John Ficarra – MAD Magazine interview: Inside a world of satire

John Ficarra is the man who had a vision to bring MAD Magazine’s pages into a world of beautiful color.

MAD’s acclaimed Editor-in-Chief started off working in the nickel industry, changed course over to his first love, comedy, and has been a part of our lives in some fashion ever since. Whether you’ve ever flipped through the crisp satire-filled pages of a MAD Magazine at your local book store or simply saw a photoshopped meme on your Facebook news feed one day, MAD had influence on that.

Parodies didn’t always enjoy such free-flowing reigns on our airwaves. John Ficarra’s fingerprints on MAD since 1984 had a big hand in popularizing today’s modern satire and beyond. Bill Gaines (MAD’s original publisher) and Harvey Kurtzman’s (MAD’s founding editor) imagination for a market that didn’t exist was way ahead of its time. Today, we experience MAD’s intangible rewards on pop culture: a society where politicians and advertisers are willing participants in on the joke. When there was a time being poked fun at would lead to a lawsuit, not an SNL cameo.

We at FanSided.com got to interview one of MAD Magazine’s luminaries and gain insight on everything from MAD’s digital future to advertising’s impact, learning along the way how comedy writing has changed from a niche to something for which you might attend Harvard. All thanks to one classy Editor-in-Chief, John Ficarra. Let’s begin!

Working in the Nickel Industry and Creative Fulfillment:

FanSided.com – Nir Regev: We’re here with Mad Magazine’s John Ficarra! The first question I want to ask you is I know that after you graduated from NYU, you worked in the nickel industry for a while.

*John smiles*

John Ficarra – MAD Magazine: Wow, you have done your homework!

FS: Yeah, I was wondering, especially on a personal level, before you were creatively fulfilled and that kind of thing, you had a period of your life where you had kind of a gap. You were working as a freelance comedy writer. Did you ever have an inkling that maybe you wouldn’t make it in that industry or you were going to drive yourself no matter what?

Ficarra: I was working for International Nickel when I was in college, just part time. I didn’t have a burning passion to work for nickel, trust me (laughs). When I graduated, they were nice enough to give me a job in the sales and marketing department for a while. Then, they fell on hard times and laid off 4,000 people, and thankfully I was one of them. It was really a good thing because I had very supportive parents and I was able to focus all my concentration on writing. I would write for anybody who would pay me and often times when they wouldn’t pay me. Whether it was comedians, radio, MAD was always my first love. I was trying to write for MAD when I was in grammar school and all through.

It was different back then because people didn’t think of comedy writing as a career. Most people when they thought of comedy writers thought of Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie from the old Dick Van Dyke Show. They didn’t really think about now that kids going to Harvard with the intention of graduating from Harvard, then going to write for SNL or The Simpsons, then becoming rich and famous in Hollywood. That career path wasn’t really evident to me when I was that young.

I was extremely fortunate to be in the right spot at the right time. Nick Meglin, who was at the magazine, was very supportive of me. I would be sending what we call ‘the slush pile’, unsolicited submissions. He would give me encouraging notes, and that really gave me a little hope that maybe I can do this. I started writing for comedians, not for much money. I wrote for Joan Rivers for $7 dollars a joke. Rodney Dangerfield was great to write for.

Writing for Comedy Legend Rodney Dangerfield:

FS: I was just about to ask you, what was it like working with Rodney Dangerfield?

Ficarra: He was great, very responsive, very honest. I’ll never forget the first time that I sent a joke to him. I sent some jokes to his restaurant in Manhattan, I didn’t even know where I could reach him. I was in my bedroom one night, still living with my parents. It was a hot summer night and the phone rang at I guess about quarter to 11. I picked it up and at the other end,

*John does a great Rodney Dangerfield voice impression*

Ficarra: “Hey, yeah, this is Rodney, Rodney Dangerfield, is this John?” Be still my heart. He was just great, a really great guy and I’m so sorry that he’s gone. He really made me laugh, I think he really made a lot of people just laugh.

FS: Must have been one of the more surreal moments in your life.

Ficarra: It was, it really was. When I started writing in New York for a very popular disc jockey at the time on NEW called Ted Brown, who I’d listened to for years on the radio. To suddenly be in a room with the person that you always turned the radio on for when they were on and they’re talking to you. It’s a very surreal moment.

MAD Magazine’s Transition to Color:

FS: In the early 2000s you decided to move MAD Magazine into the world of color, finally. I’ve seen that you wrote that it looked like something that came out of a third world country for a lot of years.

Ficarra: That was Joe Raiola, one of my editors lines. *laughs* “It looks like it was printed in Mexico in 1959”, is the exact quote.

FS: How do you feel that’s changed things? Now that you’ve obviously been in color for many, many years, how do you feel fans have responded to that? Especially from a business perspective, I know you have the marketing background. Do you feel that it had a greater effect?

