It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Or Was.

I dug Mad Magazine. My brain is wired to mock.

— Lalo Alcaraz

Sometimes Congressional investigations prompt criminal charges; sometimes, new laws; and sometimes, public outcries for justice and reform.

But a 1954 Congressional investigation prompted a new magazine.

Mad was the result of a bipartisan investigation of the comic book industry by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.

Comic books—filled in the day with murder, mayhem and sex—were on the hot seat because experts had claimed that they corrupted young readers.

And Congress agreed: its investigation of the industry reached the conclusion that comic book publishers were de facto smut merchants who needed to be censored.

A "comics code" was written and a watchdog group set up.

One publisher, however, was of no mind to comply.

Entertaining Comics skirted Congress' directive by upping the trim size of its comic book Mad to that of a magazine and renaming the product Mad Magazine.

Magazines had no code or watchdog.

Free from censorship, Mad in its heyday entertained well over a million Baby Boomers a month, providing a steady stream of puerile parodies, cornball sendups, and idiotic satire.

Most of all, Mad represented relief from the stifling conformism and earnestness of the 1950s and '60s.

"Mad's consciousness of itself as trash, as enemy of parents and teachers, even as money-making enterprise, thrilled kids," The New York Times said on the occasion of magazine's 25th anniversary. 

"It was magical, objective proof to kids that they weren't alone, that there were people who knew that there was something wrong, phony and funny about a world of bomb shelters, brinkmanship and toothpaste smiles."

My favorite feature in every Mad was the TV show parody. I still remember some of the nutty titles the magazine gave to these spoofs:

• Walt Dizzy Presents
• The Rifle, Man!
• The Phewgitive
• Voyage to See What's on the Bottom
• 12 O'Crocked High
• Mission: Ridiculous
• The Flying Nut
• Kojerk
• Makeus Sickby
• The Straights of San Francisco
• Kung Fool
• The Dopes of Haphazzard

When they worked—which was often—Mad's spoofs excelled in their ability to transport you to a cartoon world where vile windbags and moronic stumblebums reigned—a grotesque and absurd world not unlike your parents' and teachers'. The characters were all gangly, their noses bulbous, their limbs marionettish, their clothes ill-fitting. When they spoke, they spoke in elaborate paragraphs that were studded with bombast and Yiddish slang which, unless you lived in a Jewish household, you only encountered in the pages of Mad.

Mad lasted on newsstands 67 years—much longer than anyone would have predicted. But, with the appearance of rivals Zap Comics and National Lampoon, Mad's best days were over by the 1970s.

According to The New Yorker, Mad "subverted the comic form into a mainstream ideological weapon aimed at icons of the left and the right—attacking both McCarthyism and the Beat Generation, Nixon and Kennedy, Hollywood and Madison Avenue."

I can’t remember the day when I fell in love with Mad. It was too long ago. But it was an inextricable rite of passage for every kid in the '50s and '60s at least to sample the zany sarcasm Mad dished out every month and to spend a few moments in a world where both the emperors and adults had no clothes.