Al Jaffee, MAD Magazine’s award-winning cartoonist and ageless wise guy who delighted millions of kids with the sneaky fun of the fold-in and the snark of “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” has died. He was 102.
Jaffee died in Manhattan on Monday from multiple organ failure, his granddaughter, Fani Thomson, said.
He had retired at the age of 99.
Photo: AP
MAD, with its wry, sometimes pointed send-ups of politics and culture, was essential reading for teens and preteens during the baby-boom era and inspiration for countless future comedians.
Few of the magazine’s self-billed “Usual Gang of Idiots” contributed as much — and as dependably — as the impish, bearded cartoonist. For decades, virtually every issue featured new material by Jaffee. His collected fold-ins, taking on everyone in his unmistakably broad visual style from the Beatles to TMZ, was enough for a four-volume box set published in 2011.
Readers savored his fold-ins like dessert, turning to them on the inside back cover after looking through such other favorites as Don Martin’s “Spy. vs. Spy” and Dave Berg’s “The Lighter Side.”
The premise, originally a spoof of the old Sports Illustrated and Playboy magazine foldouts, was that you started with a full-page drawing and question on top, folded two designated points toward the middle and produced a new and surprising image, along with the answer.
The fold-in was supposed to be a onetime gag, tried out in 1964 when Jaffee satirized the biggest celebrity news of the time: Elizabeth Taylor dumping her husband, Eddie Fisher, in favor of Cleopatra costar Richard Burton. Jaffee first showed Taylor and Burton arm in arm on one side of the picture, and on the opposite side a young, handsome man being held back by a policeman.
Fold the picture in and Taylor and the young man are kissing.
The idea was so popular that MAD editor Al Feldstein wanted a follow-up. Jaffee devised a picture of 1964 Republican presidential contenders Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater that, when collapsed, became an image of Richard Nixon.
“That one really set the tone for what the cleverness of the fold-ins has to be,” Jaffee told the Boston Phoenix in 2010. “It couldn’t just be bringing someone from the left to kiss someone on the right.”
Jaffee was also known for “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” which delivered exactly what the title promised. A comic from 1980 showed a man on a fishing boat with a noticeably bent reel.
“Are you going to reel in the fish?” his wife asks.
“No,” he says, “I’m going to jump into the water and marry the gorgeous thing.”
Jaffee did not just satirize the culture; he helped change it. His parodies of advertisements included such future real-life products as automatic redialing for a telephone, a computer spell checker and graffiti-proof surfaces.
He also anticipated peelable stamps, multiblade razors and self-extinguishing cigarettes.
Jaffee’s admirers ranged from Charles M. Schulz of Peanuts fame and Far Side creator Gary Larson to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who marked Jaffee’s 85th birthday by featuring a fold-in cake on The Colbert Report. When Stewart and The Daily Show writers put together the best-selling America (The Book), they asked Jaffee to contribute a fold-in.
“When I was done, I called up the producer who’d contacted me, and I said: ‘I’ve finished the fold-in, where shall I send it?’ And he said — and this was a great compliment — ‘Oh, please Mr Jaffee, could you deliver it in person? The whole crew wants to meet you,’” he told the Boston Phoenix.
WAKE-UP CALL: Firms in the private sector were not taking basic precautions, despite the cyberthreats from China and Russia, a US cybersecurity official said A ninth US telecom firm has been confirmed to have been hacked as part of a sprawling Chinese espionage campaign that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and telephone conversations of an unknown number of Americans, a top White House official said on Friday. Officials from the administration of US President Joe Biden this month said that at least eight telecommunications companies, as well as dozens of nations, had been affected by the Chinese hacking blitz known as Salt Typhoon. US Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technologies Anne Neuberger on Friday told reporters that a ninth victim
Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners of war in the latest such swap that saw the release of hundreds of captives and was brokered with the help of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), officials said on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that 189 Ukrainian prisoners, including military personnel, border guards and national guards — along with two civilians — were freed. He thanked the UAE for helping negotiate the exchange. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that 150 Russian troops were freed from captivity as part of the exchange in which each side released 150 people. The reason for the discrepancy in numbers
A shark attack off Egypt’s Red Sea coast killed a tourist and injured another, authorities said on Sunday, with an Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs source identifying both as Italian nationals. “Two foreigners were attacked by a shark in the northern Marsa Alam area, which led to the injury of one and the death of the other,” the Egyptian Ministry of Environment said in a statement. A source at the Italian foreign ministry said that the man killed was a 48-year-old resident of Rome. The injured man was 69 years old. They were both taken to hospital in Port Ghalib, about 50km north
MISSING: Prosecutors urged the company to move workers out of poor living conditions to hotels, but residents said many workers had already left the town Brazil has stopped issuing temporary work visas for BYD, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Friday, in the wake of accusations that some workers at a site owned by the Chinese electric vehicle producer had been victims of human trafficking. The announcement came days after labor authorities said they found 163 Chinese workers who had been brought to Brazil irregularly in “slavery-like” conditions at the BYD factory construction site in the northeastern state of Bahia. The workers were employed by contractor Jinjiang Group, which has denied any wrongdoing. Later, the authorities also said the workers were victims of human trafficking,
RSS