DeBartolo is a satirist so talented that his work has appeared in consecutive issues of MAD for 26 years. No other member of the magazine’s “usual gang of idiots” can make that statement. At least I don’t think they can.
What’s more, it was not his only job. He also wrote for comedians and for television game shows. He rescued “The Match Game” for Goodson-Todman (after it was cancelled but before it had finished taping six weeks of scheduled shows) by introducing questions that invited listeners to think in double entendres, such as “John liked to put gravy on his (blank).” The show ran for about 10 more years. For years, he also has written a column for a power-boating magazine, notably an article on how to make your powerboat look like it is running faster than it is, which included a wig fashioned to suggest hair caught in a high wind.
He was still in high school when he sent in his first copy–a sendup of the “live” Imperial margarine tests conducted in supermarkets that, as he puts it, “raised a legitimate question: How come everybody they film is so normal? What would those tests be like if they were really done live?” In his version he depicted a “bimbo-type starlet doing anything to stay on camera and a dowdy old lady freaking out because she thought she was answering questions of a game show.” The young man who would later be billed as “MAD Magazine’s Maddest Writer” got his first taste of just how mad the staff was when he opened the self-addressed, stamped envelope he had sent with his copy. It contained a piece of cardboard, inscribed, cartoonist fashion, by Nick Meglin, then an associate editor: “HA, HA! Bet you thought you got REJECTED! Stapled to this cardboard is a check for your article. Please call about FUTURE WORK!”
DeBartolo reports that he always took notes wherever he went. As a result, this book is a genuine inside look at MAD’s real madness, complete with (reconstructed?) dialogue at times, and also dialogue obviously made up, as in his conversation with Bill Gaines, Mad’s founder and publisher and a close DeBartolo friend, after his death.
Scattered through the book are “forewords”–a clever device to get other people to write much of his book. Mort Drucker, who writes well and draws magnificently, contributed two, the first about Gaines, revealing that in the early 1950s, the publisher had one of his staff members warn a young man with a summer job at the magazine to beware of Gaines’ evil twin. Accordingly, Gaines on some days showed up at the office as the evil twin, “wearing a thin moustache, a Panama hat and a scar down the side of his face. He would intimidate everyone and in particular, the young man in the mail room.”
Perhaps you have wondered, as I have, if MAD’s parodies ever drew any flak. Sometimes they did. DeBartolo, who did parodies of countless movies, TV shows and commercials, tells of a letter he received from “Star Wars” producer George Lucas’ lawyers complaining about DeBartolo’s “Star Bores” parody. But DeBartolo already had received a letter from Lucas. “We decided to use Bill’s (Gaines’) letter-answering technique and scribbled on the lawyers’ letter–`Gee, your boss, George, liked it’–and attached a copy of Lucas’ letter. We never heard from them again.”
