418: Culture Clash 1

Mad, June 1974
“Bussing In Other Areas for the Purpose of Social Integration”
Writer: Arnie Kogen
Art: George Woodbridge

This cartoon rather belatedly plays on the aftermath of the culture clash of late 1960s / early 1970s America. Bussing was the policy of desegregation in education where black students would be transferred to more upscale usually white schools. So here we get three more culture clashes which would make a lot more topical sense if they had been printed in 1971. Instead, three years later, it’s less like satire and more like nostalgia. We get Hippies, underground newspapers, and Fire island homosexuals on the one side of the gap. On the other side Pat Boone (an Ultra-WASP singer), marines, and hard hats (right wing workers who attacked anti-war protestors). The joke being that in each instance that integration is impossible. If the top cartoon shows an actual path of violence being cleared through all those mucky, lazy hippies, then it’s hard to see how the joke in the bottom panel isn’t “Tee-hee, look the fairies are also going to get a bashing”. Like the gay men in Jack Chick’s “The Gay Blade” , these are some surprisingly old, ugly and balding gay men, to add insult to injury.

393: Anita Bryant 9 - Mad Magazine 2

“Mad Magazine” January 1978
“He’s Company”
Writer: Arnie Kogen
Artist: Angelo Torres

In many respects, this is a fairly accurate parody of the intentions and shortcomings of the sitcom “Three’s Company”, with its reliance on titillation, mild innuendo, and some gay jokes. It was an American adaptation of the popular UK sitcom “Man About the House”. “Man About the House” was created and written by Johnnie Mortimer (not the writer of Rumpole) and Brian Cooke and ran from 1973 to 1976 for six series, a cheeky if largely harmless turn on the new domestic arrangements thrown up by the sexual revolution

The premise established in the first episode is that two attractive young female flatmates wake up to find a strange man asleep in their bath the morning after the farewell party for their departed flatmate, Since he is a chef and the two girls get along with him they invite him to become their new roommate. To preempt any objections about mixed-se living arrangements from their landlords they them that he is gay, or in the slightly more rough-and-ready argot of the 1970s “a poof”.

That he spends most of the first episode in a frilly lady’s bathrobe helps cement this impression. And note the discomfort that the landlord has around him.

The poof jokes barely get started in the series before the conceit of Jack being gay around his landlords gets dropped, so O’Sullivan never does anything to play up a gay performance. If that’s what you want though, why not dig up a copy of 1974’s appalling sex comedy “Can You Keep It Up For a Week?”(I haven’t seen it, but let’s be honest, they’re all appalling) in which O’Sullivan has a cameo as a blatantly camp photographer with a sailor boyfriend.

“Three's Company” was an American adaptation that first appeared on March 15, 1977. It is almost a direct copy of “Man About the House”, and proved very popular, running for about eight years, and subsequently in almost permanent syndication during the 80s when I lived in America. Since the US version is set in California, there was more of an emphasis on the attractive singles lifestyle of the mid/late 70s, with the show notable for its busty blonde character played by Suzanne Somers. For the writers of “Mad” the show is an exercise in mid T&A, leering and salacious

One of the recurring shticks is the American series is the disapproving landlord subjecting the young male lodger to a succession of mild gay mockeries such as tinkerbell, fairy, etc. However it it’s never quite the concentrated barrage that crops up in this parody. Here it may be intended as excess to satirise this recurring aspect of the show, but it also rather smacks of the writer’s opportunity to unload all these sort of gags in print. Even if you disregard the parody of the landlord character, this whole parody is larded with rather plonking gay puns from the very beginning.

Since the whole parody attacks the programme on the grounds of morals and standards, one can’t help feel when Anita Bryant is brought in as an censorious figure that the piece is incidentally endorsing her opinions

392: Anita Bryant 8 - Mad Magazine 1

While from the hindsight of 35 years we can note approvingly all the stand-ups, columnists, talk-show hosts, comedians and sitcoms that criticise Anita Bryant, it can’t be overlooked that Bryant’s short-term goals were successful in overturning the ordinance and that many people supported her campaign and attitudes toward homosexuals. Where then are the humourists sympathetic to Bryant?

