Al Jaffee, cartoonist and veteran of MAD magazine who devised the famous ‘fold-in’ – obituary
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Al Jaffee, who has died aged 102, was the American satirical cartoonist who invented MAD magazine’s famous “fold-in”, prophesied yet-to-be-invented amenities such as autocorrect and the multi-roll lavatory paper dispenser, and held the Guinness World Record for the longest career as a comic artist.
Jaffee’s inaugural 1964 “fold-in” was an irreverent, low-budget response to the glossy fold-outs of colour magazines like Playboy. “It hit me,” he recalled. “What should a magazine on cheap black-and-white newsprint do but a fold-IN? Go the other way.”
MAD, which Jaffee described as “designed to corrupt the minds of children”, had been launched in October 1952 as Tales to Drive You Mad: Humor in a Jugular Vein. It peaked in popularity in the early 1970s, with a circulation of more than two million and a counter-cultural influence far beyond that.
For the magazine’s back page, Jaffee designed an interactive puzzle: an image that posed a question, with dotted lines so that the reader could fold it vertically into thirds, and reveal a hidden, smaller picture as a pay-off.
His first “fold-in” subject was Elizabeth Taylor kissing Richard Burton, with her recently dumped husband Eddie Fisher being trampled by a crowd. But after the paper is folded, she has moved on from Burton and is kissing a random man from the crowd: “so simplistic and silly and juvenile!” said Jaffee.
He did not think that MAD’s editor Al Feldstein – anarchic though he was – would buy the “crazy” idea, because it required the magazine to be “mutilated”. But Feldstein, after folding and unfolding it for a while, said: “I like this!” Bill Gaines, MAD’s publisher, thought it made commercial sense: “If a kid mutilates the magazine, he’ll buy another one for his archives!”
After that, until 2019, almost every issue of MAD carried a Jaffee fold-in. July 1968 asked: “What is the one thing most school drop-outs are sure to become?” A picture of teenagers at a job centre folds into a gun muzzle with a youth inside it, and the answer: “Cannon fodder.”
September 1978 asked: “What colorful fantastic creature is still being exploited even after it has wiggled and died?” A garish butterfly folds into Elvis. November 2001 asked: “What mind-altering experience is leaving more and more people out of touch with reality?” A crowd hoovering up an assortment of drugs folds up to reveal the Fox News anchor desk.
In 2014, Jaffee drew a valedictory fold-in, to be printed when he died, but in the end it ran in MAD’s August 2020 “Special All Jaffee Issue” to mark his retirement, aged 99. A large image of “Economy Collapsing! Unemployed Starving!” folds in to reveal Al Jaffee floating serenely above the cityscape, with the caption: “No More New Jaffee Fold-Ins.” The New York Times called him “the world’s oldest adolescent”.
He was born Abraham Jaffee on March 13 1921 in Savannah, Georgia, to Lithuanian Jewish parents. His father, Morris, had been a tailor in New York before becoming a department store manager; his wife Mildred, an intensely religious woman, was homesick for the shtetl, and took six-year-old Jaffee and his three younger brothers back to Lithuania – supposedly just for a month. On the crossing, Jaffee was mortified when she ordered the captain of their transatlantic steamer to halt the ship for the sabbath.
Before leaving Savannah he had made his father swear on the Bible that he would send American comic strips to Lithuania. “So every six months or so, a huge roll of newspaper comic strips arrived at the post office. My brother and I would be in ecstasy for months. We literally learnt to read and write English from reading the comic strips.”
The village of Zarasai was a muddy, 19th-century shock of horse-drawn carriages, no indoor lavatories or electricity, little food and lots of bullies. Jaffee avoided being beaten up by drawing cartoons for his attackers in the dust with a stick.
After a year, Morris materialised to take his family back to America, but a year later Mildred dragged her sons back to the shtetl for four more years. By the time Jaffee was 12, and back in America for good, he had developed “anti-adultism”: a bitter sense that the authority figures in his life were oppressive and absurd. He never saw his mother again; most of Zarasai’s Jewish population was massacred in 1941.
He attended the High School of Music and Art in New York and was just 20 when he published his first comic strip – a parody of Superman, called Inferior Man, about an accountant who, by night, fought crime and evil in his underwear. “If it became too much for him to handle, he would sneak into some phone booth and change into civilian clothes.”
Jaffee went on to work 18-hour days for Stan Lee at Timely Comics, which became Marvel Comics.
When America joined the war he got a job as an art instructor at a military rehab centre for shell-shocked soldiers, then as a Pentagon artist, designing pamphlets and posters. The military offered a free name-change service so, tired of anti-Semitism, he became first “Alvin Jaffe” (by mistake), then “Allan Jaffee”.
In 1957, short of cash, he invented a wordless cartoon strip with the unique selling point of being vertical, not horizontal. “Tall Tales” ran for six years in the New York Herald Tribune, and was syndicated in 100 papers internationally until an interfering editor said: “We gotta put words in it.” It was immediately dropped from 28 foreign papers.
In October 1965, he came up with his popular MAD series, “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions”. “Are they twins?” asks an old lady in a typical panel, looking at two identical boys. Their mother is given three speech bubbles: “No, they’re a pair of identical strangers”; “No, they’re nine years apart. Smoking stunted the older one’s growth”; and “No, he’s an only child. Who’s your eye doctor?”
Jaffee also spoofed Madison Avenue hucksters with advertisements for fantastic (fake) products – many of which ended up coming true. He predicted automatic telephone redial, the computer spell-checker, peelable stamps, multi-blade razors, graffiti-proof building surfaces and the self-extinguishing cigarette – for which he is cited as the inspiration on the patent file.
He published more than 60 books, with titles such as MAD’s Vastly Overrated Al Jaffee. In 2013, Columbia University acquired his archive, which flattered but bemused him. “I’m utterly silly,” he told his biographer. “Serious people my age are dead.”
In 1945, Al Jaffee married Ruth Ahlquist, a fellow Pentagon worker, with whom he had a son and a daughter. In 1967 they divorced, and in 1977 he married Joyce Revenson, who died in 2020. He is survived by his two children.
When asked the “stupid” question “How do you think you’ll be remembered?”, he gave the “snappy” answer: “Is space available on Mount Rushmore?”
Al Jaffee, born March 13 1921, died April 10 2023
