Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
During the 1950s and 60s, FBI agents kept a file on Mad Magazine, worrying that its wisecracks about J. Edgar Hoover and spoofs about the John Birch Society and draft dodgers might be communist propaganda. Thanks to the Freedom of Information-Privacy Acts, the FBI-MAD files are now available online, accompanied by an interview with Mad editor Al Feldstein. "All through my years as editor of MAD, I was constantly and continuously surprised and amazed at reader reaction to the satirical, humorous, tongue-in-cheek, absolutely outlandish articles we'd run," Feldstein says. "People with no sense of humor had no business reading it. ... Some readers would take us deadly serious ... and chastise us and berate us for whatever we'd just published. Some readers (not necessarily 'fans') would go even further...and accuse us of being Un-American, etc. ... And some readers, like an FBI Director with real problems about his public image, would send his Agents to attempt to intimidate us."
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