Al Jaffee, Mad magazine’s cartoon maestro, dies at 102

He was Mad magazine’s longest-serving contributor and proudly helped corrupt the minds of generations of young Americans

By Ali Bahrampour
April 10, 2023 at 5:10 p.m. EDT



Al Jaffee draws himself in a double self-caricature. (Al Jaffee)

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The monthly fold-in, Mr. Jaffee’s best-known Mad cartoon, is a one-page picture with a question above and a caption below. When the page is folded vertically into thirds, the two outer sections join to form a new image and a new caption, which answers the question.



A color fold-in by Mr. Jaffee published in Mad in June 1968. The fold-ins are optical illusion gags for the magazine's inside back page. (Al Jaffee/DC Entertainment)

Conceived in 1964 as a poor-cousin parody of the multi-page foldouts that were appearing in glossy magazines such as Life and Playboy, the fold-in became a regular feature and often provided the sole note of direct editorializing in the pages of Mad.

One 1968 panel, done at the height of the Vietnam War, showed students outside a job center and asked, “What is the one thing most school dropouts are sure to become?” ... It folded to depict a student in a cannon with the caption: “Cannon fodder.”

A picture showing 1972’s presidential candidates splashing around in a swimming pool promised to reveal what the public could expect this election. When folded, the image became a giant toilet with a caption reading “The same old stuff.”

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Mr. Jaffee in 2011. (Stephen Morton/AP)

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Mr. Jaffee’s first piece for Mad — about a golfer whose secret to a successful swing lies in the extra fingers he sprouts — appeared in 1955. Two years later, he followed Kurtzman to his new magazine, the short-lived Trump, financed by Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, and then to Humbug, which also folded.

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In 2013, Columbia University acquired Mr. Jaffee’s archive. Despite the Ivy League imprimatur, the cartoonist was still happy when people called him “the retching jackal guy,” a reference to his Mad illustration showing that animal mid-vomit. ... “It may be my most successful drawing,” he told his biographer. “It’s utterly silly, I know, but I’m utterly silly. Serious people my age are dead.”