The Little World of Harvey Kurtzman

A Seldom-Smiling, slow-talking fellow in his early thirties is the fountainhead whence gushes some of America's freshest and most frantic humor. His name is Harvey Kurtzman and he has been described by Roger Price thus: "He is five feet six inches tall and has a physique that is just barely noticeable and a long expression. In fact, Harvey looks like a beagle who is too polite to mention that someone is standing on his tail. This beagleishness has certain compensations – he is never ordered off the grass in Central Park and pretty girls stop on the street to scratch him behind the ears." He was the creator, editor, and chief writer of the satirical magazines Mad and Trump, and is now the creator, editor, and chief writer of the satirical magazine Humbug. He is the star of the first magnitude around which revolve the teeming. (continued on page 70) Kurtzman (continued from page 51) planets Will Elder, Jack Davis, Wallace Wood, Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth, cartoonists and/or writers all.

The brand of parody purveyed by Kurtzman and Co. is largely pictorial: it achieves its effects by means of deft draftsmanship that caricatures just about every facet of our society. An issue of Humbug might include potshots at American highways, tranquilizers, vacation time, popular movies and even The Great American Breakfast Food Box: "...No longer a container, but a medium of communication; in fact, a publication" which includes condensed classics, comic strips, a cut-out for a Real Shooting Cannon, and a Real Deed to One Mile of Texas ("one mile long by one sixteenth of an inch wide").

Kurtzman's crazy career began in the comic book field and many of his best satires have been of famous comic strips by other people, as he turned Prince Valiant into Prince Violent, with the Prince's "singing sword" rendering popular tunes of the day; Pogo into Gopo Gossum, with the familiar swamp characters complaining that the borders of thir panels "ain't even draw'd with a ruler"; Li'l Abner into L'l Ab'r, wherein the homespun hero of Al Capp is transfdormed into a greedy opportunist continually creating Shmoo-type animals that will sell big in toy stores. "The drawings," in the words of The Kingsport (Tennessee) Times-News' Bill Freehoff, "are almost exact duplicates of the originals, except that the women characters have been rendered even mor womanly." This is true even of Little Orphan Melvin (a girl, incidentally, despite the name), who answers the question "How come you call Daddy Peacebucks 'Daddy'?" by saying, "I've been around a long time and a girl doesn't get any younger, you know. But my public wants me as the child they always remember, with those ridiculous cotton stockings, that fantastic hair-do and my eyeballs turned up so's only the whites show." Divesting herself of these childish accoutrements, she stands revealed, in the last panel, as a burgeoning blonde beauty who demands, "So what's wrong with me calling him Daddy peacebucks?" Of this metamorphosis, Robert Warshow, writing in Commentary magazine, said, "I had some difficulty in explaining that joke to my 11-year-old son."

Any given issue of a Kurtzman magazine may be hard to spot on news-stands because Kurtzman makes sure his covers resemble everything else under the sun: a schoolboy's composition book, a picasso abstraction, even other magazines such as Time, Life and sobersided New Republic/The Nation-type publications. ("This special issue is desinged for people ashamed to read this in subways and like that! Cover design makes people think you are reading high-class intellectual stuff instead of miserable junk.")

Behind the intricate excellences of the artists' pens is Kurtzman, who writes most of the scripts and personally sketches detailed layouts and break-downs to guide the artists in doing the finishers. Ideas are fed into the hopper by all members of the group, however, when they periodically come in to Manhattan from Scarsdale, Long Island, Westchester, Philadelphia and other outlands for editorial meetings, of which the following extract is typical:

Kurtzmam: Actualy, there's not too much to talk about...

Jaffee: We came from 50 miles around to hear that.

Kurtzman: But there are a few spots here maybe you can help me out on. For the Christmas cover, I've been trying to think about something with Ebenezer Scrooge on it. And about the closest I got to an idea that satisfied me was – you know that old poster of Uncle Sam saying "I want you"?... I was just wondering how Scrooge would look pointing out from the cover like that and just saying "Humbug!" to the would out there.

Jaffee: And maybe we could put our title, Humbug, in a balloon...

Roth: Why don't we run a message from Manischewitz wine on the cover?

Everybody: For Christmas??!!

