Al Jaffee, creator of the MAD fold-in, is 102 year old, still drawing, and
very lucid.
It came out in a lot of the things he [Dave Berg] did. He had a very moralistic personality. I mean, he moralized all the time. And his gags were very suburban middle-class America. Plus, he was very religious. He wrote a book called My Friend God. And, of course, if you write a book like that, you just know that the MAD staff is going to make fun of you. We would ask him questions like, “Dave, when did you and God become such good friends? Did you go to college together, or what?”
Magazine staffs did remote work long before the pandemic:
Was there a sense of camaraderie in the golden age of MAD, from the early ’60s through the mid-’70s?
Oh, a great deal. Absolutely! MAD’s publisher, Bill Gaines, did something very clever: He would take the whole staff on an annual trip abroad. And we lived together for anywhere from seven to 17 days. We hung out together, we all went out to restaurants together, and we got to know each other. We became almost like a family. I mean, we weren’t in an office environment day-to-day where we got to know each other. A lot of us worked from home. In fact, every artist and writer worked from home — only the editors and art directors worked in the office.