Al Jaffee, Mad magazine's award-winning cartoonist and ageless wise guy who delighted millions of kids with the sneaky fun of the Fold-In and the snark of "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions," has died. He was 102. Jaffee died Monday in Manhattan from multiple organ failure, according to his granddaughter, Fani Thomson. He had retired at the age of 99, the AP reports. Mad magazine, with its wry, sometimes pointed send-ups of politics and culture, was essential reading for teens and preteens during the baby-boom era and inspiration for countless future comedians. Few of the magazine’s self-billed “Usual Gang of Idiots” contributed as much—and as dependably—as the impish, bearded cartoonist. For decades, virtually every issue featured new material by Jaffee.
His collected "Fold-Ins," taking on everyone in his unmistakably broad visual style from the Beatles to TMZ, was enough for a four-volume box set published in 2011. Readers savored his Fold-Ins like dessert, turning to them on the inside back cover after looking through such other favorites as Don Martin's "Spy. vs. Spy" and Dave Berg's "The Lighter Side." The premise, originally a spoof of the old Sports Illustrated and Playboy magazine foldouts, was that you started with a full-page drawing and question on top, folded two designated points toward the middle and produced a new and surprising image, along with the answer.
Jaffee was also known for "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions," which delivered exactly what the title promised. A comic from 1980 showed a man on a fishing boat with a noticeably bent reel. “Are you going to reel in the fish?” his wife asks. “No,” he says, “I’m going to jump into the water and marry the gorgeous thing.” Jaffee didn’t just satirize the culture; he helped change it. His parodies of advertisements included such future real-life products as automatic redialing for a telephone, a computer spell checker, and graffiti-proof surfaces. He also anticipated peelable stamps, multiblade razors, and self-extinguishing cigarettes.
story continues below
Jaffee's admirers ranged from Charles M. Schulz of Peanuts fame and Far Side creator Gary Larson to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who marked Jaffee’s 85th birthday by featuring a Fold-In cake on The Colbert Report. Jaffee received numerous awards, and in 2013 was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, the ceremony taking place at San Diego Comic-Con International. In 2010, he contributed illustrations to Mary-Lou Weisman's Al Jaffee's Mad Life: A Biography. Mad lost much of its readership and edge after the 1970s, and Jaffee outlived virtually all of the magazine's stars. But he rarely lacked for ideas even as his method, drawing by hand, remained mostly unchanged in the digital era.
(More
Mad Magazine stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
