M. Thomas Inge, college professor
A joke isn't funny if you don't get the joke. In other words, you have to know something. The informed will always find more to laugh at than the uninformed.
When I read Mad magazine as a teenager there were a lot of jokes I didn't get. But these gags made me want to get them. They made me want to know more about the movies and books being parodied, about the politicians being ridiculed and so forth. Reading Mad made me a better newspaper and magazine reader, I believe. I wanted to get the jokes.
Thus, that magazine that many teachers and parents thought was a waste of time was, to my mind, educational. The magazine made me smarter, and the smarter I got the more I enjoyed the magazine.
The above quotation from M. Thomas Inge, a pop culture writer, suggests the satire magazine even had a certain snob appeal. It was to teenagers what Harper's or The Atlantic Monthly was to adults, a suggestion to peers of a certain level of intellectual elitism. You must know something if you read this magazine.
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