Mad magazine cartoonist Al Jaffee, a fixture at the satirical publication for a half-century of hi-jinks and hilarity, died Monday at the age of 102.
The award-winning Jaffe passed away from multiple organ failure just three years after his retirement, according to his granddaughter. Jaffe, who joined the Mad staff for good in 1964, contributed his special brand of comedy for the next 50-plus years in almost every issue — most notably, his famous “Fold-In” feature.
The Fold-In was comprised of a full-page drawing with a question on top, with the reader coming up with a new sketch and a funny response by folding the page into the middle. A full collection of the Fold-Ins was published in 2011, and Jaffe was honored at the 2013 Comic-Con in San Diego.
A second Jaffe signature bit was “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” a comedic premise as simple as its name, and his parody advertisements were another popular Mad feature.
The bearded artist’s efforts throughout the decades earned him admirers from “Peanuts” artist Charles M. Schulz to comedians/talk show hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The latter pair recruited Jaffe to create a fold-in page for their best-selling “America (The Book).”
But Jafee shrugged off the cheers of his fans, insisting what he did remained unchanged across the decades and came almost naturally.
“I don’t see the magic in it,” he once told the magazine Graphic NYC. “If you reflect and think about it, I’m sitting down and suddenly there’s a whole big illustration of people that appears.”
Jaffe was born in Savannah, Ga., the son of a department store manager and a religious Jewish mother. He and his mom returned to her native Lithuania, where Jaffe learned to read and write by studying clippings of comic strips send along from the United States by his dad.
A teenaged Jaffe left Lithuania and landed in Manhattan, where the gifted young artist was accepted into the High School of Music and Art alongside future Mad staffers Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzmann.
He worked briefly at Mad in the mid-1950s, left a few years later and returned for good in 1964, a constant presence among the magazine’s self-described “Usual Gang of Idiots.”