- By Emma Saunders
- entertainment reporter
April 11, 2023 at 11:01 am CET
Updated 1 hour ago
Image source, Getty Images
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Al Jaffee’s parents were Lithuanians and he spent part of his childhood there
Award-winning American cartoonist Al Jaffee, best known for his work for the satirical magazine Mad, has died at the age of 102.
Jaffee, who was still working until three years ago, set a Guinness World Record for his 77-year career.
Mad magazine catered to pre-teens and teens, with Jaffee famous for his fold-in pages on the inside back cover.
Jaffee’s famous fans included Charles M. Schulz, creator of Peanuts, and his work was featured in The Simpsons.
His trademark fold-ins were a parody of Playboy and Sports Illustrated fold-out inserts.
They showed an image with a question at the top and a caption at the bottom. When the page was folded vertically in thirds, the two outer sections merged into a new image and caption that answered the question.
Jobs on Mars
The fold-ins included a 1968 Jaffee created during the Vietnam War, which showed students in front of a job center accompanied by the question, “What will most high school dropouts surely become?”
When folded, the picture turned into a young person in a cannon with the inscription: “Cannon fodder”.
A box set of his fold-ins was released in 2011.
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Jaffee was also known for a regular segment called Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, which featured sarcastic answers to stupid questions.
A 1980 comic showed a man on a fishing boat with a bent pulley. “Will you catch the fish?” asks his wife. “No,” he says, “I’m going to jump in the water and marry that beautiful thing.”
Al Jaffee’s Mad Inventions were also popular, including items such as a smokeless ashtray.
“I think they beat Mad because they go beyond anything we can think of to show the clownish nature of their claims,” he said. “Politicians used to claim that within two years or so they would create jobs for everyone in the country; now they claim they will create jobs for everyone on Mars.”
Famous fans of Jaffee included Far Side creator Gary Larson and television presenter Stephen Colbert, who celebrated Jaffee’s 85th birthday by featuring a foldover cake on his show The Colbert Report.
Matt Groening’s The Simpsons referenced Mad magazine and the fold-in in several episodes over the years.
DC tweeted: “His signature style and wit will be WORTHLY missed.”
The satirical singer Weird Al Yankovic described Jaffee as one of his “heroes of all time”.
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“Al was a rascal at heart,” said John Ficarra, a former Mad editor-in-chief who worked at Jaffee for over 35 years. “He always had a playful sparkle in his eyes and brought that sensitivity to everything he created.”
The cartoonist was born Abraham Jaffee in Savannah, Georgia in 1921 (he later legally changed his name to Allan). His parents were Jewish Lithuanians, but his mother never really settled in the US and she brought Al and his three younger brothers back to Lithuania for six years.
His father brought him back to America when he was 12 and he began attending the High School of Music and Art in New York.
He then worked for Stan Lee and the New York Herald Tribune before embarking on a long career at Mad, although he always remained a freelancer.
His awards included the 2008 Reuben Awards’ Cartoonist of the Year.
To mark his retirement in 2020, Mad released a special edition “All Jaffee” — a pun on the word Al — featuring a selection of his work over the years.