Before Mad, Trump, Humbug and Help!, Harvey Kurtzman created the comic strip Silver Linings for the New York Herald-Tribune where comics writer Harold Straubling was the comic strip editor from 1946 to 1954. The strip ran in the Herald-Tribune from March 7 through June 20, 1948.
The gags and art in Silver Linings are very similar to Kurtzman's Hey Look! pages. Here are four of the nine strips in the series. Note use of the repetitive diner dialogue years before John Belushi's "cheeseburger cheeseburger" routine and another line of dialogue decades prior to the recording "I Scare Myself" by Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks.
I keep meaning to make a timeline detailing all of the important developments in humor, counter-culture and pop culture that stemmed directly or indirectly from Harvey Kurtzman. The world as we know it would certainly be a different (and grimmer) place if it hadn't been for Harvey.
ReplyDeleteNotably the SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE sketches with Christopher Walken borrowed from "The Countynental" in MAD #14. The 1952-53 original TV series with Renzo Cesana is so forgotten and obscure that in years of watching TV I have only seen one 60-second clip. Some SNL writer must have been reading MAD reprints.
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