MAD Magazine just isnt funny anymore

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Do you remember or even still read MAD Magazine? You know, the magazine with the goofy looking character Alfred E. Neuman. MAD has been around since the 1950s with its unique brand of satirical humor. When I was a kid, my father took me to the barber shop to get our haircuts. You always had to wait awhile and there was the proverbial table of newspapers and magazines. I always looked forward to reading MAD Magazine and delighted in devouring it. I thought it was really funny stuff like Spy Vs Spy. Many things are funny when you are 10. Flash forward to the present and being well past middle-age. After not looking at MAD for decades, I have perused a number of issues at the library. MAD is not funny. Maybe I am trying to recapture some youth in my dotage but MAD is not funny. I get the wisecracks and jokes but they are not amusing. Not even a chuckle. The magazine’s format is essentially unchanged with parodies of movies, television shows and other pop culture as well as the familiar regular features like Spy Vs Spy. After 60 years of the same tricks over and over, Spy Vs Spy seems old and stale. I read a parody of Modern Family TV series and there were the proverbial comments and exaggeration of actress Sofia Vergara’s accent, sexiness and abundant attributes. MAD has employed those juvenile snickers forever. That is awfully sexist for a magazine with an obvious liberal political leanings. But I am an adult now and not a kid. Yes, I am a kid at heart but MAD just failed miserably to arouse pleasant nostalgia. MAD’s readership likely skewers older these days rather than teens. I kept looking at issues trying to be amused. Am I missing something? Did I outgrow MAD or did MAD outgrow me? Rewritten from a deleted post from Persona Paper.