Nick Meglin, longtime top editor of Mad Magazine, dies

Nick Meglin, a top editor at Mad magazine who for many years was the chief barometer of whether the publication’s silly and satirical humor had gone too far—or not far enough—died on June 2 at his home in Durham, North Carolina. He was 82.

His daughter, Diane Meglin, said the cause was a heart attack.

Meglin spent nearly a half-century at Mad, from its early heyday as an outrageous force in American culture to an era when it struggled for relevance amid the rise of increasingly daring humor outlets, like National Lampoon, “Saturday Night Live” and The Onion, many of whose writers had been influenced by Mad.

To Meglin, though, Mad’s mission had remained the same over the years, regardless of its competition.

“Mad has always been a reflecting pond,” he told The New York Times in 2001. “We help society look at itself. We don’t create, we respond to.”

As Mad’s editor from 1985 to 2004—a position he shared with John Ficarra—Meglin became a major figure in the magazine’s long history, along with Harvey Kurtzman, who founded it as a comic book; William M. Gaines, its Falstaffian publisher; and Al Feldstein, who ran Mad from 1956 to 1985.

“Feldstein was a smart editor, but he was a hard taskmaster,” Al Jaffee, the cartoonist who, at 97, still devises Mad’s back-page fold-ins, said in a telephone interview. “Nick, on the other hand, was simpatico to the contributors, which made us all want to be better.”

Gaines scribbled a note to Meglin in 1989 calling him “the soul and conscience” of Mad.

Although his byline rarely appeared, Meglin refined Mad’s cover ideas, added puns and gags to stories, frequently ghostwrote Dave Berg’s cartoon feature “The Lighter Side Of…” and checked to make sure the lyrics of the magazine’s song spoofs had the right meter.

And, because movie parodies were one of Mad’s signature features, he took staffers to movie theaters to watch films. There, in the dark, they giggled at the lines and scenes they would mock in future issues.

When Mad parodied “The Sting,” the Academy Award winner for best picture in 1974, Meglin suggested that the cover illustration replace the faces of the film’s stars, Robert Redford and Paul Newman, with those of former President Richard M. Nixon and former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, both of whom had recently resigned.

“That was ahead of its time,” Ficarra said. “No one was really mashing up movies and politics.”

Meglin was born Nick Megliola in Brooklyn on July 30, 1935. His father, Anthony, was a mason, and his mother, Elizabeth was a seamstress.

Meglin graduated from Brooklyn College and earned a certificate from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.