"The Lighter Side of Copyright Infringement."

Appropriating the panels Dave Berg drew for MAD and replacing the word balloons. (Via Metafilter.)

National Lampoon did it in 1971, and "'in 1991 or 1992,' Sam Henderson and some unnamed friends put together a zine titled The Lighter Side of Copyright Infringement, featuring Berg MAD art with rewritten, raunchy words in the balloons. (Henderson is proud that they found a font similar to MAD’s mechanical typography.)" And:

The editors of MAD began to practice Berg-détournement themselves when they introduced (in #487, March 2008) their “Darker Side of The Lighter Side” feature, a recycling of Berg’s images with new word balloons. Now Berg’s delicately-drawn characters deliver jokes about murder and sex offenders in the pages of the magazine itself. Late capitalism can recuperate and profit from anything, including the subversion of its own laws about property ownership, but the inspiration for “The Darker Side of The Lighter Side” goes back to the earliest comic-book issues of MAD, where Harvey Kurtzman wrote new, supposedly funny word balloons for previously published E.C. horror stories (“Murder the Husband!” / “Murder the Story!” MAD #11, May 1954) and slapped captions on pictures of babies (“Baby Quips!” MAD #13, July 1954) to save money on contributors’ wages and keep ahead of crushing deadlines.

"In 1959 Fred Astaire hired renowned makeup artist John Chambers to work on his television special, Another Evening with Fred Astaire."

"The assignment? Turn Fred Astaire into Alfred E. Neuman. The results were predictably strange."



As they say... The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

I can't imagine such a long dance routine on network TV, even with a visual gag. I can't imagine a visual gag going on and on like that. People must have been so much more patient back then. Or much more in love with the idea of themselves as appreciating elevated culture. And yet it was not so elevated, what with the Alfred E. Neuman gag.

And that deadly modern dance. The woman swanning around while men in tuxedos behaved as if they were a single entity and that entity was a pulsating sexual organ. And all in such exquisite taste! Then Neuman/Astaire performs alone, lasts longer than all the rest of them, but in the end, he too loses his erection.

Moral: The ugliest guy might be the best performer.

Did I get that right?