A mainstay of countless American childhoods, MAD magazine exploded onto the scene in the 1950s and gleefully thumbed its nose at all the postwar pieties. Unfazed by lawsuits, the ire of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and the scorn of critics and scolds unwilling or unable to get the joke, MAD became the zaniest, most subversive satire magazine ever sold on America’s newsstands.

The MAD Files celebrates the magazine and its creators, the self-styled Usual Gang of Idiots who transformed puerile punchlines and merciless mockery into an art form. Twenty-six essays and comics present a varied, perceptive, and often very funny assessment of MAD’s significance. Art Spiegelman, Roz Chast, and Chris Ware recall what MAD meant to them as children; David Hajdu and Grady Hendrix zero in on MAD’s hilarious spoofs; Liel Leibovitz delves into the Jewishness behind the magazine’s humor; and Rachel Shteir amplifies the unsung genius of MAD’s women artists. Several contributors offer admiring profiles of the individual creators who made MAD what it was: Mort Drucker, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Jaffee, Antonio Prohías, and Will Elder.

For die-hard fans and newcomers alike, The MAD Files is an irresistible, indispensable guide to America’s greatest satire magazine.

David Mikics, editor, is the author, most recently, of Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker and Bellow’s People: How Saul Bellow Made Life into Art, and editor of The Annotated Emerson and Harold Bloom’s The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon. His writing has appeared in Tablet, The Nation, and The New York Times.

The paperback edition features French flaps and has been printed on acid-free paper.