It is hard to believe, in this new millennium, when satire and cultural criticism, most of it witless and inept, drip from virtually all of society’s pores, that there was once an era when subversive humor was as hard to find as a winning lottery ticket. The era was the 1950s, the gray flannel fifties, and Mad magazine, which began publishing early in the decade, was so subversive that the FBI actually investigated it, sometimes sending agents to visit the editors and, in the words of an FBI document, "firmly and severely admonish them."
Mad’s reaction was to draw funny cartoons of J. Edgar Hoover.
What me worry indeed…
