Hate Mail

Bob and Ray were geniuses, the people who produced even the early MAD magazine were merely clever.  

I wasn't a constant reader of MAD, though I found it entertaining when I was a teenager and young adult, then I outgrew it.  As I remember reading one of those who were involved in producing the magazine, there was constant turn-over in its reader base as people outgrew it only to complain it used to be better (reportedly they got their first such note after they published the second issue). You don't outgrow genius.  Which is one of the ways to tell you it is genius.  I remember looking back at some of what I found somewhat amusing and saw it just upheld a slightly different POV on what Brueggemann calls out as the Modern-Industrial-Scientific Model of thinking about life.  It's not really radical, it's merely snarky.  

I don't think my grandparents ever saw MAD magazine and I'm sure my parents never read it, while it wouldn't have been banned from my house we wouldn't have left it around to be found.   They didn't need comic scrawlers to tell them Freud was bunk.   

Update:  He didn't start writing for MAD until 1957, you're whining about the first issue, which was years before that.  I'd suggest you make up your mind what you're whining about but I know that's hopeless.  

You might want to look at what what people said about one of MAD's better writers, Harvey Kurtzman and his most widely known, but hardly his best work "Little Annie Fanny" and how the venue that published it, Play Boy, influenced what he did in that for the worse.   Hack writers do different quality work for different customers.   MAD was good, it was, on occasion great, but it wasn't a venue of genius.  You can say the same thing about National Lampoon, which was very uneven over the years.   Needless to say,  I outgrew that, too.  

Bob and Ray were geniuses and I imagine they inspired people who wrote some of their material.