Category Archives: Mad Magazine

Anti-tobacco campaign, Mad Magazine

Great old Mad magazine anti-smoking ad

MAD-Magazine-Carry-On-Ad_536170b060fa49.59442991

Got this from Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. This is great! Really funny.

Mad magazine used to be famous for its fake ads (and some of them looked very real).

Here is a scathing ad from way back in 1965 just skewering Big Tobacco with a “Us Cigarette Makers Would Rather Fight than Quit” ad, mocking the old, long running Tareyton cigarette campaign of “I’d rather fight than switch.”

As a smoker smokes a dollar bill, the ad for “Carry On” reads:

“You think we’re going to let our billion-dollar industry go up in smoke? Sure those Gov’t reports linking cancer and smoking gave us a black eye! But just you wait! Our own scientists and public relations men are hard at work and we’ll be fighting back pretty soon!”

The ad concludes: “Coming Soon! Self serving reports to help the tobacco industry. Higher sales through statistical double talk.”

Wow, that is REALLY ahead of its time. I guess Mad magazine had no desire for any cigarette advertising.

 

Anti-tobacco campaign, Mad Magazine, Tobacco, Uncategorized

Old Mad Magazine tobacco ads

1 Comment

Hey thanks to Richard at the Patio for tuning me on to this.

He brought up Mad Magazine’s tobacco parody ads from the 1960s. I vaguely remember their parody ads (The Magazine at its height was before my time, but I used to get these little paperbacks of their old magazine Mad used to put out like 10 years later. I gave away all those paperbacks. I had dozens of ’em. Used to get them at a little cheesy gift shop at Bass Lake, Calif.) I had a bunch of Don Martin and Spy vs. Spy books, too. Don Martin was great.

Mad Magazine is really dated and at the time was kind of edgy, but today it looks pretty staid (and very New York-ish) compared to the humour that’s out there today. National Lampoon and other magazines kind of blew Mad out of the water, but they paved the way.  I don’t know if we just grew up, or if Mad Magazine got stale, but it stopped being the cultural phenomenon it was inthe 1960s.

I had a few of their old comics from the 1950s that were really cool. Really subversive stuff for the 50s. Just kind of goofy comics. Then Mad turned into more a satire of politics and culture in the 60s. The 50s comics seem more timeless to me.

So, I went online and dug up a few of them. Most of these are from the late 1960s. Again — FOR THE TIME — this was considered edgy. One of the cartoons with Obama is obviously a newer one.

Oh, whoops, just realized I sneaked a real ad in there. Can you find it? It’s pretty bad.

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