Roth: Sure, and we'd have What's-His-Name, Commander What's-His-Name...

Kurtzman: Whitehead?

Roth: Yeah, only we'd change his name; you know, he says, "Hello theah, this is Monty Schewitz... "Well, he looks like Santa Claus, that guy!

Jaffee: But it would be too long to say "Manischewervescence."

Kurtzmam (in desperation): I'm not getting any help here!!

Dorothy Parker, without knowing it, once described the Kurtzman brand of satire to a tee. Volunteering her personal description of what humor should be, she said, "There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind. There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it." This disregard is evident again and again in Kurtzman when he peppers his parodies with such favorite private words and phrases as potrzebie, furshlugginer, chicken fat, ecccccch and How's your mom, Ed? That he finds a bottomless well of personal yoks in the name Melvin is clear: in addition to the previously mentioned Little Orphan Melvin, he has been responsible for Smilin' Melvin and Melvin of the Apes. Of late, however, Melvin seems to have lost ground in favor of Seymour Mednick, a real-life neighbor of Arnold Roth's who did the photographic portrait of Kurtzman on the opening page of this feature and whose name is sprinkled with "magnificent disregard" through Humbug's pages.

The hard core of the Kurtzman crew are all roughly the same age and have known each other since boyhood. Kurtzman, Elder, Jaffee and Humbug Managing Editor Harry Chester all attended The High School of Music and Art in New York, where Kurtzman brightened the bulletin boards with crude mimeographed satire while Jaffee and Elder convulsed the lunchroom crowd with comic pantomime and an extensive repertoire of vocal sound effects.

About the time the Music and Art gang were graduating from high school (late Thirties, early Forties), pulp magazines took a nosedive and comic books suddenly burst upon the American scene with uparalleld vigor. Once a minor maret content to reprint old material from the Sunday comic sections of newspapers, they were now a repository for all the energy, talent and lack of talent that hitherto had poured into the dying pulps. To meet the pubilc's sudden demand fror comic books. publishers were hiring everybody they could get their hands on – including three kids named Kurtzman, Elder and Jaffee. Kurtzman eventually wound up writing scripts, drawing covers and generally masterminding jis own book, a Korean war story called Two-Fisted Tales, for EC (Educational Comics), which also published such titles as Tales from the Crypt and The vault of Horror. Will Eler began working for Kurtzman's book; Harrey chester left a job as a girdle salesman to help his old school chum, Harvey in a managerial capacity; a lanky southern boy named Jack Davis came shufffing in from Georgia with some wonderful drawings under his arm; and a Minnesotan, Wally Wood, with equally wonderful drawings under his arm, also found his way to Two-Fisted Tales.

The artists who worked for Kurtzman in those days recall with horror the relentless research that went into every panel. Kurtzman was a stickler for authenticity: he demanded that his artists work from photographs to duplicate army equipment and uniforms exactly: he sent them out on maneuvers (continued on page 85) Kurtzman (continued from page 70) to see how it felt and looked and smelled to ride in real tanks; he personally interviewed Korean veterans and took a trip to Washington just to talk with people at the pentagon. Once, he sent his asistant editor down in a submarine. Such attention to detail and accuracy was almost unknown in the comic book field, but it paid off in a superior product that influenced the whole trade.

This elaborate research and overwork on Kurtzman's part led to lowered resistance and an attack of yellow jaundice. While convalescing, he brooded over his unhappy lot. "I wanted to edit a magazine where I wouldn't have to go out and do all that leg work," says Kurtzman. "Something where I could go shut myself in a room somewhere and think up a story out of my head." Kurtzman's loyal but research-worn artists said amen to that and vowed to follow wherever he might lead.

Thus, in the spring of 1953, from yellow jaundice, was born Mad.

