DoT EP101: Why Save MAD? with Michael Gerber and Ian Scott McGregor, plus New Music from Twin Peaks

The Department of Tangents Podcast

In early July, rumors started to surface that MAD Magazine was going to cease publishing new material and just reprint old stuff with new covers. MAD has been around since 1952 and has influenced multiple generations of smart asses. The eulogies came quick and heavy, and they’re still coming, even though we’ve never gotten a terrible clearly statement about the magazine’s future. Everyone seems so sure it’s dead, but what happens next with the magazine seems far from certain.

I loved MAD when I was a kid, and I’m the proud owner of a rejection letter from sending in a bunch of ideas years ago. It was a formative publication for me. But what is MAD Magazine now, and why save it? That’s the question I asked of Michael Gerber, editor and publisher of the humor magazine The American Bystander, and Ian Scott McGregor, an actor and filmmaker with a very personal attachment to MAD dating back to the early 90s, when he began to meet and befriend the writers and publishers in New York. He has been giving out “Stay MAD” stickers and trying to rally readers to help save the book. Gerber is leading a team of investors trying to save it.

Since MAD has been around so long, parodying popular culture all the way, this conversation wound up covering everything from the comics code and the Red Scare right up to the current administration and the magazine’s recent “Ghastly Gun” Edward Gorey parody. The new issue of MAD Magazine, which might be the final one with new material, is out on stands now. You can find out more at madmagazine.com. And you can find The American Bystander at americanbystander.org, and McGregor at ianscottmcgregor.com. The site to help save MAD is savemadmagazine.com.

This week’s featured track is “Dance Through It,” a grooving and uplifting tune about perseverance from the band Twin Peaks. The video for this, which you can find on the Department of Tangents blog, is also a kind of horror movie, in that it features a woman who wakes up having been knifed in the back and stumbles bloody through public places in what looks like hidden camera footage. Yes, the visual metaphor is a bit heavy-handed, but the video is breezy and fun, despite that, and winds up being a perfect compliment to the song. She does, after all, dance through it. The new album is called Lookout Low, and will be available September 13. You can find them on the Web at https://twinpeaksdudes.com/