{"id":95203,"date":"2016-03-03T12:45:13","date_gmt":"2016-03-03T17:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=95203"},"modified":"2018-12-06T10:26:00","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T15:26:00","slug":"a-boy-with-no-birthday-turns-sixty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/03\/a-boy-with-no-birthday-turns-sixty\/","title":{"rendered":"A Boy with No Birthday Turns Sixty"},"content":{"rendered":"

The long and tangled history of Alfred E. Neuman.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"File:Alfred

Postcard that later inspired Norman Mingo’s, Alfred E. Neuman.<\/p><\/div>\n

In a 1975 interview with the\u00a0New York Times, MAD Magazine<\/em> founder Harvey Kurtzman recalled an illustration of a grinning boy he\u2019d spotted on a postcard in the early fifties: a \u201cbumpkin portrait,\u201d \u201cpart leering wiseacre, part happy-go-lucky kid.\u201d It was captioned \u201cWhat, Me Worry?\u201d<\/p>\n

That bumpkin became Alfred E. Neuman, MAD<\/em>\u2019s mascot, who turns sixty this year\u2014kind of. The impish, immutable redhead made his official debut in December 1956, when he appeared on the cover of MAD<\/em> no. 30 as a write-in candidate for president. He\u2019s appeared on almost every MAD<\/em> cover since: possessing, spoofing, and spooking cultural icons with nothing more than a drowsy rictus. Though MAD<\/em> gave him a purpose, a permanent home, his origin story remains elusive. It involves, among other things, a plum-pudding advertisement, a dubious lawsuit, and a traveling nineteenth-century farce. Neuman is forever synonymous with the magazine and its infinite irreverence, but the riddle of his real age may be the trickster\u2019s trump card.\u00a0<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In the corners of MAD<\/em>\u2019s early issues, Kurtzman deployed the \u201cWhat, Me Worry?\u201d face as a miniature visual motif that would pop up in the margins of the publication\u2019s densely-packed black-and-white pages. When Al Feldstein inherited editorial control from Kurtzman in 1956, he made the boy the full-color magazine\u2019s new figurehead. Mascots by then had become a point of prestige: Playboy<\/em> had its bunny, The New Yorker<\/em> had Eustace Tilley, Esquire<\/em> had the wide-eyed Mr. Esky. \u201cI decided that I wanted to have this visual logo as the image of MAD<\/em>, the same way that corporations had the Jolly Green Giant and the dog barking at the gramophone for RCA,\u201d Feldstein told the A.V. Club in 2007.<\/p>\n

Feldstein commissioned Neuman\u2019s first cover portrait from Norman Mingo. A sixty-year-old veteran of commercial illustration, Mingo\u2019s specialty was Vargas-style pinups and Norman Rockwell\u2013esque portrayals of middle-class American culture. He was near retirement when he responded to a New York Times<\/em> ad that read ILLUSTRATOR WANTED<\/small>. A born-again Christian, Mingo recoiled when he first visited the magazine\u2019s headquarters at 485 \u201cMADison Avenue,\u201d but his luxuriant style was a perfect fit for the burgeoning publication, and he needed the work. Beginning with the Neuman assignment, he ended up painting most of MAD<\/em>\u2019s covers for the next twenty years.<\/p>\n

For the half-length color painting of their red-haired mascot, Feldstein told Mingo that he didn\u2019t want the boy to \u201clook like an idiot\u2014I want him to be lovable and have an intelligence behind his eyes. But I want him to have this devil-may-care attitude, someone who can maintain a sense of humor while the world is collapsing around him.\u201d MAD<\/em> insiders referred to the kid by various names\u2014Mel Haney, Melvin Cowsnofsky\u2014but when the magazine won legal rights to the face, he was officially christened Alfred E. Neuman. A pseudonym without a specific host, it was one of many counterfeit names used as running gags in the magazine.<\/p>\n

By 1965, when the face had grown in stature to become a familiar punch line in the national culture, the widow of a cartoonist named Harry Spencer Stuff brought a lawsuit against MAD<\/em>. Neuman, the plaintiff claimed, was a copy of Stuff\u2019s caricature \u201cThe Original Optimist,\u201d also known as \u201cMe-worry?\u201d, which he had copyrighted in 1914.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Antikamnia-tablet calendar, from 1908.<\/p><\/div>\n

