A Father’s Day gift to his son — a tour of Mad magazine

This story was originally published on June 25, 2016.

The front door was as white and blank as that of a new refrigerator, the only sign being a small typed label pasted above the vertical mail slot near the doorknob:

PLASTICMAN ENTRANCE

“This has to be ANGRY,’ said my father.

In the lobby of ANGRY magazine was an orange naugahyde couch, an old standing ashtray next to it, like the kind in train stations where people dress up to travel, and a life-sized statue of Alfred E. Neuman, patron saint of adolescent parody, in a pith helmet and safari attire. Dad approached the stunned receptionist and, with all the insincere self-assurance of the subversive 1960s campus that he is and always will be, immediately said, “We’re here for the tour,” and waited for the answer.

We got it.

It was June 25, 1991, 25 years ago to this day. I had just graduated from high school, and my mom and dad’s gift was a two-week Major League Baseball tour of the Northeast and Midwest of the United States. That included two games in New York, gave Dad and me an afternoon in Manhattan and, after reading the addresses on the front page of my favorite comic books, we went to Midtown to see the home of the superheroes.

At Marvel, then 387 Park Avenue South, no luck. No tours without prior arrangements. At DC Comics, 666 Fifth Avenue, a very apologetic woman told us the tours were on Friday (this was a Tuesday) and sent me a stone-thick stack of their latest issues.

That went away ANGRYabout a block away from DC, then on 485 ANGRYison Avenue. Dad and I (Mom was home, overseeing a kitchen renovation) sat on the couch in the waiting room watching the latest ANGRYs, closing eyes with Safari Alfred and his blank, careless look. Then someone in the back told the flustered cheerful receptionist to let us in. We walked into a back office with windows facing 52nd Street.

The summers of my childhood are a perfect post-war postcard of driving vacations across America, and in the hamlets we stopped in – Metropolis, Ill., Cooperstown, NY, Wartrace, Tenn. local newspaper office, announces himself and shoots with the other executive. By the same method that we have come to know ANGRY editors Nick Meglin and John Ficarra. Meglin’s business card read “Tennis Editor.”

(Ficarra said “Hot Shit.”)

Meglin apologized that publisher William Gaines, the magazine’s bearded and bespectacled Jerry Garcia-looking patriarch, famous for beating Congress 37 years earlier, was vacationing in France with his wife. But Meglin offered to show us his office. It was just unreal. I think it actually had windows at some point, but there was no natural light inside. Instead, there was a giant King Kong head and arm bolted to the wall as if reaching through the window to kidnap Gaines or whoever at his desk. The room was dimly lit, like a $5 studded table in a Fremont Street casino. Dad went to Gaines’s desk, picked up the mail and the papers on it, and flipped through them. (“Oh yeah, I used to do that whenever I was in someone’s office and they weren’t in town,” he said when I brought this up a month ago.)

We left Gaines’ office and went into a large, high-ceilinged composition room, kind of like the one at Dad’s newspaper. “I remember feeling at home,” he told me. “It was just another run-down print shop with all the usual junk scattered everywhere. And people were starving for interaction and validation.”

Pap is a journalist and a charter subscriber National lantern. When I turned 11, he took me and my brother to see our first parentally approved R-rated movie (Beverly Hills agent, Strongly recommended). Three weeks later, before Christmas, he and Mom gave us a subscription ANGRY, with Eddie Murphy right there on the cover. It was more than a spoof magazine, or a license to swear, or to talk openly about things like sex and alcohol and drugs. It was a challenge to think critically about popular culture and marketing, to question all their flattering insults to the intelligence community and fire back all their insubstantial answers with baffling humor.

My school grades were bad at the time, so I came up with an alternative path to pat my head, and it was adult humor. That didn’t necessarily mean scat jokes or sex language, but political references and sophisticated asides certainly did the trick. Like, “That actor has the dramatic reach of a charcuterie platter,” was guaranteed cocktail party applause. It has been stolen ANGRY (said of Prince, in a quip about his lesser-known stinker of a movie, Under the cherry moon).

My brother and I can quote MAD panels as a religious text: “Listen, I’m a sadist, not a mathematician!” (Darth Vader, in the Return of the Jedi parody of 1983). “AH-AH-AH-HOON!” (Iron Man sneezes into his helmet, per Don Martin, the master of onomatopoeia); “I can’t do this script! It’s bullshit!” (the late John Ritter, in a “Things Celebrities Never Say!” photo feature).

DC entertainment

1986, ANGRY overturned North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms in a 60 minutes parody illustrated by Mort Drucker, a sort of put-us-on-the-map moment for a state that didn’t have a major sports franchise back then. That’s not to say of the magazine’s many wordless absurdities, like Antonio Prohias shooting the teeth out of White or Black Spy, or a Sergio Aragones panel in which a ringmaster bleachers while an obviously costumed bear rides a unicycle. Then backstage, the grinning showman removes the bear mask to reveal the real performer: a horse.

After a short walk through the nondescript facility, Meglin, the “Tennis Editor,” invited us into his office, where Dad said he was also a USTA-certified umpire who worked on the US Open. (He still does.) That brought a flurry of excited questions. Meglin asked if Daddy had called the pets out! for the evening. Ficarra wondered if I should jump on a stray potato like a ball boy and roll it back to the chair at family dinner. I mumbled coy answers, but it was clear that this was the nonsense approach they took when presenting a topic for the magazine.

At one point, the great Angelo Torres knocked on Meglin’s door to turn in the next great movie parody: “Hack draft.It almost felt out of body to stand there, judging the jokes on the page and hearing Meglin and Ficarra critique. “Nah. That’s no problem. Oh that’s good.”

Dad and the editors talked about the US Open and how to get them a ridiculously difficult ticket. (In 1991, before the opening of Ashe Stadium, the National Tennis Center sold only about 20,000 tickets, the capacity of Louis Armstrong Stadium, despite all the surrounding courts and their seats. Today, a much larger amount is sold.) I had to pee , so I asked to use the toilet. Ficarra pointed it to me, to the side of the composing room.

I learned a lot from this tour, and it wasn’t just about ANGRY, or the people who worked there, or how they dealt with an absurd world. It was about how you go places you shouldn’t be. That is, if you act like you belong somewhere, people will usually let you in and may even do things for you.

That same day, Dad told me how to sneak into the press box at Shea Stadium (wait for the sportswriters to block the elevator after batting practice), and I made off with some hot dogs and media guides, despite not having a degree. Three years later, I drove all the way to Georgia Tech at the NC State student newspaper without telling our photographer that I hadn’t applied for a media pass, and I still managed to bluff both of us to press queue on the will call. (Complaining loudly that “I expect this sort of thing in Wake Forest” may have helped.) In my senior year, a friend and I went to NC Central Prison for an execution just to eat the free food at the press conference. Three years later, I came into a major sporting event dressed as a referee (this was before 9/11) and then, in 2008, I showed up at E3 without any pass.

ANGRYThe toilet was barely a closet, lit by an uncovered lamp. I walked outside, looking for a place to wash my hands. “There,” Nick said, pointing to the wall. The sink was outside in the brewing room for some reason. I let the tap run and dipped my hands in the water. A small, typed label was pasted above the buttons:

NIXON PISS HERE.

This has to be ANGRYI thought.

Correction (August 2, 2016): I was contacted today by Ficarra, who provided some clarification on my recollections, some details of which were mixed up or wrong:

• His business card was a one-time joke made by a colleague, not the one he handed out professionally. But it did say “Hot Shit.”

• The toilet wasn’t in the office itself either, but there was a sink in the brewing room with the Nixon sign.

The author regrets the mistakes.

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