Mad (subtitled "Humor in a Jugular Vein") was a satirical comic book: it lampooned famous comic strips (Superduperman), radio and TV shows (Dragged Net), old movies (Ping Pong), new movies (The Barefoot Nocountessa), attacking them, all through the expressive medium of the comic strip panel. But these panels could not be assimilated buy the reader as swiftly as most, for they were loaded with dialog and packed with subsidiary background gags, therefore demanding of the reader an expense of time and effort, almost of study, if the full content of humor was to be extracted. As with other quality examples of the strip cartoonist's art (Krazy Kat, Barnaby, Pogo, Peanuts) the new magazine was first latched on to by a small, ardent following of enthusiasts and before long was "in'" hip, chic, the mainstay of fashionable conversation. "Mad," wrote the editor of Alumination, "is perhaps the first truly adult comic magazine." Pageant said: "In the comic book business, where 350 titles are published monthly and everybody follows trends, a very unusual comic book – Mad – has emerged as the leader of the latest trend. Mad is satirical and it's funny. And in a field normally dominated by horror and violence, this is such an unusual twist that Mad, in only 11 issues, has soared to a circulation of 750,000..."

In an article that first appeared in Commentary and was subsequently anthologized in a weighty tome called Mass Culture, Robert Warshow wrote that Mad was "devoted to a wild, undisciplined machine-gun attack on American popular culture... The tendency of the humor, in its insistent violence, is to reduce all culture to indiscriminate anarchy." He also said that Mad was "in a direct line of descent from the Marx Brothers... and from that comic orchestra which starts out playing 'serious' music and ends up with all te instruments smashed." Warshow confessed to having read Mad "with a kind of iritated pleasure."

Unexpected praise for the new Kurtzman creation came from London when E. W. Hildick wrote, in England's staid Journal of Education: "Intellingent people on this side of the Atlantic have grown used to receiving with a shudder news of any further development of mass communications in America. It is refreshing, therefore, to be able to describe such a venture – in the comic book field at that – without having to look up Roget on Rubbish." Hildick described his first experience with Mad: "I must admit that for the first few minutes it had me fooled. Here, I thought, as I flicked through page afdter page of thumps, thighs and thuggery, here was one of the worst. The fact that it was obviusly better drawn than most only deepened my depression, for when excellent draftsemn stoop to – and that's about as far as I got in this glum train of thought. I'd begun to follow one of the stories more closely and in doing so had found that it was all a glorious hoax... peppered with satir and wrapped in parody." Superman and such Superman types as Captain Marvel and Batman were a favorite target for the early Mad. Hildick cited sociologist George H. Pumpherey's description of such types ("small heads with receding foreheads and enormously developed muscular bodies and limbs") and then told his readers what happened to these musclebound heroes in the hands of Kurtzman and his friends: "They run true to type. Their muscles are enormously developed, their heads are small. But – and this is where Mad's artists excel – their foreheads recede just that little bit too much, their mouths stretch that extra oafish millimetre and there is about their expression, at times, the vague but unmistakable pout of the pansy. After a dozen fames of this it is not inconceivable that even a staunch Superman-worshiper should become a trifle uneasy. ('This looks like the goods, but --') And if he should smile when he notices no Superduperman's chest an embroidered For rent or 100% wool or think! instead of the usual flamboyant emblem, then the essentially humorless world of Superman will have begun to totter."

Other commentators on the new phenomenon included Stan Freberg ("...brilliant lampoonery... an example of pure and honest satire...") and Roger Price ("...I like Mad ... It's the first successful humor magazine to be started in this country since The New Yorker...It has style.").

Canny paperback tycoon Ian Ballantine saw the merit of Mad early in the game and obtained permission to put out a series of still-popular 35¢ colections of Kurtzmania entitled The Mad Reader, Mad Strikes Back, Inside Mad and Utterly Mad.

Naturally, newsstands son became glutted with Mad imitations dubbed Wild, Whack, Flip, Nuts, Riot, Madhouse, Bughouse, Crazy Man Crazy, Get Lost, Lunatickle and Eh! One imitation, Panic, was put on the market by the pubnlisher of Mad, Though perhaps the deftest of the imitations, since it followed the Mad format exactly and used many Mad artists, it never achieved Mad's popularity.

Kurtzman was destined for bigger things than the comic book medium, which he soon began to find restrictive. He recived an attractive offer from Pageant to come in as assistant to the editor-in-chief and was considering it when Mad's publisher, William Gaines, made him an even more attractive counteroffer – a carte blanche go-ahead on a pet Kurtzman daydream: the up-grading of Mad from a comic book to an all-round satire magazine that would make use of written text, photographs and other special feature material in addeition to the comic strip technique. This new Mad allowed Kurtzman and his cronies to stretch their wings and soar into areas of humor hitherto denied them.