Where are they? They’re writing for “Mad Magazine”, that’s where they are. In 1971 “National Lampoon” had run an incisive parody of the older magazine criticising “Mad Magazine” as stale, clichéd and the prisoner of its own limited viewpoint. Seven years later and it had not got any better. Many of the writers and artists had been at the magazine since the mid-50s, and now they had become men in their mid-50s with the attitudes to prove it. Film, TV, and advertising spoofs and gags were still okay. Stuff about the petty banalities of daily life, and clichés about teenage life were still just about tolerable. But anything touching current youth culture or anything that was actually new and you could easily expect the same “Get off my lawn, kids” attitude from your aging uncle. The staff had set opinions on what constituted social hypocrisy and they were going to stick to it.

If “National Lampoon”’s pieces about homosexuality in the late 70s can be harsh at least they were informed about the issues of homosexuality and the lifestyles of modern homosexuals. “Mad” wanted to remain ignorant about homosexuals and didn’t wanted to be troubled by them either.

“National Lampoon”’s parody had included a brief piece about the social topics the magazine was largely ignoring back then. Ironically, this cartoon proves to be a fairly accurate prediction of “Mad”’s portrayal of homosexuals throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s.

“National Lampoon”, October 1971

“Mad” July 1978
Writer: Tom Koch
Artist: Jack Davis

It’s 1978, but Davis’s illustration of demonstrating homosexuals, their hats, their jerkins and jewelry would be more suitable to 1971 or 1972 – even by the mid-70s it’s rather dated.

“Mad” July 1978
“Mad’s College Concert Comic of the Year”
Writer: Lou Silverstone
Artist: George Woodbridge

This piece is far more telling. It’s a wholly clueless attack on George Carlin, trying to paint him as a hypocrite and also attacking his audiences as equally hypocritical. Carlin’s 1974 routine on homosexuality is quite positive and thoughtful. Here in this strip though the underlying attitude is that it’s impossible that anybody could be pro-homosexuality, everyone really agrees Bryant, and they’re all just a load of phonies.

383: Star Wars 2

"Star Roars"

Mad Magazine, January 1978

Writers: Larry Siegel and Dick De Bartolo

So if C3PO is a camp seeming robot, how do we ramp that up for parody? Well, draw him with one hand resting on his hip and the other thrown out limp-wristed. Will that do? Let’s have him swish it up like an interior designer too. Although quoting lyrics from Kismet (“Take my hand / I’m a stranger in paradise”) , a musical that was then 25 years old, probably has more to do with the age of the staff at Mad, then anything you might expect even from the most musicals-obsessed gay cliché. And then just in case anyone, anyone at all, might be oblivious to the point this parody is making, they come out and say C3PO is a “fag robot”. That’s the punchline for this little bit.

259 - American Unisex 3: Mad Magazine

Mad, October 1973
“Standards Rewritten for the Liberated Woman”, by Frank Jacobs

And this is the standard “Mad” effort, where I once again decry “Mad” in the ‘70s as a bunch of clapped-out, senescent farts who are so behind the times it’s the only thing funny about them. This effort being only 6-7 years late. Hell, even “Monty Python’s” – “I’ve heard of unisex, but I've never had it” dates from 1969. Although this goes beyond unisex, or even effeminacy, to suggest more of transvestism, since the female figure is also throwing away bras and undergarments. So quite what the writers of “Mad” think they’re parodying is another matter. One or two similar extravagant gay figures crop up in American sitcoms in the mid-‘70s, but usually American sitcoms of the period are too busy trying to present homosexuals as just like everyone else to go after this stereotype from a Jack chick cartoon
http://ukjarry.blogspot.com/2009/02/224-jack-chick-gay-blade.html
- and even that was a couple of years earlier.

235: Gay ballet dancer

from “Appropriate Comic Strip Sound Effects” in Mad July 1969

Pretty much the same joke as Chic Jacob’s http://ukjarry.blogspot.com/2008/02/86-chic-jacob.html but with a haughty ballet dancer instead. About as subtle as a brick to the face.

181: Gay Baseball

by Arnold Roth, from “Keep Your Hands Off My Machismo” in Punch” 19 March 1975

from “Mad” October 1978

America’s sports are integral to America’s ideas and expression of its masculinity. Unlike most European sports, baseball and American football are about sheer grunty muscle mass.
American football consists of massive specimens of meaty neanderthalism crashing into each other for short periods of time, with game-play interrupted by lengthy intervals allowing for the alternating distractions of jiggly pom-pom girls or beer adverts.
Baseball is all about the necessary resources of intense upper body strength to facilitate hitting a ball with a stick.
If your average Ameri-gay is often bigger than his Euro-poove counterpart then it is because the body-ideal exemplified by their national sports are so different. Ideals of attractiveness are often moulded during adolescence, and just compare the difference in builds between an athletic American high-schooler and his continental equal.
It doesn’t necessarily have all that much to do with what’s above, but it’s an observation from last spring when I was in Los Angeles, and I was struck by how positively anorexic I seemed in comparison to everyone else.