To help fight the infringement claim, MAD <\/em>searched for and solicited from its readers evidence of the boy\u2019s existence before 1914. The image that Kurtzman first discovered on that postcard turned out to be an itinerant orphan of low-budget advertising, with a trail of appearances dating back to the early twentieth century. He was there on a 1942 matchbook for an auto-parts store in Longhorn, Texas; on the label of Happy Jack, a soda produced in 1939; on the menu for a coffee shop in Ashland, Nebraska;\u00a0in a 1908 calendar for antikamnia, a cure-all painkiller spiked with heroin; in a 1905 ad for \u201cpainless dentistry,\u201d beneath the quip, IT DIDN\u2019T\u00a0HURT A BIT!<\/small>; and in a 1902 playbill for Maloney\u2019s Wedding Day<\/em>, a small-market musical comedy. Every graphic centered on a portrait of a kid with mussed red hair, saucer ears, and a shit-eating grin, minus a tooth. Stuff may have codified the image, giving the boy the sleepy grin and tilted posture, but earlier iterations suggested that his caricature was itself a modified copy. The court ruled in MAD<\/em>\u2019s favor: Neuman was a fatherless mutant of the public domain.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In Completely Mad<\/em>, her comprehensive 1991 history of the magazine, the writer and researcher Maria Reidelbach traced the earliest Neuman antecedent to 1895, in an advertisement for Atmore\u2019s Mince Meat and Genuine English Plum Pudding. \u201cThe kid\u2019s features are fully developed and unmistakable,\u201d Reidelbach wrote, \u201cand the image was very likely taken from an older archetype that has yet to be found.\u201d<\/p>\n

Peter Reitan doesn\u2019t believe in untraceable archetypes. A patent attorney based in Irvine, California, Reitan devotes his spare time to researching arcane threads of pop culture. Under the pseudonym Peter Jensen Brown, he collects his work in a series of personal blogs<\/a>. One is dedicated to \u201cThe Dude-craze of 1883.\u201d Another focuses on the evolutions of Bozo the Clown. A former competitive Scrabble player, Reitan relishes etymologies with supposedly unknowable origins: \u201cthe whole nine yards,\u201d \u201cthe whole shebang,\u201d \u201c23 skidoo.\u201d \u201cI like looking at things that seem mysterious,\u201d he says. \u201cOnce you get enough early information, they seem less mysterious.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Atmore\u2019s Plum Pudding ad, ca. 1895.<\/p><\/div>\n

In late 2012, Reitan was trawling the online newspaper database Chronicling America for information about the Cuban Giants, the first African-American professional baseball club. (Early sports histories are another of Reitan\u2019s specialties.) Scanning a page from an old Los Angeles Herald<\/em>, he noticed a familiar face mugging at him from a corner. The scraggly hair, the missing tooth\u2014Neuman. A caption beneath the face read: \u201cWhat\u2019s the good of anything?\u2014Nothing!\u201d It advertised a play called The New Boy<\/em>. The paper was dated December 2, 1894.<\/p>\n

Reitan had been a MAD<\/em> reader as a boy, but he was unaware of the ongoing debate over Neuman\u2019s origins. \u201cFinding the image made me wonder,\u201d he says, \u201cand then, when I went looking, I found John Adcock\u2019s Yesterday\u2019s Papers blog<\/a>, which led to Maria Reidelbach\u2019s book and the Atmore\u2019s Plum Pudding ad \u2026 That\u2019s when I figured I might be on to something.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

An 1894 ad for\u00a0The New Boy<\/i>: Neuman\u2019s clearest prototype<\/p><\/div>\n

Reitan\u2019s research turned up a history of The New Boy<\/em>, a comic farce that had been a smash hit in London and then New York before traveling America in a touring company throughout late 1894 and early 1895. The grinning boy was a rendering of the play\u2019s title character, Archibald Rennick, a thirty-ish man who passes as a boarding-school adolescent so that he and his wife can cash in on an inheritance scheme. The foundational image, Reitan deduced, was probably based on either Bert Coote or James T. Powers, two rubber-faced, red-haired stage actors who starred in the early productions.<\/p>\n

As Reitan points out, the advertisement \u201cwould likely have been seen in every city where the show played during its three tours over a span of more than five years,\u201d which helps explain the boy\u2019s omnipresence. He was adopted for political caricatures and soon after for more advertising, including the Atmore\u2019s Pies graphic. Each new riff invited another wave of copycats: the character split and multiplied, strengthening its potency as a meme and obscuring any certain origins.<\/p>\n

While some MAD<\/em> theorists insist that Neuman\u2019s history goes back further, to the racist, simian-faced Irish cartoons that Joseph Keppler and Frederick Opper drew in the 1870s, the resemblance becomes more specious in images before 1894. \u201cThe fact that so many of the other, similar images cropped up soon after the play opened, and none of them before, suggest that the image originated with The New Boy<\/em>,\u201d Reitan wrote in his original post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The pre-1894 cartoon images \u2026 may just be random look-a-likes of a funny type, in the same way that Howdy Doody, Opie Taylor, Richie Cunningham, Ron Howard, Rick Astley, and the young Prince Charles looked like Alfred E. Neuman. Let\u2019s face it, redheaded kids with big ears are just funny, a painful lesson that my brother and I learned at a young age, as did our father, uncle, and grandfather before us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*<\/p>\n