Ficarra: Absolutely. First and foremost, the world is in full color. I mean, we were living in an age of video games, television’s getting better, and then MAD is looking like this really outdated publication. Now, in its defense, that was Bill Gaines’ whole philosophy. He always felt that MAD should be cheap, look like it wasn’t overly produced, so it had a renegade quality to it.

I think for a long time that worked, but then the game moved a little bit over here. Another thing was we had these artists working hours and hours, doing beautiful black and white work with gray washers. Then we would print it on one grade of paper up from toilet paper, and it would be all lost. So I was forever getting calls from artists saying, “Oh my god, my job reproduced so badly.”

Tiptoeing into the Color Market

Ficarra: We tiptoed into the color market, I think when we started doing the MAD 20. Where we would do a 12 or 20-page section of color, and it immediately just opened it up. Also, at the same time, computers were really starting to barge in now. Now Photoshop was becoming a thing, a real tool you could play with. A lot of our fans thought that after Bill [Gaines] died that corporate came in and made us take advertising. When the fact was the exact opposite.

Corporate was resistant to taking advertising, it was editorial that was pushing for advertising, so we could upgrade the paper, reproduce in color and make a more attractive package for the reader.

Charlie Hebdo and Creative Expression:

FS: I’ve seen you comment on what happened a few years ago at Charlie Hebdo, about the whole incident and how it effects creative expression. I’m curious especially now, because it’s more of a PC age these days, does that restrict the world at MAD at all?

Ficarra: Well, Charlie Hebdo, as much as I supported them, and I did a lot of press for them, CBS Sunday morning with them. They did stuff that we don’t do, they were being obnoxious and provocative just to be obnoxious and proactive. MAD has never gone that complete route, you know? People always ask things like, “How come MAD has never put Alfred as Jesus on the cross?” and stuff like that. Yeah, we could do it tomorrow but a) We would probably lose half our distribution overnight and b) there’s no reason to do that. We don’t make fun of religion, we make fun of the zealots in religion and how people manipulate religion. Whereas Charlie Hebdo I think was much more about getting in their face, unrelenting, and they paid a terrible price for that.

Advertising’s Impact on Content:

FS: Is there a big pull from advertising sometimes, has there ever been an incident where something had to be pulled?

Ficarra: No, no. Well, first of all advertising hasn’t been that robust ever since the crash. Print advertising has pretty much gone away and it’s gone into the web, but we’ve never had that problem. Now, we may have advertisers that won’t go near MAD at all. That I’ve heard. That’s because of the political things especially, they just won’t go touch MAD.

There’s kind of a wall with MAD, that I’ll just get a call where we have three ads in the next issue, and I’ll lay out the book to accommodate those three ads. Until the thing comes off the press, I don’t even know who the ads are, and that’s by deliberate design. So that I’m not affected in any way and they’re not affected. When the guys go out to sell the ads, they even give a carryout to the advertisers saying “We can’t guarantee that MAD won’t make fun of you or that MAD will make fun of you.” Some advertisers want us to make fun of them as part of it, and some advertisers say don’t make fun of us at all.

FS: I’m actually surprised some of them want you to make fun of them.

Ficarra: Oh yeah, you’d be surprised. I think advertising, some clients anyway have sort of gotten in on the gag. Just like politicians now, they’ll go on Saturday Night Live to try to diffuse some of the pointed satire that’s there. “Oh, he’s not such a bad guy, he’s playing along with him.” It sort of diffuses some of the teeth, to mix a metaphor, to dull some of the teeth out of the satirical points being taken.

I remember we did a thing years ago on George Bush and Clone of the Attack [Star Wars parody]. It was about the second Gulf War, and we did a take off the poster. It did very well, it went around the web a million times, and the thing that upset me is some people would take the MAD logo off. Then some people would send it to me and say “Did you see this? MAD should be doing this sort of thing.” I got a call from this CBS White House correspondent and he said, “I saw that poster and I loved it! I showed it to Condi Rice, she loved it! I just gave it to Ari Fleischer and he’s walking it in to the oval office to show Bush, he loves it so much.” He thought I’d be thrilled with this, and I was like *ugh*, I wanna piss Bush off. I don’t wanna make him laugh, you know? It’s tough though, it’s very tough these days.

FS: Why do you feel some organizations will never touch satire? You mentioned before some advertisers will never wanna be connected to MAD, is it really just being poked fun at? That risk, or just because that chance to offend in any way?

Ficarra: Everybody says they have a good sense of humor, but a lot of people don’t.

FS: That’s the quote of the day.

