If you’ve spent any time at all with Mad Magazine over the years, you’ve been entertained by Mort Drucker. But Thursday brings bad news: The legendary cartoonist has died at age 91 at his home in Woodbury, New York, reports the New York Times. No cause of death was given, and it was unclear whether it was related to the coronavirus. Drucker joined Mad in 1956 and gained particular renown in the subsequent decades for his parodies of movies and TV shows. “I think I’ve drawn almost everyone in Hollywood,” he once told the Times. In time, big stars came to cherish being immortalized by Drucker.
Dangit, I had all but forgotten about Buttigieg.
That is sad. I was a Mad Magazine nerd in the late 1950’s and 1960’s. He and Jack Davis were amazing cartoonists.
RIP Mr. Drucker.
What a loss! Mort saw me through from childhood and well into adulthood with MAD.
R.I.P. Mr. Drucker. You made life better.
And then there was Mad’s truly maddest artist Don Martin. I still crack up to this day whenever I see one of his cartoons. Jack Davis was an incredible cartoonist as well who I know just passed away recently within the last couple of years. Sergio Aragones with all his little drawings hidden thru out the pages of Mad Magazine as well as Al Jaffee, Dave Berg, Paul Coker Jr. etc. I’m glad that I kept all my Mad Magazines from the mid 50’s to the mid 70’s when Mad was at it’s satirical best.
probably the best caricaturist ever
RIP Mort … you gave me a lot of yucks
@TimBuktu ~ don’t forget the late Don Martin & Chester Fester Bestertester
Wow, I just flashed back in time to a Krogers food store in east central Ohio in 1967. “Mom, can I get this MAD magazine?”
Hence began a lifelong obsession with comics.
Mort, you were the best. Be sure to draw the heavenly hosts in full color.
Way back Mad did a parody on Bonanza, the popular TV show.
Instead of “Little. Joe” they named the character “Short Mort”,
It was very, very funny!
Mad Magazine, Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. Probably the best piece of literary work ever done. Any where, any time.
extirpates–
Wasn’t the Bonanza parody called “Bananaz”? [Looks it up] It was!
@Bad_Brad – not to take away from the current tribute, but I want to take this opportunity to recommend the Flashman series by George MacDonald Frazer. THAT’s the best literary work EVER. Except for maybe Shakespeare, but a whole different thing.
LOVED Mad Magazine when I was growing up. I kind of lost track in my later adult years.
RIP Mr Drucker.
MAD Magazine. A treasure. I would haunt the magazine rack at the local Piggly Wiggly reading CAR-toons and Mad magazine until the manager would yell at me. Grew up dirt poor so I rarely had the money to buy one unless i mowed lawns or shoveled snow, but when i did i wore it out. Always tried to decipher the back page fold in to see what it said without mangling it. The 60’s were an awesome time to grow up. RIP sir, you were one of the many that made the 60’s great.
Seems to me I recall that just below the large letters of MAD was in fine print the word “mind”. Anyone else ever pickup on that??? I was a follower and believer. Used to lay up in our tree house and read it cover to cover. They also had paper backs. Bought them at the Boston Candy Kitchen on Main. 15 cents at one time. Where’s a time machine? Most likely the direct cause of my sick sense of humor – but Mom never stopped me. Rest assured you will be missed by many Mr. Drucker Is that a tear in my eye?, nope its my nose again.
Mr. Drucker helped to warp my mind as a young boy. Thanks and rest in peace Mort.
MAD was definitely something I grew up on in the 80s, used to be the only reason I didn’t mind mom taking me to the grocery store with her once in a while. Good thing she never knew that MAD was a bit more “adult” than most 10 year olds were ready for, but I was always a bit ahead of the curve. RIP Mort.
My earliest recollection of Mad was about 1958 when my older brother brought an issue home.
The back cover was a parody add for Salem cigarettes. The header was “Salem, Don’t Inhalem”, with a picture of a guy setting boxes of Salem cigarettes in stream and “sailing” them downriver. My brother and mother were having a laugh over it and so I checked it out. I was a Mad fan forever after.
And on very rare occasions there were some cartoons by Basil Wolverton who was stranger and weirder than Don Martin. Snappy answers to stupid questions by Al Jaffee was very funny as well. Fester Bestertester was Don Martin at his absolute best. Horrifying Cliches by Paul Coker Jr. was one of my favorites. I’d have to send pictures to show you how funny those were.
I read them back in 1964.Dad had everyone
of them.He liked “cracked” magazine also.
Better not talk while Bullwinkle & Rocky
were on.A Mensa member with 143IQ go figure…
“Mr. Drucker helped to warp my mind”
Mine, too, Billy. Loved Mad, madly. From the front to the fold-in back cover.
You know of course that Rocky and Bullwinkle was never for kids, smart kids like me who had a sense of warped humor and understood and appreciated the humor even when I was younger back in the early 60’s. It was adult humor disguised as a satirical and subversive kid’s show. What else could explain Boris and Natasha as well as Fearless leader and the quasi commie country of Pottsylvania and all the running political gags and digs at the culture of that era.
