What was the reason for the increased popularity of MAD magazine?
My parents said I couldn’t read it, so naturally I went out and bought copies and hid them and read them. That’s it exactly. That exactly demonstrates the formula of our success. We were anti-establishment. We were telling kids they were being lied to by manufactures of cigarettes. We ran anti-cigarette ad satires for years. We were way ahead of the anti-tobacco stuff of now. Back in the ’60s, we were clobbering the cigarette industry. Nobody was listening, but we were trying. We were telling it like it us, and they trusted us. And all we were doing, really, was reinforcing their own feelings. We were saying don’t feel badly about the fact that you don’t trust politicians. They are crooks, a lot of them. Don’t feel badly that you’re very skeptical about Madison Avenue advertising. They’re lying to you. This was the whole thrust of the magazine. It was an anti-establishment magazine, but it wasn’t as blatant or as iconoclastic as some of the things that followed that turned us into a bu