It was a short-lived flight, however, for when the horror comics in the EC line fell under the bombardment of the censors, EC's distributor went bankrupt and, in the ensuing financial upheaval the Kurtzmam Consort was soon out on its own, looking for another publisher.

The editors of Playboy had long been fans of Mad and it was a natural course of events, then, when HMH Publishing Company furnished the nut for Kurtzman to start afresh. A quarter of a million Playboy dollars were invested in Trump, a slic, expensivcely produced 50¢ magazine with full color distributed lavishly throughtout. Devotees of satire will cherish forever the memory of some of Trump's handsome, hilarious pages: the startlingly exact duplicate of a Breck shampoo ad, with Al Capp's Hairless Joe in place of the perennial wet-eyed blonde; the spread of pseudo pocketbook covers, lampooning the paperback practice of promising sensational thrills on the covers of innocent classics ("Robinson Crusoe, A Strange Tale of Lonely Men"); and the inspired parody of Life's "Epic of Man" series. This last was a sumptuous gatefold by will Elder prefaced by these remarks; "Who is not familiar with the epic of this type which has appeared as a series in another popular magazine?... We'd been looking at all these beautiful artists' drawings of how cavemen looked a million years ago and we got to thinking – what kind of pictures will the artists a million years from now be drawing of us?" The answer appeared in loving detail on the full-color, three-page foldout that followed. A reconstructed "typical village" of the time of "Unitedstatesolithic Man" had been reconstructed all wrong by the anthropologists of a million years hence: a "typical hut" was pieced together from a subway entrance ("These huts, it seems, were connected by metal-tracked underground tunnels, probably for mutual protection. Inscription on hut indicates town was called 'Downtown.'"); men hung fish on "drying racks: (TV antennae), fashioned "boat with ingenious valve device for letting water in" (a bathtub), worshiped "oldd statue found in great numbers everywhere" (a fire hydrant) and drank out of bowls "inscribed with tribal name" (Chevrolet hubcaps).

The publisher of Playboy soon discovered, however (as did last year's TV sponsors of a Caesar named Sid), that the fans of satire, thought fervent, are few: there are not enough of them to support a lush, costly publications devoted exclusively to satire (George S. Kaufman once observed, "Satire is what closes on Saturday night."). Trump was discontinued and Kurtzman,bloody but unbowed, drew his pals around him once again to plan still another magazine. Money was chipped in by all concerned, and Playboy contributed to the new venture with office space and material prepared for, but not used in, Trump. The new magazine, produced at low cost on inexpensive paper and faintly resembling the English punch, was called Humbug. in the kickoff issue, Kurtzman wrote:

"Here we go again! We don't believe in standing still and letting the grass grow under our feet! Oh no! We're going to spring into action! We're going to hustle on down to that Unemployment Insurance office for money. After that, we're going to hustle back to work on our latest magazine, Humbug. Humbug will be a crusading magazine. We will tackle important national issues such as Should the Mayflower Replica Be Allowed to Land in the U.S., and Fluoridaton – the Red Conspiracy. Humbug will be a responsible magazine. We won't write for morons. We won't do anything just to get laughs. We won't be dirty. we wont't be grotesque. We won't be in bad taste. We won't sell any magazines."

This is "magnificent disregard" with a vengeance! But friends and fans (they include Ian Ballantine, who will bring out a paperback called The Humbug Digest any day now) have faith in Kurtzman. They know that, althought the course of true satire has never run smooth, there will always be a staunch bunch of zany zealots who will run out and buy, read, roar over and recommend to all who will hear them the unique humor of the Kurtzman crew – whether it's labeled Mad, Trump, Humbug or Potrzebie.

Kurtzman

Elder by Elder

Davis by Davis

Lampooning a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover, Will Elder depicts "A Visit to Grandma's," with the old folks beaming as the kids feed small animals to a flesh-eating plant. Surrounding the Post parody are self-caricatures of key Kurtzman cartoonists.

Jaffee by Jaffee

Roth by Roth

Wood by Wood

Micky rodent, by apocryphal cartoonist "Walt Dizzy," reproduced the familiar technique of the original with deft exactitude.

