacles in their paths. The company
I work for is designated a women in Trucking company,
with over half of our staff, including the owner, being women.
The women are so supportive of one another and make
sure to help each other out whenever possible. It's a
really great industry to be a part of, and groups
like this help to make that possible every day. I

(58:46):
hope there are some young women out there who were
listening to your episode and started thinking about joining this field.
Trucking used to be just for men, but it's for
us too. Keep up the great episodes. And that is
Amanda from Pittsburgh.

Speaker 1 (59:00):
Amanda, what a great email, and yeah, shining some light
and some quarters we weren't fully aware of in the
hopes of luring people to those new quarters.

Speaker 2 (59:10):
Yeah. So, if that peach your interest and you're a woman,
you can check out Women and Trucking dot org or
maybe read the article how female truckers are Changing the
industry that is on Dat dabt dot com and that
might further peak your interest, because hey, you can make
a hundred grand a.

Speaker 1 (59:24):
Year from my as well. Thanks again, Amanda, and thanks
to everybody who writes in on a regular basis or
even one time. We always appreciate your emails, even if
we don't get a chance to read them on the
air or respond. We here you and we appreciate you.
So never forget hashtag. Never forget that. If you want

(59:45):
to get in touch with this, like Amanda did and
like everybody else does, you can send us an email,
send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 2 (59:56):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcas guests my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.