When Mingo retired in 1976, the task of drawing Neuman passed from Frank Kelly Freas to Richard Williams, Mark Fredrickson, and a host of trusted MAD<\/em> staffers. In a recent blog post<\/a>, the illustrator Tom Richmond, who has been with MAD<\/em> since 2000, outlined the strictures limiting Neuman\u2019s evolution. \u201cI was told early on that any depictions of Alfred should be based solidly on the Mingo original,\u201d said Richmond:<\/p>\n

Artists are not allowed to do 3\/4\u2019s or profiles of Alfred \u2026 We can only draw the front or back of his head directly. I was told not to try and \u2018caricature\u2019 Alfred or place my own stamp on his features \u2026 Alfred is also never to have a word balloon or have words coming from his mouth (although the editors have broken this rule themselves many times in the magazine\u2019s table of contents, where they have an Alfred \u201cquote\u201d feature). His expression can be changed in certain circumstances, but that is rare and needs editorial approval.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Meanwhile, as old ephemera is unearthed and traded online, Neuman\u2019s family tree continues to thicken. There he is as the clueless supporter of Roosevelt\u2019s 1940 re-election in a postcard produced by Wendell Willkie\u2019s campaign. A World War II snapshot shows Neuman\u2019s face emblazoned on the nose of a C-47 bomber, above \u201cWhat Me Worry?\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there are the more mysterious sightings: a close-up of an old portrait of Sari and Sally\u2014a popular Grand Ole Opry team from the thirties\u2014reveals Alfred\u2019s face in Sari\u2019s broach. A National Geographic<\/em> photo shows an Austrian folk artist carving a grinning Zell am Moos mask that resembles Alfred. In the basement of a home in Takoma Park, Maryland, someone unearthed a glass negative from 1902 that showed a family posing in a backyard next to a cutout of Alfred\u2019s head. The Stanford chemist Carl Djerassi swore that he had seen the face in Vienna after the Anschluss, with the caption \u201cTod den Juden<\/em>\u201d (\u201cKill the Jews\u201d).<\/p>\n

\"Me_worry-_No,_I_buy_auto_parts_from_James_Evans_Parts_Co.,_337_West_Tyler_St.,_Longview,_Texa\"<\/a>

An ad for James Evans Auto Parts ca. 1930\u201345.<\/p><\/div>\n

According to Reitan, each appearance can be explained as an exponent of either The New Boy<\/em> promotions or Harry Stuff\u2019s \u201cWhat Me Worry\u201d kid. (Reitan surmises that Neuman\u2019s signature motto is a hybrid of The<\/em> New Boy<\/em> tagline and the \u201cI Should Worry!\u201d craze<\/a> of the 1910s.) The more far-fetched sightings can be attributed to a special case of collective apophenia. That people are convinced they saw Neuman in places he never existed only reinforces his ubiquity.<\/p>\n

In election years especially, Neuman is the Zen retort to a world of increasingly exhausting absurdity. Though he\u2019s often interpreted as a symbol of idiocy\u2014most prominently in a spate of appearances during George W. Bush\u2019s reign\u2014I never read him as an idiot. I told Reitan that Neuman has the knowing serenity of someone who knows he\u2019s going to get the last laugh. \u201cI have a different interpretation,\u201d said Reitan. \u201cI agree he\u2019s knowing, but I think it\u2019s the look of someone who knows he\u2019ll never get the last laugh.\u201d<\/p>\n

As art historians scrutinize the Mona Lisa<\/em>, MAD<\/em> fans try in vain to push past their hero\u2019s profound ambiguity in arguments about Alfred\u2019s true age. He looks wizened but he\u2019s not an adult, yet he\u2019s too old to be a \u201cnew\u201d boy. Reitan pointed out that the protagonist of The New Boy<\/em> was an old guy acting like a kid. When I forced him to pin an age on Alfred, he said: \u201cWhen I was twelve, he looked twelve. Now that I\u2019m fifty-five, he looks fifty-five.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sam Sweet is the author and publisher of <\/em>All Night Menu<\/em><\/a>, five booklets about the hidden histories behind a series of Los Angeles addresses. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The long and tangled history of Alfred E. Neuman. In a 1975 interview with the\u00a0New York Times, MAD Magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman recalled an illustration of a grinning boy he\u2019d spotted on a postcard in the early fifties: a \u201cbumpkin portrait,\u201d \u201cpart leering wiseacre, part happy-go-lucky kid.\u201d It was captioned \u201cWhat, Me Worry?\u201d That bumpkin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":604,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[14238,13749,21384,21389,11479,12976,21388,21387,7503,7472,14130,21386,21391,21390,21392,21385],"class_list":["post-95203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-advertisements","tag-al-feldstein","tag-alfred-e-neuman","tag-antikamnia","tag-characters","tag-drawings","tag-happy-jack","tag-harry-spencer-stuff","tag-harvey-kurtzman","tag-mad-magazine","tag-mascots","tag-norman-mingo","tag-peter-reitan","tag-plum-pudding","tag-the-new-boy","tag-what-me-worry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Long, Tangled History of Alfred E. 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