A SPECIAL HERO OF THE DAY!
Age: 99 (currently)
Occupation: retired writer and artist
Last Seen: New York, NY
Awarded For: 100 years of making this world a better place
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If you had a crappy childhood, you have two avenues in life.
One is to grimace all your life about the past and think about the things you wanted to do, but couldn't. The other is to turn pristine, mint condition issues of Mad Magazine into something worthless because you caused the reader to put a crease on the back cover.
Obviously, Al Jaffee chose the latter.
For eight decades, Abraham Jaffee brought joy and laughter to millions of people around the world with his clever sense of humor. Every month, people wondered what Jaffee had spewing out of his brushes that would cause them to have a chuckle or two. Granted, Don Martin was Mad's Maddest Artist. But, Jaffee might as well have been in second place.
For Jaffee, Mad was the childhood he never had. The son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants in Savannah, GA on March 13, 1921, young Al struggled with the fact that his mother wanted to move back to Lithuania when he was a child. Until he was a teenager, Al alternated between America and Lithuania while his parents fought for control of him and his three brothers. Ultimately, his father and America won while his mother died during the Holocaust. In his teens, Al moved to New York City, where he studied at the High School of Music and Art. There, he studied with future Mad-men like Will Elder, Harvey Kurtzman and Al Feldstein. One now-famous photo shows Al goofing off with Elder.
Upon graduation, Jaffee worked at several comic books and developed many characters for a precursor of Marvel Comics such as Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal. In 1955, Al started working for the young Mad, but left three years later along with friend and editor Harvey Kurtzman. He returned to the magazine in 1958 when the magazines he and Kurtzman worked for, Playboy-owned Trump and Humbug, which Kurtzman owned himself, failed.
At Mad, Jaffee submitted several famous articles over the years, namely his Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. Inspired by the fold-outs in Playboy and National Geographic, he created the Mad Fold-In. He thought it would be a one-off article, but publisher William M. Gaines demanded he submit a Fold-In for every issue since the reader would fold in the back page and then they would have to buy a new issue. Obviously, Jaffee's Fold-In boosted sales of Mad considering that the crease ruined the copy.
Over the years, Jaffee was a man of many feats. He contributed to 500 issues of Mad with only one issue with no article by him between 1964 to 2013. He currently holds the Guinness Record for longest ever career as a cartoonist: 78 years.
But now, Al Jaffee will have another record to be proud of. On Saturday, he will be 100 years young.
In a world where there's too many bad people who live too long, Al is a notable exception. The humor from Mad Kept him young for so long. Maybe that's why he only retired last year at a spry 99.
Sadly, I, like too many Mad fans are outraged that their current owners, AT&T/Warner Media are simply killing the magazine instead of selling it to an owner who care about their readers. Mad was a magazine where you worked for decades and loved it. It was a magazine a father could pass to his son and so on. But, it's simply loaded with reprints and little-to-no new material... save for the Fold-In. After he published a parody of the Mad Fold-In for The Pitchfork Review in 2013, Johnny Sampson was personally commissioned by Al himself to continue with the article. Today - and sadly - the Mad Fold-In is the only new article published by the magazine every month.
Granted, Mad's glory days are extremely far behind them. But, leave it to Al Jaffee to bring so much laughter to generations of us mindless humans. I hope his 100th birthday will be a joyous - and socially distanced - one.
I'll betcha if he was still doing the centennial birthdays for The Today Show, Willard Scott would have ended up turning his segment into an episode of This is Your Life.
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