This burning summer puts me in mind of what might have been Dave Berg’s most memorable Mad magazine gag, from his “The Lighter Side of . . .” strip. One of his classic midcentury stuffed-shirts becomes increasingly enraged in a heat wave when people keep greeting him with, “Hot enough for you?”
Then, sweltering still, he meets an attractive woman. But he can’t think of anything to say. “Hot enough for you?” he blurts out, his face in close-up shaking with Berg’s inimitable self-mortification.
The facade shatters, the staid character comes undone: That was a winning motif of Berg’s, like the strip in which a department store Santa loses it after one too many spoiled demands, screaming, face reddened with anger, “Ho, ho, ho!” at a terrified child in his lap.
Well, it might help if you could see that one in its entirety.
Car trips, grandparent stays, I would read every word of those mags, ending with the always-ingenious fold-in back covers by Al Jaffee, who we lost earlier this year at age 102. He also had a regular feature called “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” once including . . . guess which heat-related query. (Sorry to say, my memory and research are inadequate to the task of recalling the comeback.)
Mad was a big part of growing up in the 1970s, I submit. Not anymore, like so much else? That’s true.
We spent Thanksgiving 2021 at a rented farmhouse next to a brewery upstate in Penn Yan, meal outfitted by Wegmans, a gleaming, wondrously stocked supermarket the likes of which I hadn’t seen since I went to college in the Midwest. But it was on a trip for emergency provisions to the local, downmarket Tops that I spied Mad’s big Christmas special at the checkout, snatching it up and then talking it up to the kids, at the time 13, 16, and 18.
I ended up reading it myself.
The issues are nothing but reprints these days, but, what can I say? They hold up. So, I paused in the writing of this to place an order for a subscription. There is still a teen in the house, after all.
I’m sure she won’t mind when I steal a look.