When I look back to where it all started going wrong, it was buying a super edition of Mad in 1985 on a field trip to the the Opryland hotel. Laughing, not unlike an idiot, on the bus ride all the way back to school. That started a 2-3 year habit of buying their lampoons that put me decades ahead of the social distancing game.
Couldn’t tell you how many times I referenced Mad Magazine growing up. My brother and I would wear those magazines out! RIP Mr.Drucker!
First John Prine, now Mort Drucker, who’s next?
Who could forget the lines… “features in both black and white and color. To rot your mind and ruin your eyes”
Thanks for all the laughs back then MAD…
Happy to see that so many IOTWreport readers are all on the same page, especially a page from MAD Magazine that’s managed to reach out from our past to make us smile once again. No doubt it has helped to shape us in a good way, into who’ve we have become. Mort must be proud.
Grew up on MAD in the 60s. Agree with the comments about Drucker, Martin and the back page.
Yes, there were many innuendoes throughout the magazine. Same with films and songs in the time (and even before). Back before movies or CDs needed ratings.
A simpler time. A Better time.
RIP
many lifetimes ago I got into MAD when I was about 11 … yeah, I’m kinda slow … went to ‘National Lampoon’ when I was in my late teens (that cover w/ ‘If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog’ immediately hooked me) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheeseface
… then I moved to ‘Zap Comix’ & the great R. Crumb … & the rest is history
I had one of the Mad records called It’s A Gas, a little cheap plastic 45 rpm record where it was about a minute or two of some guy burping and possibly farting as well to a funny song. My best friend and I played it to death because we thought it was hilarious. I have no idea whatever happened to it after all these years.
I remember the Catholic Church forbidding us to have them, which made me go out of the way to read them. Later on I loved the Far Side and Pat McManus as well. Hope the FS makes a full come back.
Mort was without a doubt the best caricaturist ever. No one could touch him. What an amazing talent.
Pretty sure that Drucker is an honorary founder of IOTW.
He may not have known us, but the contributors and commenters have certainly assumed his sarcastic and clever role on this blog.
I’ve never run into a more deserving group of social misfits, wiseasses and wonderfully entertaining group such as IOTW.
And 91 years is a full life.
RIP Mr.Drucker. We’ll take it from here.
Toenex, The Far Side has been back for at least a couple of months now on Comic.com. I read it the first thing every morning along with Calvin & Hobbes, BC, Pearls Before Swine, Dilbert and Red and Rover. Comics.com also has reprints of Al Capp’s immortal Lil Abner as well. No Pogo though. I inherited all of my dad’s Pat McManus books after my dad died a couple of years ago. My dad grew up in N Idaho like Pat McManus and was always laughing at his wild stories in Field and Stream Magazine and later in book form.
“Songs We’d like to hear” “To the tune of…” Were field trip staples on the bus – “My body has calamine lotion,
My body’s as sore as can be,
The flowers I picked for Grannie,
Turned out to be poison iveeeeee!”
2020 is a real bastard
I bet Santy Clause will be next
Mort taught me how to do caricatures, by copying him.
He had the touch, his characters had life!
And the bosoms he drew…
He warped my young mind, and I am better for it
IOTWers certainly aren’t conformists. They don’t swallow conventional wisdom. They aren’t afraid to call BULLSHIT.
I think Mort would be proud that his work spawned such an unruly offspring.
I really do.
Let’s get unruly this year and do an electoral beat down this year.
It would be ‘Mad’.
Mad?
You bet I am.
PHenry
O-fookin-K!
We take the house, get a supermajority in the senate get some serious shit done, and build us a country that can withstand four terms of Dykes and token (insert gender identity here)
The early Mad Magazines after Mad # 24 (prior to Mad #24 it was strictly a comic book) from 1955 were subtitled Humor In A Jugular Vein. My earliest copies of Mad are from Mad # 25 (Sept 1955) on thru the mid 70’s. They are in excellent condition I might add since I’ve kept them in plastic bags for 50 years or more since I bought them from Clark’s Old Book Store in downtown Spokane. Once a nerd and a geek always a nerd and a geek. The first time Alfred E Neuman ran for President was in Mad # 30 Dec. 1956 when he was a write in candidate for President.
@ Geoff the Aardvark…
‘First John Prine, now Mort Drucker, who’s next?’
Yes, this was a hard week… They warned us but jeeez, I had no idea they were going straight for my formative years!
I downloaded….ah, from somewhere, over 100 scanned copies of MAD Magazine, some I had owned in paper form a long time ago, and had forgotten about, it was funny all over again.
Cop pulls over a driver
*His hand puppet asks, What’s the problem officer?
*You were swerving all over the road, I suppose you’re going to tell me YOU were driving?
*I had to, he was too drunk to drive!
What a talented group of guys those Mad men were.
National Lampoon, in its heyday, nearly rose to their level. They might have, but they did not have the consistency.
My first Mad magazine featured AE Neuman as a smiling bomber pilot on the cover (Catch 22 parody?)…35 cents, cheap. Enjoyed Mort, Don, and all those previously mention; I also like “Spy vs. Spy.” That, National Lampoon (first copy had a March date and a cartoon of a lion behind a startled lamb, “In like a lion.”) and Bob Heinlein…yep, ruint right outta the gate.
Rip Mort Drucker.