Mad is an American humor magazine first published in 1952. It was founded by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines, launched as a comic book series before it became a magazine. It was widely imitated and influential, affecting satirical media, as well as the cultural landscape of the 20th century, with editor Al Feldstein increasing readership to more than two million during its 1973–1974 circulation peak.
Sergio Aragonés Domenech is a Spanish/Mexican cartoonist and writer best known for his contributions to Mad magazine and creating the comic book Groo the Wanderer.
Isaac Sidney Caesar was an American actor, comedian and writer. With a career spanning 60 years, he was best known for two pioneering 1950s live television series: Your Show of Shows (1950–1954), which was a 90-minute weekly show watched by 60 million people, and its successor, Caesar's Hour (1954–1957), both of which influenced later generations of comedians. Your Show of Shows and its cast received seven Emmy nominations between the years 1953 and 1954 and tallied two wins. He also acted in films; he played Coach Calhoun in Grease (1978) and its sequel Grease 2 (1982) and appeared in the films It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Silent Movie (1976), History of the World, Part I (1981), Cannonball Run II (1984), and Vegas Vacation (1997).
Mad TV is an American sketch comedy television series created by David Salzman, Fax Bahr, and Adam Small. Loosely based on the humor magazine Mad, Mad TV's pre-taped satirical sketches were primarily parodies of popular culture and occasionally politics. Many of its sketches featured the show's cast members playing recurring original characters and doing celebrity impressions. The series premiered on Fox on October 14, 1995, and ran for 14 seasons. Its final episode aired on May 16, 2009.
Frank Romer Pierson was an American screenwriter and film director.
Evan Dorkin is an American comics artist and cartoonist. His best known works are the comic books Milk and Cheese and Dork. His comics often poke fun at fandom, even while making it clear that Dorkin is a fan himself.
John Burton Davis Jr. was an American cartoonist and illustrator, known for his advertising art, magazine covers, film posters, record album art, and numerous comic book stories. He was one of the founding cartoonists for Mad in 1952. His cartoon characters are characterized by extremely distorted anatomy, including big heads, skinny legs, and large feet.
Arnie Kogen is an American comedy writer and producer. He has written for TV, film, and is a longtime writer for Mad Magazine. Among his hundreds of Mad bylines, Kogen has written more than 100 film or television parodies.
Anthony J. Barbieri is an American comedic writer and performer. He is known for his appearances as the Jimmy Kimmel Live! character "Jake Byrd".
Tom Richmond is an American freelance humorous illustrator, cartoonist and caricaturist whose work has appeared in many national and international publications since 1990. He was chosen as the 2011 "Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year", also known as "The Reuben Award", winner by the National Cartoonists Society.
Sam Viviano is an American caricature artist and art director. Viviano's caricatures are known for their wide jaws, which Viviano has explained is a result of his incorporation of side views as well as front views into his distortions of the human face. He has also developed a reputation for his ability to do crowd scenes. Explaining his twice-yearly covers for Institutional Investor magazine, Viviano has said that his upper limit is sixty caricatures in nine days.
Jane Anderson is an American actress, playwright, screenwriter and director. She wrote and directed the feature film The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005), and wrote the film It Could Happen to You (1994), starring Nicolas Cage. She won an Emmy Award for writing the screenplay for the miniseries Olive Kitteridge (2014).
The immense popularity and wide recognition of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter fantasy series has led to its being extensively parodied, in works spanning nearly every medium. The franchise holds the record for the most fan fiction parodies, at over 900,000 Some self-described parodies have been targeted by Rowling and her publishers as plagiarism, while others have sold hundreds of thousands of copies without any threat of legal sanction. Misinterpretations of Harry Potter parodies have sparked at least two urban legends. Many Harry Potter parodies are self-published; others are put out as part of major comic productions, such as Mad, The Simpsons, South Park, Saturday Night Live and Robot Chicken, all of which have parodied Harry Potter several times. Rowling has also been parodied in a number of instances.
Paul Rose, known by his online persona Mr Biffo, is a British screenwriter. He was the editor of the Teletext-based video games magazine Digitiser, which ran between 1993 and 2003, and is a BAFTA-nominated writer of children's television.
Mad is known for many regular and semi-regular recurring features in its pages.
Kim Fuller is an English writer for film, radio and television. He is the brother of music manager and Idols series creator Simon Fuller.
"Superduperman" is a satirical story by Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood that was published in the fourth issue of Mad. Lampooning both Superman and Captain Marvel, it revolutionized the types of stories seen in Mad, leading to greatly improved sales. Writers such as Alan Moore have cited this story as an influence.
Tauriel is a fictional character from Peter Jackson's feature film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. The character does not appear in the original novel, but was created by Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, and Fran Walsh as an expansion of material adapted from the novel. She appears in the second and third films in that trilogy, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.
A pornographic parody film is a subgenre of the pornographic film industry genre where the basis for the production's story or plotline is the parody of a mainstream television show, feature film, public figure, video game or literary works. This subgenre also includes parody of historical or contemporary events such as political scandals. The subgenre has gained acceptance by the adult industry to the extent that major awards are presented in this category by organizations such as AVN and XRCO.
