Happy 99th Birthday Al Jaffee

Friday the 13, 2020 is master cartoonist Al Jaffe’s 99th birthday.  Jaffee was listed as having the longest career of a comics artist by the Guinness World Records (and that was back when he was only 95).

                                           (Photo from The Daily Cartoonist)

Jaffee is probably best known for his long tenure (64 years) with Mad magazine.

He created popular feature such as Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions :

and the Mad Fold-In:

                                           (Here’s a classic from the 1960’s)


Jaffee also created a syndicated comic panel, Tall Tales, designed to accommodate one newspaper column width. It ran for about 5 years.

(This one's from my collection)

(These scans from The Fabulous Fifties blog)

Before Mad he worked for Harvey Kurtzman’s other short lived parody magazines Humbug and Trump.

Here’s a strangely timely piece that Jaffee did for Humbug in response to the 1957 Asian Flu Pandemic (Humbug#5, December 1957)

Al Jaffee is still at it.

You can read about his remarkable (and often tragic) life in Mad Life written by Mary-Lou Weisman.

Here’s Al Jaffee’s website:

https://www.originalaljaffee.com/splash

A Mother Jones interview:

https://www.motherjones.com/media/2010/09/interview-al-jaffee-mad-life-snappy-answers/