Outer-space heroes and their bare-midriffed girlfriends were satirized by Kurtzman in an adventure strip called Flesh Garden.

The "growing" talent of one beloved cartoon character was joshed thus when "Skizziks" caught up, sizewise, with his sweetheart.

The discrepancy between movies and their ads tickled the Kurtzman fancy with the incisive result above.

Credulity was strained in a well-known manner via this ribbing of Ripley.

If a magazine wants to show you how to boil water, here's how they do it.

We'd like to see for a change one of those faultless photographs of faultless dishes, tablewares and backgrounds with maybe one fault

And then we would like to see one of those maddening, mouthwatering meals which are always cooked to absolute perfection, cooked very imperfectly.

We'd like to see for another change one of those faultless photographs of dishes, tableware and backgrounds using real dishes and real tableware.

As for the type photograph where the table is set so artistically, we'd like to see it set like breakfast in the kitchen back home

Young Boss: Why, Miss Chester! You're ... Beautiful!

Father: I lost my job ... and somebody stole my bike.

Promoter: Handy wicha mitts, eh kid! Wanta fight for dough?

Everybody: Blublle glubble

From a spread of "Movie Scenes You Must Have Seen," drawn by Arnold Roth, come these examples of tried and true cinematic situations.

In "back-to-school" issue, Kurtzman ran ad parodies. An "Institue of Dietics" taught planning of "popular large-quantity meals with emphasis on pizza, popsicles, etc." and "fee-splitting with physicians." Below, manufacturers' claim that planned obsolescence is necessary to the prosperity of our economy is spoofed.

Mathstick soaked in fireproofing liquid goes out quickly.

Shoelace is woven with weak spot integrated into design, which does not arouse suspicion.

Actually KL-22 is a chemical that causes the bar to evaporate when not in use. Pencil has lead only at the very tip and wears out wonderfully fast.

As a part of lampoon, Kurtzman "mounted a movie camera onto a gun" to give his readers "a real gun's-eye view." Below the gun-camera in action and a "real gun's eye-view" of the hunter recorded "on 6,733 feet of film before he turned camera around." At right, two further examples of gun-camera in action.

As a part of lampoon, Kurtzman "mounted a movie camera onto a gun" to give his readers "a real gun's-eye view." Below, the gun-camera in action and a "real gun's-eye-view" of the hunter recorded "on 6,773 feet of film before he turned camera round." At right, two further examples of gun-camera in action.

The American ad has been a continuing source of satire for Kurtzman. Few have escaped his devastating brand of mockery. The above ad for "Canada Club" looks perfectly on the level to the casual observer, is revealed as a parody only upon closer examination and reading.

Other Kurtzman ad take-offs include a devastating "Beer Belongs—Enjoy It!" page with beer being enjoyed by Dad, Mom, grandparents, the kids, the dog, the baby, the parrot and the goldfish in their beer-filled bowl; and an ad for "Jell-y" featuring an unhappy ape saying "When I'm eating Jell-y I wish I were a human being, because apes don't eat Jell-y, 'specially with spoons. Apes eat joints of bamboo shoot or insects. Jell-y!...Yarrgh!" A burlesque of Band-Aid Plastic Stips claimed, "No other bandage sticks to dry eggs so well."

Other Kurtzman ad take-offs include a devastating "Beer Belongs—Enjoy It!" page with beer being enjoyed by Dad, Mom, grandparents, the kids, the dog, the baby, the parrot and the goldfish in their beer-filled bowl; and an add for "Jell-y" featuring an unhappy ape saying, "When I'm eating Jell-y I wish I were a human being, because apes don't eat Jell-y, 'specially with spoons. Apes eat joints of bamboo shoot or insects. Jell-y!...Yarrgh!" A burlesque of Band-Aid Plastic Strips claimed, "No other bandage sticks to dry eggs so well."

So faithfully do Kurtzmann's artists duplicate the appearance of the original adds that when he accepts actual advertising, he is forced to accompany it with prominent notices reading: "OK now, all kidding aside, these are real advertisemtns!!!"

So faithfully do Kurtzman's artists duplicate the appearance of the original ads that when he accepts actual advertising, he is forced to accompany it with prominent notices reading: "OK now, all kidding aside, these are real advertisements!!!"