Before SNL and the wise-guy sarcasm of Letterman and Colbert, before The Simpsons and online memes, there was . . .  MAD.

A mainstay of countless American childhoods, MAD magazine exploded onto the scene in the 1950s and gleefully thumbed its nose at all the postwar pieties. MAD became the zaniest, most subversive satire magazine ever to be sold on America's newsstands, anticipating the spirit of underground comix and 'zines and influencing humor writing in movies, television, and the internet to this day.

Edited by David Mikics, The MAD Files celebrates the magazine's impact and the legacy of the Usual Gang of Idiots who transformed puerile punchlines and merciless mockery into an art form. 26 essays and comics present a varied, perceptive, and often very funny account of MAD's significance, ranging from the cultural to the aesthetic to the personal.

• Art Spiegelman reflects on how he "couldn't learn much about America from my refugee immigrant parents--but I learned all about it from MAD"

• Roz Chast remembers how the magazine was "love at first sight. . . . It was one of my first inklings that there were other people out there who found the world as ridiculous as I did."

• David Hajdu and Grady Hendrix zero in on MAD's hilarious movie spoofs

• Liel Leibovitz delves into the Jewishness behind the magazine's humor

• and Rachel Shteir amplifies the often unsung contributions of MAD's women artists.