Mad/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
< Mad


YMMV tropes related to the magazine

  • Acceptable Targets: Increasingly so from the 1970s onward. Lawyers are some of the most frequently targeted.
  • Canon Sue: The Grey Spy in Spy vs. Spy would always win whenever she appeared.
  • Continuity Lock Out: Just who is "Max Korn", anyway?
  • Critical Research Failure: Occasionally in the parodies, such as failing to notice that Mystique replaced the dead Senator Kelly in the first X-Men movie.
  • Fan Dumb: Not so much from fans of the magazine itself, but sometimes when Mad spoofs something legions of fans will write to them complaining. For instance, it got pretty bad when they were making fun of Hanson and Pokemon in the late 90's.
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: In Mad's "20 Dumbest People, Events, and Things" for 2008, Amy Winehouse's destructive behavior was listed at number 11. The end of the entry stated: "It makes us wonder if her next full-house appearance will be at a funeral home." Well, MAD, you got your wish...
  • God Mode Sue: Fantabulaman.
  • Growing the Beard: Arguably, the transition from comic book to full-fledged magazine, which allowed for a wide variety of non-comic parodies.
    • YMMV. The original Mad comic has some of the greatest comic book storytelling ever. Even Alan Moore thinks so.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: This [dead link] parody ad for Cadillac back in 1960, showing a woman wearing an emblem of the car like a necklace to show off her status symbol. Who knew rappers would adopt the same style decades later?
  • Memetic Mutation: Alfred E. Neuman is a rare pre-Internet example; his image, known as the "What, me worry?" Kid, appeared as graffiti as early as the 1920s and in as unlikely places as post-WW 1 Austria. Mad just named him and chose him as their mascot.
    • The mysterious gap-toothed smiling kid has been traced in advertisements going as far back as the 1890s… and it's still uncertain if the original image has been found.
  • Moment of Awesome: During a company-wide vacation to the Dominican Republic, Bill Gaines discovered that there was only one subscriber in the entire country, and his subscription was going to expire that month. The entire Mad staff - artists, writers, editors, and Gaines himself piled into a bus and drove out to his house. Gaines knocked on the subscriber's door, and with the entire staff of the magazine looking on, presented him with a renewal notice.
  • Nausea Fuel / Gross Up Close-Up:
    • Basil Wolverton's hideously pock-marked, hairy, blemished women. His son, Monte, carries on in the same tradition.
    • Tom Bunk is fond of Basil Wolverton-esque women, as well as gags relying on blood, guts, puke, snot, pus, eyeballs, et cetera. His art is at its grossest when Michael Gallagher handles the script; strangely, most of Michael Gallagher's work with other artists is very tame.
    • Al Jaffee loves grossout gags as well, although he hasn't done very many of late. He still has an affinity for grossly overweight women, though.
    • Spy vs. Spy has become considerably more... visceral since Peter Kuper took over.
  • Refuge in Audacity: The "You Can Never Win With A Bigot" feature, in which it's noted that bigots will respond to stereotypes being refuted by changing to others, stands out, as the writers admit in the Mad About the Seventies collection that they could never do that today.
  • Shallow Parody: See the page for examples, some of which are based off early drafts, and others involve getting things wrong or not doing the research
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Ask longtime readers when Mad went downhill and you'll get answers ranging from "When it became a magazine" to "When Kurtzman left" to "When Gaines died" to "When they started accepting ads." Art director Sam Viviano says that Mad was funniest "whenever you first started reading it."

"The second issue of MAD goes on sale on December 9, 1952. On December 11, the first-ever letter complaining that MAD 'just isn't as funny and original like it used to be' arrives."

  • Unfortunate Implications: Series mascot Alfred E. Neuman's appearance is derived from rather racist depictions of Irishmen created in the mid 19th century.
  • We're Still Relevant, Dammit!: Completely averted, as the whole point of the magazine is to make fun of anything that's new and popular.

