Al Jaffee, whose 64-year career with MAD magazine makes him its longest-running artist, was born in Savannah, Georgia on this date in 1921. He spent six years living in Lithuania in a Yiddish-speaking environment before returning to the U.S. in 1933. Jaffee’s schoolmates at New York’s High School of Music and Art included Will Elder, Harvey Kurtzman, John Severin and Al Feldstein, all key players at MAD.
Among Jaffee’s most notable creations have been MAD’s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” and the back-cover Fold-Ins — in which one image ingeniously yields another after the page is tri-folded — which he first launched in 1964. The Fold-In appeared in almost every issue of the magazine until 2008. Amazingly, Jaffee draws all of these by hand: “I’m working on a hard, flat board . . . I cannot fold it. . . . never see the finished painting folded until it’s printed in the magazine.” Jaffee also wrote quite a few of Mad’s cartoon parodies of movies, television shows and other cultural icons, usually with cartoonist Mort Drucker.
In 2008, Jaffee was awarded the National Cartoonists Society Reuben Award (named for Rube Goldberg) as Cartoonist of the Year. In an interview with ABC News in February, 2014, Jaffee revealed the one fold-in MAD refused to run.
“We were just being very silly.” —Al Jaffee