Posted By Dan Greenfield on Sep 22, 2025 | 1 comment

The celebrated Mr. K pays birthday tribute to a comedy master…

By PAUL KUPPERBERG

Comedy has many fathers.

In my case, most of them were Jewish. Including my actual father, who was both funny and Jewish. I grew up in a 1960s household that listened to comedy albums by Jews like Allan Sherman, Myron Cohen, and Mickey Katz, and goyim including Bob Newhart, George Carlin, and Bill Cosby (that used to be OK, honest!) alike, and we always found extra laughs for the humor of landsman comedians who appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show like Alan King, Jackie Mason, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, Jan Murray, Joan Rivers, Totie Fields, Jean Carroll, Red Buttons, Sam Levenson, and others.

Jews could be Jew…ish on TV in those days. Myron Cohen set up his ethnic jokes with perfect English diction and lapsed into exaggerated burlesque Yiddish accents for the punchlines. Mel Brooks’ 2000 Year Old Man was all about the Jewish accent… imagine any of those bits done in some other accent: Swedish. Irish. Italian. Chinese. Not as funny! Mel’s partner Carl Reiner’s TV show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, was an exceedingly Jewish program with the ultimate shegetz in the leading role; only Morey Amsterdam’s character, who would be Bar Mitzvahed in the 1966 episode, “Buddy Sorrell: Man and Boy,” got to wear his Mogen David on his sleeve.

But Mad…!

Mad Magazine was never anything but unapologetically Jewish! Glatt Kosher for those of us who followed a strictly Orthodox diet of schmaltz—or chicken fat—based humor. These days, schmaltz refers to the cheesy, the sentimental or kitschy, but in the Mad dictionary, it was a style of humor, broad and loud, and few delivered the schmaltz with as much nondenominational hilarity as creator Harvey Kurtzman and his comedy cohort, Will Elder.

Elder’s work was manic. Born in the Bronx in 1921, Elder attended New York City’s High School of Music and Art with future Mad artists John Severin, Al Jaffee, Al Feldstein… and Harvey Kurtzman. Kurtzman and Elder went together like matzoh balls and chicken soup. Later working with Kurtzman, Elder became famous for his dense, zany visual style, packing panels with his version of “chicken fat”—background gags and absurd details that enriched stories and rewarded close reading. His wild visual gags complemented Kurtzman’s sharp satire and helped define Mad’s anarchic voice that would influence generations of comics and humorists. Elder also co-created the adult sexual satire “Little Annie Fanny” for Playboy.

By the time I came along, Mad had undergone its famous transformation from 10¢ four-color comic book to 25¢ black-and-white magazine (EC publisher Bill Gaines’ way of avoiding censorship under the newly formed Comics Code Authority). But as early as 1954, Ballantine Books began issuing a series of 25¢ mass market paperback reprints of the early comic book material, precious little tomes of comedy that stayed in print through the 1990s. In all, there would be 93 Mad reprint paperbacks (along with 129 books of new material by Don Martin, Sergio Aragonés, and others), but it was in those early Ballantine paperbacks that I first encountered the Kurtzman and Elder comic book stories from Mad #1-23, circa 1964.

I was nine years old.

I didn’t know this kind of funny existed. Up until then I thought Jerry Lewis and the Three Stooges were the height of humor. Kurtzman and Elder introduced me to satire, to the idea that there can be an idea behind the joke and got me ready for the Marx Brothers and the looming irreverence of the 1960s.

If you don’t believe how much the Kurtzman and Elder Mad comics influenced me, check out my early movie satires in Marvel’s Crazy Magazine from the late 1970s. Some may call it influence, others homage, but I’m pretty sure I was just ripping those guys off.

Here then, MY 13 FAVORITE WILL ELDER MAD STORIES (all written by Harvey Kurtzman):

—

Mad #2 (December 1952/January 1953). A parody of crime dramas, “The Mole” is a grotesque little man who digs his under the skin of the authorities and includes a daring escape involving a nose hair plucked from the Mole’s nostril. What wasn’t to love?

—

Mad #3 (January/February 1953). “How’s your mother, Ed?” The Kurtzman and Elder send up of the popular Dragnet radio program, starring Jack Webb as the monotone Sgt. Joe Friday, solving crimes between mundane conversations with his partner and suspects.

—

Mad #4 (March/April 1953). Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Lamont Shadowskeedeeboomboom does! Who knows what humor lurks in this crime pulp drama parody? Kurtzman and Elder do!

—

Mad #6 (August/September 1953). Not even giant apes with notoriously bad tempers got a pass!

—

Mad #8 (December 1953/January 1954). “I gave you Lifebuoy!” That’s a soap joke, son!

—

Mad #10 (April 1954). “Woman Wonder” does not stand up to the test of time. The, uh, punchline is that Steve Trevor beats the crap out of Woman Wonder in order to turn her into a docile, subservient wife. Ha ha? Sadly, it was created in 1954, and I first read it in 1966 or thereabouts when all I could see was its connection to my beloved comic books.

—

Mad #11 (May 1954). That Dragnet must have been popular, rating a second parody in a little more than a year! I lifted bits in their entirety from this for my Crazy Magazine satire of American Gigolo (“American Giggler” in #68). After that, I made myself stop.

—

Mad #12 (June 1954). My understanding is the publishers of Archie Comics were offended by “Starchie,” Kurtzman and Elder’s juvenile delinquent take on Archie and the gang, so… mission accomplished.

—

Mad #14 (August 1954). I loved their sendups of the comics! I could never look at the Mandrake the Magician strip with a straight face after reading this.

—

Mad #15 (September 1954). Another comics parody, this one beautifully rendered by Elder in the style of Gasoline Alley creator Frank King.

—

Mad #17 (November 1954). Mo’ comics about comics, this one paying homage to Bringing Up Father creator George McManus.

—

Mad #19 (January 1955). You think this would get Kurtzman and Elder cancelled today?

—

Mad #21 (March 1955). Elder yam what he yam. Brilliant!

—

MORE

— The MAD-NESS of WILL ELDER in 13 Hilarious Pages. Click here.

— PAUL KUPPERBERG: My 13 Favorite (Mostly Not MAD) AL JAFFEE Features. Click here.

—

PAUL KUPPERBERG was a Silver Age fan who grew up to become a Bronze Age comic book creator, writer of Superman, the Doom Patrol, and Green Lantern, creator of Arion Lord of Atlantis, Checkmate, and Takion, and slayer of Aquababy, Archie, and Vigilante. He is the Harvey and Eisner Award nominated writer of Archie Comics’ Life with Archie, and his YA novel Kevin was nominated for a GLAAD media award and won a Scribe Award from the IAMTW. Check out his new memoir, Panel by Panel: My Comic Book Life. 

Website: https://www.paulkupperberg.net/

Shop: https://www.paulkupperberg.net/shop-1