Humor In An Elder Vein

Like any other child who washed up in the detritus of the Baby Boom, your friendly neighborhood Fortress Keeper was strongly influenced by the Usual Gang of Idiots who published Mad magazine.

Each and every month, we would marvel as the likes of Don Martin, Al Jaffee, Sergio Aragones and Antonio Prohias made the “adult” world seem that much more childish and contradictory.

Yet The Keeper never truly realized how demented the magazine could be until we stumbled upon a few early Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder stories in those old black & white Mad paperbacks.

(Those reprint collections were sort of the Marvel Essentials of their era … )

To be honest, Kurtzman and Elder were too much for your humble host to take. Kurtzman portrayed respectable childhood favorites like Archie and Mickey Mouse as craven, self-serving louts who loathed themselves and their positions in society while Elder’s art packed so many bizarre gags that our senses were perpetually on the verge of overload.

It felt like we were looking at one of those odd - yet somehow enticing - underground comix The Keeper had heard so much about.

As the years passed we grew to appreciate the brilliance of those early Kurtzman and Elder stories, which aside from being hilarious also taught The Keeper a very important lesson - the so-called “respectable” figures in society shouldn’t be taken quite so seriously.

Kurtzman passed away in 1993 and the world sadly learned of Elder’s death this week. The best of their work, however, remains timeless and will certainly influence impressionable youths for generations to come.

As a tribute to Elder’s genius, here is a pointed game-show parody from the first issue of Humbug - a post-Mad effort led by Kurtzman that featured Jack Davis, Arnold Roth and Jaffee.

It is interesting to note that the show skewered by Kurtzman and Elder (who, as always, added a slew of visual jokes to the already broad parody), Twenty-One, was later discovered to be rigged and pretty much caused the downfall of prime-time game-shows until … well, now.

We also can’t help but notice that the cliches Humbug made so much of in the 1950s exist in modern game-shows like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and Deal Or No Deal.

It’s like the old saying goes, the more that things change …