The ingenious cartoonist who helped define Mad
Al Jaffee 1921–2023
Al Jaffee turned cartooning inside out. An institution at the puckish humor magazine Mad, he presided there for a 65-year stretch that began soon after the magazine’s 1952 founding and ended with its final issue in 2020. His recurring features included “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” in which a lamebrained query prompts three possible barbed replies, and “Al Jaffee’s Mad Inventions,” which depicted absurdist products like a handbag with a heated handle to scald purse-snatchers. His most celebrated contribution was the “Fold-In,” a back-cover illustration that posed a question, then supplied the answer—and a transformed image—when folded in on itself vertically. When he drew the first one in 1964, lampooning Elizabeth Taylor’s serial marriages, “it was supposed to be really a one-shot,” he said in 1993. “But because of the overwhelming demand of three or four of my relatives, it went on to a second time, and on and on.”
Born in Savannah, Ga., to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, Jaffee “for years was torn between the U.S.” and his parents’ homeland, said the Associated Press. Unhappy in America, his deeply religious mother returned to Lithuania with Jaffee and his three brothers, who “endured poverty and bullying.” He found solace—and learned to read and write in English— through comics sent by his father, a department-store manager. At age 12, Jaffee returned to the U.S. to live with his dad in Queens, where his artistic gifts won him acceptance at New York’s High School of Music and Art. After graduating, he worked for several comics publishers and created Inferior Man, “a hapless superhero” conceived as “an antidote to Superman,” said The Washington Post. He contributed his first Mad piece in 1955 and became “one of the defining voices of the magazine as it grew to become a countercultural must-read.”
Jaffee’s Mad work garnered him “cartooning’s top honor,” the Reuben Award, said The New York Times, and many other accolades. In 2020, when he was 99, Mad celebrated Jaffee with a “Special All Jaffee Issue” that included his final Fold-In, which shows Mad mascot Alfred E. Neuman fretting over bad news. When folded, it showed the real reason to be upset: Jaffee’s image hovering above the message: “No More New Jaffee Fold-Ins.”