Letters to the Editor
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When I grow up, I wanna be a writer for MAD or the WWN
Dear Mr. Sinberg,
I'd like to thank you and the rest of your colleagues at WWN and MAD. I still love them both as an adult, but they were two of my all-time favorite publications when I was a kid.
On many long, tense, crappy family Saturday afternoons, MAD in particular transported me to a funny, warm, world of play. Really, when I think of it, perhaps my life-long love of cultural and literary theory and criticism was born reading some of the film send-ups. (I remember being particularly captivated by the spoof of Rocky, for some reason.) If a popular comic can be said to capture some of the spirit of Derrida's "freeplay, I vote for MAD.
Similarly, the WWN, with its extraordinary lies, put a spell of wonder on me and cracked me up, distracting me from the imaginative desert of grocery shopping while my parents fought. 'Could they be true?' I wondered, 'Could they be lies? Were grownups really allowed to just make things up and write them in newspapers?'
I thought that the grownups who got paid to write for MAD and WWN had to be the absolutely luckiest people in the world. As a grownup-ish now, on bad work days, I still daydream about it sometimes.
Thanks for years of the joy of goofball intellectual play.