168: Gay Sports - Anxiety and Embarrassment

Almost all the cartoons I shall be dredging up over the next couple of days, when they’re not about inappropriate sexual attraction, are instead demonstrating how gay men are unfit to play sports and therefore silly and ridiculous. Here are a couple of cartoons where heterosexual discomfort is the engine of the joke.

in “Mad Magazine” January 1973

A little gay panic. Vast tracts have been written and rewritten about homophobia and homosociality in sports, about how you can only have the intense heterosexual affection demonstrated in team sports through the explicit disavowal of any homosexual feeling – blah blah blah, blah bla-bla-blah. I’m not even going to attempt to add to any of that.
Here, given “Mad Magazine”’s target teenage audience, it just comes down to anxiety about how, when you’re least expecting it, normal manly behaviour suddenly turns into an unexpected sexual encounter. On several levels this is a refusal to play by the acknowledged rules.
I didn’t notice it immediately, and then only after I’d looked at this several times, but the gay player not only has a limp wrist but there also appear to be some lacy frills poking out of the bottom of his shorts. It is a fairly good thunderstruck expression on the first chap though.


by Richard Guindon, “Minneapolis Tribune”, 1977

In this one it’s about feeling the shame of being beaten by gay players, when in the natural scheme of things one might expect to be superior to a gay team.
And has there ever been an article with a gay team that hasn’t included the question, “How do the other teams feel being beaten by a gay team?” Well done, Mr Guindon for being decades ahead of the curve there. And I do often admire Richard Guindon’s cartoons – particularly one from the late 70s/early 80s which is spot on in its prediction of the horror of a world where everyone has a mobile phone.

166 - Gay Summer Camp

Summer camp is a traditionally outdoorsy and active, rough and tumble boysy American rite of passage. And in contrast we all know that young gay boys are such delicate and sensitive hothouse flowers, to be forever constitutionally disqualified from participating in the free and easy lifestyle that is normal male bonding. So basically here we have three different variations on the same joke – what would a gay summer camp be like?

From “Mad Magazine” June 1971

Here it’s not just that little gays boys are effeminate, but they actually want to be women. Drag, hair styling, interior decoration – well fair enough. They even give us flowers around the border. But Mah-jongg? Really! Who knew gay boys wanted to be Jewish widows? Although I did enjoy “Golden Girls”.


from “National Lampoon” May 1977

Probably the best, and most thorough of the three. This isn’t a camp like the other two, where artistic youngsters have their sissy proclivities indulged and developed. No, the joke here is that this summer camp programme is intended to enable its young campers to participate fully in the experience of being that slightly bullied, awkward, excluded and un-athletic proto-homo.


from “National Lampoon” June 1979

Here’s it’s all about late ‘70s sensitivity development. Hell, I wouldn’t mind having gone to one like this. Although I did do one summer at Johns Hopkins nerd camp, which is about as near an approximation as one could wish.

Note also the first and last make reference to Fire Island. To which we did once go on holiday for one day when I was about thirteen, and where we all utterly failed to notice anything.

163: Gay Ad - Clorox parody

“A Mad Look at the Clorox Commercial”
from “Mad Magazine” December 1978

Again, a pastiche of a popular ad strategy. Again, the momsers at “Mad Magazine” think a homosexual is a transvestite. Note the wrist is so limp as to be almost atrophied. “Divine. . . silly . . .yummy”? . . .ho-hum. The face looks awfully familiar, from some camp American supporting actor, but I know it’s not Edward Everett Horton. Or it may be the guy from the “Don’t squeeze the Charmin” ads.

156: Incredible Hulk parody

from “Mad Magazine” January 1979
written by Lou Silverstone, drawn by Angelo Torres

Here we have some pertinent excerpts from a parody of “The Incredible Hulk” TV series. The mild-mannered nebbishy David Banner is the necessary alter-ego of the non-stop rage machine that is The Hulk. “Mad” takes this one step further by running a series of gags making him so un-masculine as to appear possibly gay. However their idea of gay (and this is by the late 70s mind you) is an uninspired representation of a transvestite in an old lady’s clothes. By this time it really can’t be denied the “Mad” crew of writers were a rather middle-aged bunch of old farts.
This strip also highlights the strange belief American have that “Bruce” is an essentially gay name. The TV producers had indeed changed the TV version’s name from “Bruce” to “David”, possibly because of homosexual overtones. Here though, they undercut this assumption with the gag about the athlete Bruce Jenner.

