To Absent Friends - Two Great Satirists

I do not want to let the month of April pass without noting the deaths of two of the All-Time great satirists of our era, Mark Russell and Al Jaffee.

Mark Russell

1932 - 2023

Mark Russell, born in Buffalo, NY, began his career as an Inside-the-Beltway guy, performing regularly in the lounge of Washington DC's Shoreham Hotel.  He parodied popular and well-known songs with his own lyrics that made comments on the news of the day out of Washington, and he was an equal opportunity guy:  no politician, regardless of which side of the aisle they sat, was safe from Russell's barbs.

He soon began to appear on the television talk show and variety show circuits which took his act to the rest of the country, and from 1975 to 2004, he did regular live programs on PBS where he performed in the round before a live audience while working at a stand up piano.  No one, dating from JFK and LBJ, Tricky Dick, the  Clintons, the Bushes, and Barack Obama, was a sacred cow to Russell, and if the truth were known, I am guessing that the subjects of his parodies were probably among his biggest fans (with the possible exception of the Trickster).

Russell was once asked if he had any writers, and he replied that, "yes, he had 535 of them, 100 in the Senate and 435 in the House of Representatives."  He effectively retired in 2010, making very rare public appearances beyond that.  When I heard of his passing, I wondered what his act would have been like during the administration of the 45th President.  I am not going to post it here so as not to stir up any controversies, but if you search YouTube, you can find a video of Russell sitting a piano at a birthday party in 2016 and doing a song about then Candidate Trump, and it was amazingly accurate in predicting what was to befall us.

Al Jaffee

1921-2023

When MAD Magazine was unleashed upon an unsuspecting nation in the early 1950's, Al Jaffee was one of the original artists for the publication, and there he remained until his retirement in 2019 at the age of 98.

The subversive and crazy humor that MAD had on generations of comedians and regular teenaged (mostly) boys, including Yours Truly, cannot be measured (to this day I still think of actors Fred Astaire and Roddy McDowell as "Fred Upstairs" and "Roddy McTowel"), and Jaffee was foremost among the editorial staff that made this giant imprint on our popular culture.  Among Jaffee's regular features was "Crazy Inventions" (some of which, like the multi-bladed razor, actually came about) and "MAD's Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions."  He may be best known, however for the inside back cover of the magazine, the MAD Fold-In.  Conceived as a one time gag as a riff on the fold-outs of magazines like Playboy, the fold-in became so popular that it became a regular feature of the Magazine, and Jaffe ended up doing over 400 of them.  Here is one of them which, based on he subject matter, no doubt dates from 1964:

RIP Mark Russell and Al Jaffee.