Mad was great before it became Mad Magazine. The first 23 issues were insane stream-of-consciousness comic books. Anything you liked about the the tv show Poli

Mad was great before it became Mad Magazine. The first 23 issues were insane stream-of-consciousness comic books. Anything you liked about the the tv show Police Squad or the movies Airplane!, The Naked Gun, etc., was basically just early Mad. Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Basil Wolverton at his manic best. Legends. The stuff you're talking about, the pure gags, the Spy vs. Spy... some of it was great, most of it was mediocre, but the main thing it did was let them make every magazine a digest. You could have a mix of new content and old every month. I vividly remember buying a copy of Mad Magazine in the early 90's that included one of their moronic movie spoofs. You know, carnival-style big head caricatures, everybody just has a new name that's a poop joke? In 1992, that spoof was of the movie Love Story, released in 1970. Half the jokes in the Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions at that time were about key parties and leisure suits. That's why you perceived it as "old hippie humor from people who didn't understand social currents that arose since the 1960s, like video games and hip-hop... and didn't want to." They were just reprinting old content with a little new stuff sprinkled in.