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IPFS News Link • Media: Print

'Mad' Magazine Told The Truth About War, Advertising, And The Media

• https://www.zerohedge.com by Jeet Heer

In the summer of 1954, almost any American kid who had the wherewithal to scrounge up a dime could walk into a drugstore and buy the sharp satire on Senator Joseph McCarthy found in the pages of Mad comics #17. The Army-McCarthy hearings had dominated television, and the Wisconsin demagogue had finally alienated so many establishment forces that the Senate was at last moving to censure him. Harvey Kurtzman, the editorial impresario who created Mad, was impressed neither by McCarthy's buffoonery nor the more deliberative political theater of the Senate. Kurtzman seized on the television drama to recast the whole McCarthy fiasco as a game show called "What's My Shine?" (a travesty of a then-popular program called What's My Line?).


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