Few entities have been as metal as Mad Magazine, which started with the notion that most people are insane and in denial, which makes for absurd comedy as humanity collides with reality. Although this came about seventeen years before Black Sabbath, it shared a sensibility.

Most likely, the root of Mad was Shakespeare or maybe Sophocles, because its comedy and tragedy are intertwined, or rather, it sees humanity as a comedic tragedy because when denial and reality collide, reality wins ever time, but only eventually, so the illusion has a “pocket” in which like Communism or Baby On Board signs, it wins by popularity alone.

This documentary brings you face-to-face with the personalities that shaped Mad, basically a bunch of culturally-Presbyterian New York Jews with the occasional Anglo, so you can see Al Jaffee, Mort Drucker, Dave Berg, and Don Martin in their native habitat with a “culture of critique” plus hard American pioneer realist take on the incipient Crowdism in humanity.

It takes you on the arc of this magazine from its birth out of the ruins of EC Comics, the censorship of the 1950s, its peak in counterculture in the 1960s, its increasing irrelevance as it swung Left in the 1980s, and finally, corporate takeover and its closing in the 2000s. However, the real story here is how it viewed its host species and the relentless omnidirectional mockery and implicit hard realism of its early years.

Tags: documentary, film, mad magazine