Considering the influence of Harvey Kurtzman
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
In its earliest days, the appeal of Mad magazine depended on a tone
so relentlessly down-market that it amounted to self-contempt. Early
in the 1950s, the editors boasted that their 10¢ comic book contained
"trash," created by "the usual gang of idiots." In 1955, transforming
Mad Comics into an ambitious magazine, the editors announced: "For
the past two years, Mad has been dulling the senses of the country's
youth. Now we get to work on the adults."
At a moment when every media institution from the Reader's Digest to
CBS News was singing hymns about its own importance, Mad's approach
was refreshing. But did Harvey Kurtzman (1924-93) and his Mad
colleagues realize they were making history?
Today, their jokes are taken seriously. Successful middle-aged
artists now often acknowledge Mad as the key influence on their
lives, and cultural historians write about it as a major force in
forming the contemporary imagination. After more than half a century,
the original Mad artists and editors look like revolutionaries who
flew below the cultural radar while their boyish but sly satire (
"humour in a jugular vein") attacked the circulatory system of mass culture.
The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics (Abrams), by
Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle, takes us some distance toward
understanding Mad as a phenomenon. The authors collect a posse of
first-class artists willing to attest that the anarchic originality
of Kurtzman and his magazine showed them the way to their future. Art
Spiegelman, whose Maus was the first graphic novel embraced by the
world beyond comic fandom, says "Kurtzman has been the single most
significant influence on a couple of generations of comic artists."
R. Crumb recalls that Kurtzman's cover designs "changed the way I saw
the world forever." John Cleese and Terry Gilliam came together while
working for one of Kurtzman's later magazines, Help!, and went off to
give the world Monty Python. (In his film Brazil, Gilliam honoured
his old boss by naming the character played by Ian Holm "Kurtzman.")
Marshall McLuhan's most influential book, Understanding Media,
carries a line attributing Mad's success to its ability to replay
mass culture in a new way. There are those who say that the strands
connecting Saturday Night Live with The Simpsons and The Daily Show
lead straight to Kurtzman. Perhaps the most obvious of his
grandchildren is a cheap but enduring movie, Airplane!, the endlessly
imitated 1980 parody of Arthur Hailey's Airport, made 10 years
earlier. Kurtzman had nothing to do with Airplane!, but the script
sounds like a team of Kurtzman acolytes loyally replicating every
detail of the Master's technique. Like one of his comic-book pieces,
it upends a famous melodrama by smearing its plot with jokes that
range from brilliantly sophisticated to downright corny, without
acknowledging that the writers understood the difference.
Kitchen's and Buhle's text, accompanying hundreds of Kurtzman images,
argues that Mad parodies helped the audience distance themselves from
the cliches of mass culture and see them for what they were. But
Kurtzman's most lasting achievement was to teach the popular arts a
version of the self-consciousness that had developed some decades
before among avant-garde artists. James Joyce in Ulysses wrote a
novel that was about novels and language; it was also a fable that
rewrote the greatest of all fables.
Picasso and Braque, through Cubism, taught artists that art was their
major subject. Kurtzman showed comedians working in all art forms
that their best material was to be found in mass culture. Being
reflections of life, the mass media could be refracted again through comedy.
From there it was a hop and a skip to Lenny Bruce's routine about a
reporter interviewing the pope or Saturday Night Live dancing nimbly
through the week's events in a caricature TV newscast. Kurtzman
established parody on the margins, then watched it become the
mainstream of entertainment.
The Art of Harvey Kurtzman has an introduction by Harry Shearer, who
played Derek Smalls, the luxuriantly hairy bass player in This is
Spinal Tap who sets off an airport metal detector with a foil-wrapped
zucchini inserted in his pants to enhance his appeal to groupies.
Shearer's brief appearance makes sense, since Kurtzman's DNA was
clearly present in Spinal Tap, a minor masterpiece. The authors of
the book's text, while well-intentioned, are less effective. Kitchen
represents the Kurtzman estate and maintains the sacred archive of
the Master. Buhle is an old-fashioned lefty, author of 35 books on
everything from Che Guevara to the Beat generation. He holds the
probably mistaken belief that Kurtzman's parodies of consumer culture
spread liberalism among American youth. (In my observation, a
dedicated Mad reader is just as likely to become a neocon.)
Much of Mad in its great days was purely silly rather than pointed or
political. Its approach to language, for instance, was playful and
innocent. In 1953, the year he founded Mad, the big movie was From
Here to Eternity, whose most famous scene had Deborah Kerr and Burt
Lancaster enjoying an orgasm as the Pacific waves crashed over them.
Kurtzman rewrote the ad copy: "They kissed on the beach … instead of
the mouth."
Kitchen and Buhle stumble in selecting reproductions of drawings made
or inspired by Kurtzman. They worry more about completeness than
quality and provide us with far more rough sketches than we need and
far too few examples of complete Mad stories. The result is a
luxurious large-format art book that somehow manages to reduce the
reputation of the artist it set out to glorify.
They describe, without much skill or understanding, the mess that
Kurtzman made of his career. After three brilliant years at Mad,
1953-1956, he decided that the publisher should give him a 51% share
of the magazine, to ensure editorial independence. When the publisher
refused, Kurtzman walked away from his creation. He later tried
vainly to reproduce his success with three other magazines Trump,
Humbug and Help! and was finally reduced to producing a monthly
comic strip, Little Annie Fanny, for Playboy. He kept doing it for 26
long years, earning a handsome page rate while boring himself as well
as his old admirers. By the time he died, almost everyone had
forgotten him, except the artists he inspired. It took some years
before the mythic dimension of his career was resurrected.
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