The MAD career that almost wasn’t
My very first submission to MAD was around 1973, when I was just out of high school. It was a script full of more “Horrifying Cliches” - my favorite recurring feature at the time. A couple months after sending it, I received a handwritten rejection letter from editor Nick Meglin saying, ‘Sorry, but we’re stocked up on all the Horrifying Cliches we’ll ever need. Keep trying! MAD-ly, Nick.’
I was crushed and defeated; I didn’t even try writing MAD stuff for 2 or 3 years after this. I was also a complete idiot! Any of you who are freelance writers; have tried to become freelance writers; or are even slightly less dense than my 18-year-old self will have already spotted one particular word from the previous paragraph practically jumping off the page, flashing and setting off bells & whistles. I’m referring, of course, to…“handwritten!” HANDWRITTEN! HANDWRITTEN! As I eventually figured out, handwritten notes from editors of big national magazines, besides being fairly rare, are “code” for “We think enough of your material to actually put pen to paper, rather than reaching for the pad of pre-printed form rejection slips we use for those 90% of submissions that, for one reason or another, aren’t even in the ballpark.”
The way I learned this bit of not-so-secret Editor Code was by compiling my own impressive collection of form rejection slips from other magazines (under the clever guise of “someone actually trying to get them to buy my material”). My Impressive Collection was lost in a house fire in the 1980s, along with my high school letter sweater (for Journalism) and a personal 1973 letter from Woody Allen. (BTW: If you yourself are a writer keeping a rejection slip collection…I strongly urge you to burn yours, too. You don’t have to burn the house along with it, but definitely lose the “Reminders of My Freelance Failures”-scrapbook! It’s pointless, it’s masochistic, and in the publishing industry, those annoying little slips are as ubiquitous, and have the same value, as toilet paper. Burn the suckers.)
My first actual sale to MAD was a UPC-barcode cover-gag. See, there was an age, long 
ago, when this stupid little doohickey at the left wasn’t plastered on every single thing in the world. In the late 1970s, MAD finally had to submit to the dictates of Modern Commerce and start defiling their covers with this monstrosity, so for them, mocking it was their little way of thumbing their nose at “the Man.” (How times have changed: today, not only is the magazine 20-25% ad pages, but they’re even selling “advert-articles” — about which more later, for sure.)
So, here is The Gag, as it appeared on the cover of MAD #203, next to the UPC-barcode: “Exclusive: scientists release first computer-written joke” (Thank you, thank you very much. I’ll be here all week. Be sure and tip your waitress!). For that I received a check for $25 — which isn’t a lot of money today…who are we kidding, it wasn’t a lot of money back then! But, as you can guess, it was huge deal to me! I spent an inordinate amount of time doing stuff like: calculating out how much that was per word (@$3.57, unless you count the hyphenated words as one, then it zooms up to @$4.17/wd); or figuring out the hourly wage based on how long it took to write ($400/hr); or coming up with ways to drop my new writing credit into casual conversation (”…well, speaking as the author of ‘‘Exclusive: Scientists release first computer-written joke,’ I think that…”).
Over the next few years, I sold MAD a couple more gags…got my first “Idea by” credit in the magazine…and, oh yeah, nearly committed career suicide by dashing off a blistering 5-page “nastygram” to the editors. (Everything worked out fine in the end — I’ll explain in a later post; it’ll make perfect sense. But I still don’t recommend anyone else trying it.)