A Funny Time for Skiing

When MAD Magazine put skiing on its cover, millions bought it. Ski editors were influenced too.

By John Fry

MAD, which ceased publication last year, was a seminal, grungy magazine of American culture during the second half of the 20th century. Its intensely illustrated and caustically written pages skewered the media, education, government agencies, politicians, hippies, psychoanalysts, the sexual revolution and even the lifestyles of its own cynical, adolescent-minded readers.

MAD #173 © E.C. Publications, Inc.

The image most closely associated with the magazine was Alfred E. Neuman, the boy with misaligned eyes and a gap-toothed smile. A skiing Neuman appeared on at least four MAD covers between 1975 and 1980. Publisher William Gaines and MAD’s editors and artists clearly saw frantic humor in putting him and the image of reckless skiing on the magazine’s cover. MAD’s most prolific illustrator was Jack Davis, an enthusiastic skier himself. Davis did the covers on the facing page and on page 25.

Seen through MAD’s eyes, a recreation in which people donned a pair of wooden boards and slid at high speed off a jump—or into a tree—must be as stupidly conceived as the TV shows, movies, health cures, and other sacred cows mocked by MAD. The ski-disaster visual also happened to be funny to the two million-plus newsstand buyers of the magazine.

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MAD was part of a golden age of publishing that happened to coincide with the peak newsstand sales of SKI and Skiing magazines. They picked up on MAD’s satirical spirit. In 1966, when I was SKI magazine’s editor-in-chief, I hired the talented young staff of the Harvard Lampoon to create a special eight-page humor section with fake articles. The most memorable joke was a letter from a bogus reader asking the magazine, “What is the cheapest way to engrave my name on my skis?” The answer was, “Change your name to Kaestle.”

In another spoof, SKI staffer Karen Rae wrote about visiting Mount Oniontop, with its glorious 100 feet of vertical, where nine jet flights a day soared over the local airport. “The sun sparkled and the crunch of my boots upon snow scared a volunteer patrolman,” she wrote. The prolific ski journalist Morten Lund wrote about a bus trip to Mt. Nowhere, a “mystical mountain where all the siren songs of ski resort publicity finally ring true.”
The ski magazines also featured full pages of cartoon art by Bob Cram and Bob Bugg. Laugh-inducing cartoons were eventually banished because too many of them made fun of women, or were seen as anti-feminist, even if the Editor and the cartoonist didn’t understand why. Political correctness hadn’t yet penetrated their minds. 

At MAD, anything and everything was politically incorrect. For many years the magazine’s offices were located on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue, several blocks north of the SKI Magazine office at 380 Madison. While MAD lampooned the work of the ad agencies on the avenue, SKI was selling Mad Men on the wonders of placing advertising in its pages.

In 2018, Burton’s Deep Thinker free-ride snowboard featured Alfred E. Neuman, the iconic MAD mascot. “If you’re wondering who these people are, they’re from an old humor magazine,” explained one website in a December 2017 review.

John Fry is the author of The Story of Modern Skiing, about the revolution in technique, equipment, resorts and media that revolutionized the sport after World War II. Skiing History and Fry are grateful to ISHA director Bob Soden for preserving the MAD covers, and to E.C. Publications, DC Comics and Warner Media for permission to reproduce them.

Cover at top of page: MAD #212 © E.C. Publications, Inc.