![]() You’ve done Fold-Ins for longer than most marriages last. You’ve been doing this, trying to outsmart your readers, for half a century.Īnd it’s really just one joke, done over and over and over and over. My job is to make it impossible for them to guess in advance. Most of our readers try to guess what it’ll be before they fold it in, and they work very hard at it, from what I’ve been told. It’s a joke that never finds its punchline. If a Fold-In isn’t folded in, does it really exist? It’s like that “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it” riddle. I don’t think people want to be lumps, letting you fill their heads with ideas. What I always loved about the Fold-In is that it couldn’t be enjoyed passively. That’s when I feel like we were doing our best work, when the readers needed to keep up, or at least take a more active role. A kid had to do his homework to keep up with Mad. There were the dog poop jokes, sure.īut you also wrote about government bureaucracy and nuclear proliferation and consumer manipulation. When we were growing up, it felt like reading Mad, and your work in particular, made us smarter. And it’s possible that all the readers of Mad are mentally ill. In that interview with Mike Sacks, Jaffee offered up a joke that he probably could’ve guessed would inevitably become the kicker in at least one of his obituaries.All human beings are intelligent, with the exception of people who are mentally ill. He won numerous prizes from the National Cartoonists society in the Seventies, and in 2007, he won the industry’s top prize, the Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year. Jaffee was widely lauded for his work over the years. ![]() Up on the roof, how the hell would I know where Mom was?” He asked me a question that he asked every time he came home from school: ‘Where’s Mom?’ And I answered, ‘I killed her and I’m stuffing her down this chimney.’ He knew I was kidding, obviously, but I thought about this afterward, and it occurred to me that there must be a million times a day we all get asked questions to which you either don’t know the answer or it’s a pointless question. “Suddenly, I heard my son climbing up this ladder. In an interview (originally published in Mike Sacks’ 2009 book, And Here’s the Kicker, with a longer version printed in Vulturelast month), Jaffee explained the origins of the segment, saying it occurred to him when he was trying to fix an antenna on the roof of his house. While the “Fold-In” showcased Jaffee’s drawing and writing skills, “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” - which Jaffee debuted in 1965 - was all about quickfire quips and burns. For 55 years, Jaffee was the only person at Mad who drew the “Fold-In,” creating well over 500 and publishing his final one in June 2020 (a somber yet sardonic bit about the end of Mad). ![]() When Jaffee first started contributing to Mad, it was mostly as a writer at the time, he was also working on other projects, including a syndicated comic strip called “Tall Tales.” His creative breakthrough came in 1964 when he published his first “Fold-In” - a brilliant back cover idea that involved folding an illustration vertically and inward to reveal a new picture and punch-line. Inferior Man was purchased by comics giant Will Eisner, and Jaffee later spent some time working for another luminary, Stan Lee. As a professional artist, Jaffe’s knack for parody and satire was apparent from one of his earliest characters: Inferior Man, an obvious spoof of caped crusaders, who easily caved at the pressure of fighting crime. Upon his return to the U.S., Jaffee threw himself into art, earning a spot in the inaugural class at New York City’s High School of Music and Art (two of his classmates, William Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman, would later found Mad). ![]() During his time in Lithuania, however, Jaffee’s father started sending him Sunday comics from America, which is where his love for cartooning began. The trip was only supposed to last one month, but it turned into a six-year ordeal as his parents battled over custody. At the age of six, his mother decided to take him and his three younger brothers back to the shtetl in Lithuania from which she’d emigrated. Born in Savannah, Georgia on March 13, 1921, Jaffee had a somewhat peculiar childhood. ![]()
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