Mad
magazine would make fun of anyone who was in the public eye, but some
of those public figures had no sense of humor. In 1957, the target of
one of the magazine’s articles was the FBI and its director, J. Edgar
Hoover.
In a memo dated November 30, 1957, an agent
with the Federal Bureau of Investigation identified as “A. Jones” raised
an issue of critical importance: "Several complaints to the Bureau have
been made concerning the 'Mad' comic book [sic], which at one time
presented the horror of war to readers."
Attached to the document
were pages taken from a recent issue of Mad that featured a
tongue-in-cheek game about draft dodging. Players who earned such status
were advised to write to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and request a
membership card certifying themselves as a “full-fledged draft dodger.”
At least three readers, the agent reported, did exactly that.
Mad,
of course, was the wildly popular satirical magazine that was reaching
upwards of a million readers every other month. Published by William
Gaines, who had already gotten into some trouble with Congress when he
was called to testify about his gruesome horror comics in 1954, Mad
lampooned everyone and everything. But in name-checking the notoriously
humorless Hoover, Gaines had invited the wrong kind of attention.
A
visit from the FBI elicited an apology from the magazine, but the
Bureau did not seem to realize that you can’t calm a nest of hornets by
poking a stick at it. And thus began
a back-and-forth battle between the feds and the humor magazine that lasted years.
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