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@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.

Paul Hébert

@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.