60 Minutes piece on MAD (1987)
Hey, I just found something interesting on YouTube (that doesn’t involve a singing cat or a dramatic rodent): it’s the piece on MAD Magazine that 60 Minutes did, way back in 1987 (hat-tip to Dick DeBartolo for having re-posted it on his own site…hopefully it’ll stay up on YouTube for awhile before the Corporate Video Yankers find it!)
This story aired the night before we all gathered at Kennedy Airport in NYC for the 1987 MAD Trip (Paris & Zermatt, Switzerland), which happened to be my very first MAD Trip. It also lead to getting my very first belly laugh out of Bill Gaines, about an hour after meeting him. See, once this 60 Minutes piece aired, Bill suddenly started getting recognized by probably 100 times the usual number of strangers, coming up to him and saying “Hey, aren’t you that MAD guy?” or “Weren’t you on 60 Minutes last night?” After a non-stop parade of maybe a dozen people accosting Bill in the airline ticket-counter line, I tugged on his rumpled white shirt sleeve, pretending to be another of them, and breathlessly said to him, “Hey, I know you: aren’t you that guy who testified at the Kefauver Crime Committee hearings back in 1954?” [Check out the brief clip of actual footage from Bill's infamous appearance at that hearing, toward the end of this video.]
BTW: Note Morley Safer’s first line of questioning, essentially taking MY side about MAD being “outdated” — 22 years ago!
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