127: Puns 1

We’re seen cartoonist literalise some phrase for comic effect, i.e “Roaring Poof”
A similar technique is, when some word of longstanding use acquires a new trendy or slangy meaning, to illustrate old phrases in this new light. So humorists and comics exhume quotes and sayings featuring the word “gay” but now give it an obvious homosexual twist or flourish. What follow all date from the 70s, when the public and the humorists who serve it had distinct ideas as to what distinguished this newly emergent and proud socio-sexual demographic. Who knows, 30-40 or so years ago this may have seemed strikingly novel, although today it seems rather laboured. Even as a boy in the early ‘80s, Larry Grayson’s catchphrase of “What a gay day!” seemed to be more of a Pavlov’s bell rung for the more lumpen propulace than anything actually entertaining.

from “Photopoetry” in “Mad” June 1972

- Edward McLachlan in “Private Eye” 13 July 1973

The Gay Gordons is a Scottish highland dance, alluding to the Gordon Highlanders regiment. So here it’s male couples with effeminate eyelashes, making pursed lipsticked pouts at each other, turning vigorous highland dancing into something more intimate and sissified. “Oh God! Not again!” could be a reaction to homosexuality, or that these Gay Gordons appear again and again. If you like, and given McLachlan’s style of humour, there could even be a suggestion that they’re all gay and they’re all called Gordon.

- Nick Baker in “Private Eye” 24 January 1975

Since “South Park”, a gay dog probably now means to most people an actual homosexual dog. But it did used to have the meaning of being “a dashing young blade about town”. Here, in the ‘70s, when Mr Humphries is the foremost gay representation, we get a beribboned and lipsticked dog with over-styled hair, sauntering on its hindquarters so it can hold one paw on its hip and the other outstretched rather limply, whilst swinging a handbag.

And if only to prove that this appropriation of the “Gay Dog” phrase is not just a one-off, here’s a little bit of dialogue from the original broadcast of “The Goodies” 1971 episode “Kitten Kong”, excised from the 1972 Montreaux Award-winning version. The Goodies have become pet sitters (transcript from http://www.goodiesruleok.com/articles.php?id=16 )

As Graeme opens the door to take the kitten out for his exercise, there is a loud barking and he slams the door shut again.
"What's that?" he gibbers, "What's that monster on the landing?"
"That's a Great Dane," says Tim.
"It's as big as a horse!" protests Graeme, adding "I'm not going out there - it looks fierce."
"Well it isn't," Tim assures him, "In fact that's its problem. It's not terribly butch."
"Isn't it?" asks Graeme.
"No," confirms Tim, "As a matter of fact it's ..."; he whispers in Graeme's ear.
"It's not is it?" asks an amazed Graeme.
"As a row of pink tents," assures Tim.
"You mean a Great Dane that's ..." says Graeme
Tim completes the sentence, "A bit of a gay dog!"
"Will you get off ..." says Graeme.

- “Kitten Kong”, 12 November 1971

118: Al Jaffee – Fold-In

in “Mad” April, 1974

And here we have one of the most famous and durable features from “Mad” – a fold-in by Al Jaffee. How you are going to make it work is up to you: if you’re bold and strong enough you could try folding your computer screen, or you could print it out and fold it, or you could cut and past the left and right sections together, or you could use a sheet of paper to blank out the middle section on the screen, or (oh SHUT up!)

A nifty visual gag. Female gestures become effeminate gay gestures, and it’s worth remembering that the hideousness of 70s styles (Cuban heels and migraine-inducing clashes of colour and patterns) can make it hard to identify an actual homosexual.

As part of the public discussion about a place for homosexuality in a modern society, given various social and ecological fears about over-population, arguments were often made that homosexuality’s non-reproductive aspect was actually a contribution to the public good. Gore Vidal used to make this point quite a bit.

84: Dave Berg - Fashion

Dave Berg in “Mad” October 1968

There are a moderate amount of gags at the end of the 60s about fashion and gender – deriving either from the trend for unisex clothing or the trend for men to have long hair. Gags about hair are usually some sort of variant on a spectator asking how do you tell the boys from the girls. Gags about unisex clothing usually come down to some sort of argument/agreement as to who wears what which day. These gags usually express the older generation’s slight anxiety about the disintegration of the firm rules about performance of sexual roles. What they usually never even faintly touch is even the slightest hint of fagginess. Boys may look more like girls, but its not because they’re actually effeminate or sexually desire other men. Berg’s older beatnik/rebel in the first the three panels offers reasons for his expression of self through fashion, however the reveal in the final panel of the cinched waist, the hands on hips, the wrist bangles, the earring and the suddenly more stylised twirled moustache gives him more the air of a hairdresser than a campus hippy.

