Happy retirement, Al Jaffee!

We’ve had to bid a sad farewell to so many rockers in the last few years.  It’s nice to bid a fond but not-so-sad farewell to someone.  He’s not a rocker though.  Al Jaffee, cartoonist for Mad Magazine and officially the longest working comic artist ever, has not passed away — he’s retiring!  At age 99!

Jaffee’s best known bits in Mad were “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” and the Mad Fold-Ins.  Reading Mad as a kid, I also remember bits he drew about the advertising biz.  In a way, he was a pre-cursor to Seinfeld in style of humor.  He rarely got outrageous — he would often just say things that were plain-old true but no-one had pointed out before.

Well certainly he would stretch a little sometimes.  One of his articles was about planned obsolescence, and he said that toilet paper manufacturers would make every third perforation a fake, so that one out of three times when people would yank on it, it would send a bunch of paper to the floor, causing the roll to be used up faster.  Ever since I read that, I’m extra careful.

Mad will soon stop publishing new content, so Al is retiring just in time.  I guess if you’re doing what you love, working until age 99 is not a problem.

Check out this article about Mr. Jaffee:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/06/06/al-jaffee-mad-magazine-retires/