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@PaulInRainCity I spy a stray sentence fragment at the end of para 2

@PaulInRainCity sure. Got pulled away before I finished reading. Great stuff so far, love the topic

@PaulInRainCity you really picked the key idea for the title here. I love this clarifying concept of "engaged levity", satire as praxis leading to engagement and as a common ground. That one goes in the concept toolkit as a keeper.

We didn't go to a lot of movies when I was a kid, not none, but not a lot. So there's a huge list of famous movies I've realized over time that I *only* know through their Mad parodies, i.e. The Poop Side Down Adventure. Even Jaws was that way for a decade-plus!

@PaulInRainCity you're an insightful person. It's worth paying attention

@PaulInRainCity That's a lovely essay. My mother disliked comics, but had to begrudgingly accommodate my father's love of Mad Magazine, so my siblings and I were well-raised in part due to the availability of every issue from the sixties through the eighties.

I feel like quibbling a little with your paragraph containing the quote from The New Yorker. Mad skewered the left and the right alike, but I feel like they were more inclined to attack the right's beliefs and the left's behaviors, but not vice versa. These days we'd call it both-sideserism but the rare example of doing so successfully against the right rather than on behalf of it.

@ardgedee Thanks for reading!

Your take on right v. left/beliefs v. behavior is really worth thinking about.

@PaulInRainCity I might walk back what I said a little (going from memory, Dave Berg's comics were politically more middle-of-the-road), but my gut impulse would be that Mad Magazine, at least in the late 60s through the 70s, was generally more willing to call bullshit on conservative political positions than liberal ones, even if it was perfectly happy to make strawmen out of either side's tendencies.