Ficarra: Yeah. *laughs* On top of that, I also remember hearing, I forget the comedian, it might have been Jerry Seinfeld on why he doesn’t do political humor. He said, “If you go up on stage and you do a political joke, chances are you just lost half your audience.” Half are Democrats and half are Republicans. If you’re making fun of the Republicans, the Republicans are pissed off. Likewise with the Democrats. We try to be even-handed, we try to only go after the absurdities, the stupidity that people do, and point it out to people.

We try not to take cheap shots, occasionally we do, but by and large we try not to. I think a lot of advertisers are so sensitive, especially the mom-and-pop, middle America advertisers. They’re just afraid, they don’t wanna upset any apple crumb. I’ve heard stories, a major one, where you’d get one complaint about a t-shirt and pull the entire line. You know, one complaint and you’re pulling 200,000 shirts, really? It gets harder and harder for advertisers these days, especially with social media, because they can really make it appear as if there’s this huge backlash. When in fact, a bunch of people who are committed with computers are really just jamming it up.

MAD Magazine’s Digital Future:

FS: How do you feel about social media with MAD? In general with the whole digital comics thing, do you think that has a future, or it’s always gonna remain mostly in print? Do you think maybe print is fading away and the digital platform will take over eventually?

Ficarra: I think it’s gonna be both. I certainly hope print stays around, I’m an old print man myself. We did a survey not too long ago and overwhelmingly MAD readers want the print edition.

FS: I feel that way for sure.

Ficarra: Yeah, we have an iPad edition, we’re on Magzter now, and a couple of other platforms where you can get MAD in other ways. We want to be everywhere readers are to reach as many readers as possible, but there is something about having a magazine.

The other thing about MAD, and I think this is true about maybe one or two other magazines and comic books, is people tend not to throw them away. They hang on to them, they put them on the bottom of their closet, especially kids. I think that’s a good thing because when kids read MAD at an earlier age, 12-13, they probably don’t get a lot of the jokes. They’ll come back to it a few years later and be rereading it and go “Oh, that was the sex joke there. Oh, that was the political joke there, that I had no clue about, but now I do.” MAD is deliberately written to appeal to a lot of different audiences. We never write down, we always just write the joke we think is funny and put it out there.

FS: I love the letter section!

*John laughs*

Ficarra: Yeah, I mean we’ll write the high-end Shakespeare joke or politics joke, then on the next page here comes the fart joke. You know, if it makes us laugh, because basically working for MAD means you never grow up mentally. We will do whatever we think is just funny, and hopefully we find a big enough audience that thinks it’s funny too.

Is Digital Disposable?

FS: Do you feel then that digital comics in some ways is more disposable? When you actually hold a physical thing in your hand you have more of a reason to keep it, but this you can kind of click it off.

Ficarra: Maybe … I never thought about it but that might be true. The other thing is there’s so much on digital now and it all seems so disposable. You know memes, things are so popular one day on a Facebook feed … A week later you can’t even remember them because it just went by so fast, so fast. Where when you pick up a copy of MAD, here’s the plug, you can flip through it and find the things you like, and of course you can do the fold-in. Which you can do on some digital platforms like the iPad because you can swipe it over, but it’s not the same experience.

MAD Magazine’s Future: 20 Years From Now

FS: Where do you see, or where would you like to see MAD in 20 years from now?

Ficarra: Well, I certainly hope it’s still in print. I hope that the magazine business continues to rebound because for a while it was really very tough. I do believe that print is coming back just like vinyl came back. I think print will come back, the problem is you need to have the stores that sell print come back as well. I mean when I was a kid, on every corner there was a mom and pop candy store that sold magazines, an ice cream. You’d go down with your allowance and you’d buy a copy of MAD. Now, thank god for Barnes and Noble, who is one of our great sellers and a couple of the big chains like Walmart. The food chains like Shop Rite and places like that. Of course you can subscribe, which I pray for the most.

You can subscribe at Madmag.com. That really helps us. Now we know okay, we have to print this many copies because we have this x-number of people who are waiting for that issue. We’re trying to look at ways to enhance the subscription process. We’re going to make it easier and maybe give people who do subscribe a little more incentive. Whether that will be with more product or greater incentives and things like that.

FS: Would you like to do a quick plug?

Ficarra: I’d like to do two quick plugs, one for this month’s edition which is on sale now! Also, this is the first time we’ve ever done this, it’s “Goodnight Batcave“. Which is our first full length parody of an existing book, and it’s the first of many that are coming this way. This one is by Dave Croatto, who’s a longtime MAD writer and editor and Tom Richmond, who’s one of our premier artists. It’s just a really fun mashup of the classic kid’s book, DC characters and MAD sensibilities. You have three different things going on, and it was written in such a way that a 4-year old can read it and find a lot of enjoyment in it, and a 35-year old fanboy can read it and also enjoy it. We’re pretty optimistic.

FS: Excellent! Thank you very much.

Ficarra: Thank you!