Al Jaffee was a cartoonist beloved by generations of Mad magazine readers for features including his iconic “fold-in” drawings.
- Died: April 10, 2023 (Who else died on April 10?)
- Details of death: Died at a New York City hospital of multiple organ failure at the age of 102.
- We invite you to share condolences for Al Jaffee in our Guest Book.
Fold-ins
The fold-in was one of the most popular of Jaffee’s creations for Mad, a reversal of the three-page foldouts that were popular in midcentury magazines from Playboy to National Geographic. Instead of revealing a larger image by folding out the page, Jaffee had readers crease the page, accordion-style, to create a new image by obscuring part of the full-page illustration.
Sometimes the fold-ins were jokes and sight gags, but Jaffee also used the platform for social and political commentary. A drawing of 1964 Republican presidential hopefuls Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller folded in to become nominee Richard Nixon. A Vietnam-era image of soldiers at war folded in to reveal a hypodermic needle in a cautionary piece against drug abuse. A red-carpet event replete with paparazzi folded in to focus on a celebrity entering a rehab center. Jaffee told Yahoo! News in a 2014 interview, “When we’re successful, it’s a funny take on a serious subject. When we fail is when we preach.”
The fold-in became something Mad’s readers looked forward to each month, but Jaffee initially never thought it would be a recurring feature. He drew the first example as a one-off, creating an image of Elizabeth Taylor kissing Richard Burton as a crowd trampled Eddie Fisher – a commentary on a pop culture news item that was huge at the moment – and made it fold in to reveal Taylor kissing somebody else entirely, a crowd member on the right-hand side of the page. When his editor asked for the next month’s fold-in, Jaffee had to scramble to come up with something, but he soon refined his fold-in technique and made the feature a Mad staple.
Jaffee was a top contributor to Mad for decades – his work first appeared in the magazine’s pages in 1955, he became a regular in 1958, and he continued drawing his fold-ins for Mad until 2019. All those years made him the magazine’s longest-running contributor, one who remained a freelancer for his decades-long career. But a casual reader, seeing Jaffee’s artwork on the pages in hundreds of issues, would be excused for thinking the artist was on the staff.
Other Jaffee features
Jaffee contributed much more than the fold-in to Mad. He created the popular feature “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” in which he unleashed all the ways he would have loved to respond to questions whose answers seemed obvious. In the feature, a single panel would depict an exchange between two people – one asking a “stupid question” and one providing three “snappy answers” to that question. In one, a waiter asks a couple, “Table for how many?” The husband responds, “A hundred and 12 – we like to change seats every few minutes.” “One – my wife will sit on my shoulders.” “I don’t know – I can’t count that high, either.”
Among Jaffee’s other contributions to Mad were his elaborate drawings of inventions and gadgets – telescoping shoes for walking through puddles, a “head hook” to attach a phone to one’s head for hands-free talking, an electrical outlet with built-in extension cords. Some of his ideas even became the jumping-off points for real-life inventions. It’s hard to say if his “Hip No-Drip Sipper” led directly to the sippy cup, which looks exactly like the cup he drew, but the person who invented a smokeless ashtray cited Jaffee as inspiration in the patent file.
Early life
Though Jaffee is indelibly associated with Mad, his cartooning life began decades before he first drew for the iconic magazine. Born March 21, 1921, in Savannah, Georgia, he had an unconventional upbringing that had him moving back and forth between the U.S. and Lithuania, where his homesick immigrant mother took him and his brothers. Worried about the boys, Jaffee’s father brought them home to the U.S., but his mother insisted on moving them to Europe again, where they stayed for several more years, returning to the U.S. only as the threat of the Nazi Party began to loom.
It was in Lithuania that Jaffee developed his comic drawing style, relying on humor to get by in a country where he was an outsider. His father mailed him the comic pages from stateside newspapers, and Jaffee used these as inspiration, as he related in an interview with Vice magazine: “I was literally spending all day Sunday when I was a little kid with the Sunday funnies on the floor, just going panel to panel to panel and then back again and looking for every detail. I just loved it.”
Back in the states, Jaffee attended the High School of Music & Art in New York City, a member of the new school’s first class. There, he not only honed his style; he also met friends who would become his colleagues, including Harvey Kurtzman, who grew up to be the founding editor of Mad. But before Kurtzman got around to founding the iconic magazine, Jaffee worked with other legends, beginning with Stan Lee.
Timely Comics
Lee was editor of Timely Comics, the precursor to Marvel Comics, when Jaffee broke into the business in 1941. Timely was building its reputation on the strength of superheroes including Captain America and the Human Torch, but Jaffee’s skills kept him on the gentler side of the business drawing animal comics. His Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal were his best-known creations, though he also drew the teen humor comic “Patsy Walker” and the superhero spoof “Inferior Man.”
Jaffee remembered his days at Timely in an interview with Mother Jones magazine: “It was what they eventually started calling the ‘golden age’ of comics, which stretched into when the superheroes became really big with people like Jack Kirby who became giants in the business. I was a small cog. To begin with, I limited myself to humor, which was on the low rung of the comic business.”
His low-rung status wouldn’t last long. By the mid-1950s, he was drawing the popular syndicated strip “Tall Tales” as well as working for Mad. When Kurtzman left Mad, Jaffee followed his friend and colleague to work on his new publications, Trump and Humbug. When they folded, Jaffee made the jump back to Mad, which was happy to have him after seeing the good work he had done with Kurtzman. He continued to draw fold-ins and other Mad features for decades, even in his 90s. Of his long-running fold-in feature, Jaffee told Mother Jones, “… I’ll keep doing them as long as I’m alive.”
Honors and tributes
Jaffee’s long career was honored in the industry. He won several awards from the National Cartoonists Society, and he was a member of the Will Eisner Hall of Fame. Those outside the world of comics paid tribute to him as well, such as when “The Colbert Report” observed his 85th birthday with a cake inspired by the fold-in. It read, “Al, you have repeatedly shown artistry & care of great credit to your field,” but when the center was removed, the message that remained was “Al, you are old.” Jaffee – who didn’t know about the cake until he happened to turn on the television that night – sent host Stephen Colbert a thank-you drawing.
Jaffee on his approach to humor
“When you expose hypocrisy or nonsense or plain ol’ stupidity, you want to do it in a way that makes the reader connect the dots. Don’t tell the joke, just hint at the joke. If you over-explain it, it’s no good.” —from a 2017 interview with Vanity Fair
Tributes to Al Jaffee
Full obituary: The Washington Post
