It took Alan Bernstein of Mt. Pleasant 16 years to make a documentary about Mad Magazine, the oldest, influential humor magazine he discovered at age 6, according to the Detroit Free Press.
The film, “When We Went Mad!: The Unauthorized Story of Mad Magazine," will make its local debut Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at Detroit’s Redford Theatre on Lahser and Grand River.
“The way I describe it is I just kept waiting for someone better than me to make the Mad documentary,” he jokingly tells the Freep. “I kept waiting for Ken Burns to skip all of that boring jazz stuff and move on to something with substance, Mad magazine, and he never did.”
The theater describes the film this way:
For generations, MAD Magazine shaped and warped its readers’ senses of humor and their very outlook on the world around them. From the McCarthy hearings and the Cold War to Taylor Swift and social media, MAD Magazine was there to poke fun at all of it.
When We Went Mad! presents the (unauthorized) history of America’s oldest and most influential humor magazine. From MAD’s landmark court case that ensured satire as free speech to its maverick publisher who kept the water cooler filled with white wine, MAD lived its very ethos.
With celebrity interviews from Judd Apatow, Quentin Tarantino, Howie Mandel, Gilbert Gottfried, David Zucker, Bryan Cranston, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and a plethora of the people who created MAD, When We Went Mad! is a celebration of MAD, the nutty geniuses behind it, and the indelible impression they left on American culture.
