people to involve themselves in hideous difficulties, along with 
their entire inability to turn a hand to help themselves, the 
more they giggled. “Satire,” said Swift, “is a glass in which we 
see every countenance but our own.”

     The comic strip and the ad, then, both belong to the 
world of games, to the world of models and extensions of 
situations elsewhere. MAD  magazine, world of the woodcut, the 
print, and the cartoon, brought them together with other 
games and models from the world of entertainment. MAD  is a 
kind of newspaper mosaic of the ad as entertainment, and 
entertainment as a form of madness. Above all, it is a print- 
and woodcut-form of expression and experience whose sudden 
appeal is a sure index of deep changes in our culture. Our need 
now is to understand the formal character of print, comic and 
cartoon, both as challenging and changing the consumer-