80: Gays in the Military 1993 - Mad Magazine 2

From “Mad” September 1993

A juvenile reference (toys), but surprisingly bold and effective. Although we all know that Action Man is packing nothing in his pants, so all the two can do is hold hands.

79: Gays in the Military 1993 - Mad Magazine

from “A Mad Look at the Real Clinton Coalition” in “Mad” July 1993

Unsurprisingly “Mad” aims for 9 year olds of all ages.

32 - Gay Lib - Mad Magazine

from “Greeting Cards for the Sexual Revolution” in “Mad”, September 1971

"Pansy Yokum" is a character from the cartoon strip "Lil Abner". Barely the level of a gag from "laugh-In", but about the level of cultural reference for the teenage reading base of "Mad".

This prompted a letter from Glenn M Larson of the Homosexual Information Service, in which he asked
“If you sincerely feel that Gay people are less oppressed, less in need of liberation than the socially acceptable minorities, perhaps you should consider this: When was the last time you heard of someone facing arrest and conviction as a ‘practicing Indian or Black’…?”

Which begs the question as to why a grown man was reading what had become an only so-so humorous magazine for adolescents? But at least they did print his letter. In the late '70s when barely an issue went by without some "fag" joke, and even a few approving refernces to Anita Bryant, "Mad" didn't allow any room for comment.

30 - Gay Lib - Mad Magazine

in "Mad Magazine", January 1969

When I first saw this, I got my dates mixed up and thought this appeared about 6 months after Stonewall. But no; in fact, it dates from 6 months before Stonewall, which means there was already a general sense of gay presence existing in American minds. Homosexuality had already become a fixture of the arts, to the extent that Stanley Kauffman could write his notorious "Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises" in the ‘New York Times’ (23 Jan 1966) accusing gays of writing poisonous screeds about contemporary America. But this photo-shoot means enough people already thought they knew what a homosexual was, for it to be worth the effort of a gag in a mass media magazine like “Mad”.

Stonewall had two effects: one is that it is a high-water mark in gay visibility. Only a few moths later ‘Time’ magazine would go into millions of homes with the October 31 issue devoted to the “Homosexual in America”.

At the same time, Stonewall connected homosexuality to the new radical fight for civil rights in 60s America. For a contemporary report on the immediate struggle for Gay liberation to find some place in the general, rather macho, revolutionary melee of the time, this May/June 1970 issue of ‘The Realist” is very interesting.

As to why the two men are in dresses? It’s a blend of anxiety, confusion and ignorance. People don’t entirely know what a homosexual is or does. Since it’s a man who wants to be with men, then it must be a womanly man, or a man who wants to be a woman. Therefore a man who wants to be a woman would, of course, wear women’s clothes. Secondly, some gay man do dress up in drag, so that confuses the issue. (If some do it, then all must do it, yes?) Besides, transvestism is as big a perversion and a crime in those days, that its unsettling aspect will mean you don’t have to think through the logical consequences: A tranny is a pervert is a fag. Finally, through its unnaturalness, a man in a dress is a way of showing what a homosexual is and does, without having to hint at any of that kissing or sex shenanigans which, being too disgusting to even think about, would get naturally get homosexuals, and you in portraying it, hauled up before the courts. So the common stereotype of a man in drag as a homosexual is a way of finding some means of depicting a gay, while also substituting the dress for some of the real visceral anxieties as to what it is that homosexuals actually get up to. When we get into the later 70s, and humorists can show what gays really get up to sexually, then the transvestite stereotype is used only by a rather sad and old-fashioned minority.

This is inspired by a contemporary advert for Canada Dry:

25 - Faggots: Dave Berg

in “Mad”, June 1969

Dave Berg offers a fairly realistic assessment of why the word “faggot” gets thrown around so much in teenage years. Berg, far too often, offered cranky old fartism and corny situations rather then real analysis. The word is offensive, but Berg is able to show the unpleasant “sour grapes” aspect of the person using it. The stigma of homosexuality is applied to anything else the user wishes to denigrate. The word “gay” is currently suffering the same treatment at the hands of British youth.