YMMV tropes related to the TV series

  • Non Sequitur Scene / Gainax Ending: The Reveal in "Gaming's Next Top Princess". After poking fun at the overly-drawn-out reveal, it cuts to a repeat of an earlier skit with a Spanish overdub.
  • Creator's Pet: Some viewers get easily sick of Kevin Shinick's voice.
  • Discredited Meme: Uses a lot of these like the "You shall not pass!" meme from lord of the rings.
  • Dude, Not Funny: Mostly averted, but one sketch depicts Lightning Mcqueen (from Cars) being thrown into a car crusher. Killing off characters for comedy is not usually funny.
  • Ear Worm: The theme song, which is just kazoo music and random people singing, "Hey yabba boy yamma, MAD!"
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: The Applejack Captain Ersatz from the Cowboys and Aliens parody skit (given the name "Maplejack" by fans to avoid confusion with the original).
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: In "Avenger Time", The Watcher's decision not to tell Captain America whether or not MAD will win an Emmy might have become one of these after Adventure Time received two Emmy nominations, while MAD has not received any.
    • Seeing as we're talking about MAD here, it could've also been some Self-Deprecation on their part.
  • Geek Bonus: "Gaming's Next Top Princess" shows that they are very definitely One of Us. They even got Samus Aran's birthplace right!
    • The "And That's What Superfriends Are For" sketch features countless B-list & C-list DC characters.
  • Growing the Beard: Maybe, with more features from the magazine and a new look for Spy vs. Spy.
    • Also with less use of gross-out humor and more variety in their sketches.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: "Dr. Mouse", as a sketch, may or may not have originated as a parody - namely, a 2009 storyline on Topolino, that is, the Italian Mickey Mouse magazine parodying the House TV series. Which, in turn, got its inspiration from a commercial, still from Italy, which celebrated the fact TV network Mediaset would start airing both franchises. Hell, even the cover you can see on the first link alludes to that commercial.
    • The skit about the ride of Paul Revere became funnier when Tea Partier Michelle Bachmann mangled revolutionary history on live TV.
    • During a Kung Fu Panda Legends of Awesomeness marathon on Nick, they showed an Angry Birds Christmas special. Now remember in the Kung Fu Blander sketch, the Angry Birds were the enemies...
    • Garfield of Dreams is about several Newspaper Comics characters getting famous directors, including Steven Spielberg, to make movies with them, and they all hate the final results. 21 years before the special, there was A Wish for Wings That Work, which was made by Speilberg, based off a comic strip, and the creator of it hated the final result.
  • Internet Backdraft: "ThunderLOLcats" sparked tons of complaints from viewers who firmly believe internet jokes don't belong on TV.
  • Nausea Fuel: The two adaptations of Tom Bunk/Michael Gallagaher back cover gags from the magazine: the first involves a boy who deflates and spews goo and guts all over the place after popping a zit, and the second, a fat woman who says that her kids "eat like a bird" — which she then demonstrates by vomiting up worms into their mouths.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The mini-sketch about the guy trying to pop his zit—which pops, and floods the room with his pus. And organs. And eventually his skeleton. That's right, that dude just died on camera in the most horrifying way possible. And before you ask, yes, he screamed.
    • Beauty Tips with Megan Fox. No, really. And not just the scene where Megan Fox turns out to be a cyborg , but her overall appearance makes her look like she crawled from the deepest trenches of the Uncanny Valley. The photo cut-out head and cartoon lips and eyebrows look really bizarre.
      • Doesn't help that HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey is in her circuits.
      • In Fantastic Megan Fox, Megan really is a fox [which causes Fridge Logic] -- one who steals Kristin Stewart's long brown hair, Scarlet Johanssen's beautiful brea—er, uh eyeballs, and Angelina Jolie's full, pouty lips just so she can be the next big female screen star.
      • The models they use to show live action or CGI characters can sometimes invoke this, along with Uncanny Valley.
    • There's the music video parody of Katy Perry's "Firework" video (called "Flammable" by Katy Putty). Much like the actual song, the parody song does have lyrics that give hope to those who feel like they're nothing special by saying there's a light inside all of them that needs to come out. The parody takes this a bit too far with the fireworks causing the clay man, the stock paper woman, and the puppet man to catch fire. While the puppet is just singed [he is saved by a man with a fire extinguisher. He is shown running around on fire at the very end though.], the stock paper woman is screaming as most of her is now blackened ash, and the clay man's head melts and falls off his neck as Katy Putty [who inexplicably survives] is carted off by a police officer for arson and murder -- but not jaywalking.
  • Older Than They Think: A sketch show based on MAD magazine's parodies, cartoons, and random doodles is nothing new (besides Mad TV, there exists an unsold pilot/TV Special of a MAD-based sketch show in the 1970s that included parodies of Columbo and The Godfather; the pilot was never picked up and made into a series)
  • Shallow Parody: Most of the time this is averted (See Above) Naruto210 is an example. The writers apparently only saw the first three episodes of Naruto. "Why do all these Naruto fights happen off-screen?" The relationship between the Genin, which is similar to a group of high school students' interacting, is also skimmed over.
  • They Just Didn't Care:

Oh my God, it's Magneto!

    • The DVDs don't have 16X9 enhancement.
  • What Do You Mean It's for Kids?: Much like most of Cartoon Network's past and present[when?] offerings, this show is packed to the brim with a lot of Parental Bonus and Getting Crap Past the Radar moments that confirm that Cartoon Network's censors are terrible at their job, and even if they were, it's doubtful that many kids would understand a lot of the things the show references.
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