While plowing through a surprisingly tedious book about one of my pop culture heroes, radio humorist Jean Shepherd, I came upon a previously unknown (to me) reference to an article dictated by Shepherd for publication in the March-April 1957 "ish" of MAD Magazine. In the article, entitled "The Night People vs Creeping Meatballism," Shepherd warns his impressionable readers of a scourge then sweeping the nation --- a menace that threatened to transform America into a race of dimwitted robots who completely identified with The Pepsi Generation. (The text page also has links to graphic facsimiles of the original MAD pages.)
Shepherd's radio audience, The Night People, were fundamentally different than The Day People, but with a role reversal that had the zombies and vampires coming alive with the first drop of Maxwell House Coffee and prowling the earth until Bonanza was over and the kids were tucked in. The Night People were considered outsiders, both by The Day People and by themselves --- alienated, round pegs hammered carelessly halfway into square holes, not "getting it" like The Day People seemed to.
The text may seem tame by today's standards, but I don't believe anyone outside of Harvey Kurtzman and MAD were doing this kind of humor for relatively mainstream readers (albeit The Night People). The content was intended for impressionable adolescents and precocious kids, written by a premier New York City hipster, and Shepherd mean every word of it in grim earnest. To me, Meatballism provides a classic display of Shepherd's prescience regarding the decline and fall of Western Civilization, as it begins with mass conformity and loss of individual identity as driven by mind-colonizing ad agency vermin.
MAD's editorial intro to Shepherd's Meatballism recitation is clearly a fully savored fuck-you to the hapless WOR manager who fired Shepherd a few months earlier for not being commercial enough, and was then immediately forced to hire him back due to a fierce Night People backlash. The MAD editors, writers, and artists were obviously Night People, as were so many of their pimply fans. (And, for that matter, as was Stan Lee at Marvel Comics in New York City, who subsequently introduced an emergent nation of comic book geeks to the cry "Excelsior!", which was a Shepherd trademark.)
Fun Fact No. 1: if you're too young to know who Betty Furness was or why MAD and Shepherd were poking fun at her in Meatballism, then you might miss the irony that Ms. Furness later became a respected consumer rights advocate in the Johnson Administration even though critics felt LBJ had picked a bimbo for the post.
Fun Fact No. 2: Shepherd did not like his first name because, not being short for "Eugene" and being spelled the way the Frenchmen spell it, some Americans in Hammond, Ind., during the Depression perceived it as a "girl" or "sissy" monicker. Shepherd's pal Shel Silverstein immortalized young Jean's plight in the lyrics he penned for Johnny Cash's 1969 hit, "A Boy Named Sue."
So take that, you meatballs!
Skroinch! Poiyt!
ReplyDelete2 questions here. First, didja notice all his gullible day people were the "greatest generation"?
Second, do see how day people now hang out all night playing with smartphones and pods? And the new name for night people is .... Brazilians. None left in America.
Don: re Q1: the revolutionary aspect of MAD, especially MAD Comics under the editorship of Harvey Kurtzman, was that it confirmed to rebellious or alienated youth that their suspicions about the adults were pretty much accurate: the adult world was drenched in stupidity, hypocrisy, avarice, and, above all, cluelessness about the other three. Shepherd's monologue, given to MAD editors pretty much the way he delivered his radio material, was highly compatible with MAD's "vision statement," as we might say today.
ReplyDeleteRe Q2: as you might guess, the terms Night People and Day People were metaphors for a state of mind, or maybe a personality type. Creeping meatballism isn't proprietary to The Greatest Generation or the Lamest Generation or The Dumbest Generation. But I'm sure there are still plenty of Night People left in this country. By definition, they're largely solitary and self-concealing. They, like Day People, may operate during any phase of the diurnal cycle.
Please tell Joe Fonebone that Professor Bleent sends his regards from Africa.