Trump tags Buttigieg Alfred E. Newman

I laughed so hard that I couldn't stop.

Because it is so ^{*high pitch*} s-t-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-w _{*low pitch*} pud. 

And yet effective.

Trump again shows he is master of media. 

And media is incredibly stew pud.

Trump is brilliantly masterfully effectively stew pud.

And that cracks me up. 

I haven't seen anything like it. And most probably never will see it again.  He takes on the entire system of systems arrayed against him, even his own party, and wages battle brilliantly masterfully effectively stupid and funny as H-E-double dead horse beating sticks. And it is glorious to behold. while being amazingly stupid.  

Buttigieg never heard of Alfred E. Newman.

How stupid is that? 

Has he heard of Boy's Life?

Cracked?

Quest?

Krash?

I'm reading in comments elsewhere that people my age don't know who Alfred E. Newman is.

Pity.

Heard of Spy vs. Spy?

Al Jaffee? 

3-part fold in?

The Lighter Side of?

Don Martin?

A Mad Look at ... ?

TV and Movie parodies?

Should you pick up a copy be sure not to miss all the jokes drawn in the marginalia on nearly every page. It is a very large part of enjoying the magazine.

At age ten I was so impressed with the back cover fold in jokes that I trained myself how to make them.

I will now share this wisdom with you.

Consider a current topic. Anything will do. Something in the news.

For example, something amusing that's ridiculous this week might be Representative Steve Cohen's stunt of bringing a ceramic chicken to House Intelligence Committee to emphasize Barr is a chicken. they also brought Kentucky Fried Chicken, so that's another possibility for a gag if the ceramic chicken doesn't pan out. 

The punchline comes first.  With two components, a picture that can be divided in half and words that can be split up to form a new sentence. This is both a visual and a linguistic joke. It's actually rather sophisticated even if it is ^{*high pitch*} s-t-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-w _{*low pitch*} pud. 

So, first fold your blank page to draw your punch line picture right down the center of it. Fold it in half. And fold the right side in half again. 

It goes, half, fourth, fourth. 

So that only 1/4 of the bottom is showing on the left. Half is left blank (and divided in half). And 1/4 is showing on the top.

Best to keep your punch line picture simple. So that when you unfold the page it leaves a blank space in the middle that is filled in with the setup to the joke. 

If your punch line picture is complex then it will be more difficult to connect the two sides and incorporate them into a new larger picture. 

And the simpler the text then the easier it is to find new text to fill in that matches the picture and sets up the punch line. 

Your viewer will not see the punch line and punch picture until they fold the page. No mater how hard they try. Even though you provide little triangle arrows for them to use to fold the page and match the triangle arrows. They can see the whole thing on the page but they are unable to eliminate the middle and consider only both edges pushed together to see the picture contained outside the arrows. 

And they cannot eliminate the middle of the text and consider only the text outside the arrows for the joke text. You'd think this would be easy to see, but it is not.

So we draw either ceramic chicken or a bucket of KFC on the two folded portions  dead center right across the crack. 

Whatever shape that takes when pulled apart will be the basis for the new picture. Same with the text. 

Say the ceramic chicken might become curtains in the new expanded picture. And the text "Ceramic chicken" will become something else. 

You can think of lots of words that begin with "Cer" and lots of words that end with "amic."

And you can think of lots of words that begin with "chi" and lots of words that end with "cken"

We might need a little more room for additional text than I provided here.

Do not despair. We can change anything. It's only a prototype. 

Whatever our new picture will be, it must ridicule Congress. 

All institutions are targets of ridicule for Mad Magazine.

Nothing is sacred.

These things are trials. The picture and the text are only beginning points.

We might not be able to fill in the blank space. And we might not be able to come up with a cogent apposite text. We might have to change things around. Change the text or reposition it across the crack or leave more space for additional text. 

We might have to abandon the project.

But this is how we start. 

Now, unfold it and fill in the picture and fill in the text.

Ew, Jeez. this is going to be hard. The fill inside the chicken must be something having to do the Congressional Security Commission, and so must the text. 

Oh man. I can't think of anything. That chicken is too obvious. Maybe I should have drawn it more ambiguously. That's rather explicit. There is nothing I can do to conceal it. I must change it to a cartoon blobby chicken.

Start over!

Certainly the dynamic

of

chivalrous Congress will quicken

with the help of a ...

Fine. Quick and dirty. Rough draft innit. 

This is the starting point! Not the ending point. At ten years of age you have unlimited time to mess around with this. And if you work at Mad magazine you can take all day. 

Mess up the chicken so it's not so obvious. Make the chicken be a map of China. Then make the text have to do with China.  Make the chicken be curtains behind Nadler sitting at the committee. Rework the text and the typeface. 

You get the idea. 

And the idea is that you start with the end. Construct your dual visual picture and text jokes backwards and present them forward. 

And kids across the country, predominantly boys, are all going, f'k'n ell, this man is a genius!