Alfred E. Neuman

• 1. Introduction

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  Alfred E. Neuman has appeared on the cover of more than 550 issues of Mad, the American humor magazine. He is its fictitious mascot, a scrawny boy with red hair, freckles and protruding ears. Almost every time, he faces the reader head-on. Now and then he shows up in silhouette, or even directly from behind.

  The odd thing is that nobody at Mad invented him. His face was already circulating decades before the magazine existed, attached to products, plays and political slogans. So where did the boy really come from? How did he get his name? And why did a dispute over who owned his image end up before the Supreme Court of the United States?

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• 2. Older Than the Magazine

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  The oldest verified image of the boy is an 1895 advertisement for Atmore's Mince Meat, Genuine English Plum Pudding. Author Maria Reidelbach studied it and found the features fully developed and unmistakable. She concluded that the picture was very likely copied from an older archetype.

  That archetype turned up in an advertisement for The New Boy, a comic stage play that opened on Broadway in 1894. The Hartford Courant described the play's trademark on the 31st of October 1894. It called him a comic, red-headed urchin with a joyous grin across his freckled face. The paper added that the New York Herald and the Evening Telegram had already borrowed the face for political cartoons. The plot of the play helps explain why the figure mixes adult and childlike features, and how he may have lost a tooth. The advertisement also carried a gloomy two-part phrase, asking what the good of anything is and answering "Nothing!" Its tone is close to Neuman's later motto.

  According to Mad publisher William Gaines, the face came from the Painless Romine Topeka Dental College. That name belonged to a dental practice at 704 Kansas Avenue in Topeka. It was tied to William Romine, a dentist who lived and practiced in Wichita. His surname is often misspelled Romaine. Similar grinning faces appeared in many advertisements for painless dentistry.

  A near-identical face appears in a 1923 issue of The Guffer, the humor magazine of the University of Minnesota. It sits above a caption about a medic who has just passed an exam. In 1939 the A.B. Cook company used another version on the logo of Happy Jack Beverages, a soda drink. During World War II, one American bomber carried the face as nose art, above the motto "Me Worry?"

  The face also served as an insult. Political advertisers used it to suggest that only an idiot would back their opponent. In 1940, opponents of a third term for Franklin Delano Roosevelt mailed postcards showing a similar caricature captioned "Sure, I'm for Roosevelt". The chemist Carl Djerassi, in his autobiography, describes something darker. After the Anschluss, he says, he saw posters in Vienna with a similar face beside a slogan demanding death for Jews. In some cases the idiot implication may have doubled as an antisemitic caricature.

  In 1965 the question of who owned the face reached the Supreme Court. A small publisher sued the parent company of Mad, claiming infringement of a copyright on the character's image dating from 1914. Mad asked its readers to hunt down earlier images, hoping to show the face belonged to the public domain. The Court ruled in Mad's favor. The 1914 copyright holder was a woman whose husband had held the original rights. She could not prove that every print he produced carried a valid copyright notice. The Court also found the original holder "most derelict in preventing others from infringing his copyright", given how widely similar images had spread over the decades.

  In 2008, Eastern Michigan University held an exhibit and a symposium on the evolution of these images. They traced the face back as far as 1877.

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• 3. Name and Motto

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  The editors at EC grew up listening to the radio, and it shaped their stories, their names and their references. The name Alfred E. Neuman came from Here's Morgan, a radio series starring the comedian Henry Morgan. It aired on Mutual, ABC and NBC. One character on the show had a name that echoed Alfred Newman, a composer who scored many films. Newman also wrote the familiar fanfare that plays with the 20th Century Fox logo.

  Morgan himself may have drawn on Sir Henry Morgan, a character played by Laird Cregar in the 1942 film The Black Swan. Alfred Newman wrote the Oscar-nominated score for that film. The Mad staff enjoyed Morgan's sarcastic, brash broadcasts and reworked the name into Neuman. Harvey Kurtzman explained the choice in a 1975 press release. In 2012, longtime editor Nick Meglin gave a shorter and more exasperated version. Kurtzman had used the name once before, in an unconnected way. Al Feldstein, Mad's second editor, attached it to the boy in 1956.

  Before that, the face wandered through the magazine under other names. On page 7 of issue #24 he was Melvin Coznowski, and on page 63 he was Melvin Sturdley. Later issues called him Melvin Cowsnofsky or Mel Haney. Issue #25 played with the pairing, showing the face and the name on separate pages. Issue #24 also contained two appearances of a different Alfred E. Neuman. That one was a little man in a traditional morning suit, with a mustache, slicked-over hair and spectacles.

  The motto is easier to trace. "What, me worry?" is a line of cheerful incuriosity. It first ran beneath his face as "What? Me worry?" After the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, Mad changed it for a single issue to "Yes, me worry!" Norman Mingo, a long-time cover artist, once painted him as a Roman bust. The paperback The Ides of Mad shows the base engraved with the motto in Dog Latin, "Quid, Me Anxius Sum?"

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• 4. From Postcard to Portrait

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  Harvey Kurtzman first spotted the image on a postcard pinned to the office bulletin board of Bernard Shir-Cliff, an editor at Ballantine Books. Kurtzman recalled, "It was a face that didn't have a care in the world, except mischief". Shir-Cliff later contributed to various magazines Kurtzman created.

  In November 1954, the face made its Mad debut on the cover of The Mad Reader. This Ballantine paperback collected reprints from the magazine's first two years. His first appearance in the comic book itself came in issue #21, dated March 1955. It was a tiny image in a mock advertisement for a rubber mask bearing his likeness, with the word "idiot" printed underneath. The price was $1.29.

  Mad switched to a magazine format with issue #24. From then on, Neuman's face sat in the top central position of the illustrated border on each cover, with a caption beneath. The same borders ran for five more issues, through #30 in December 1956. His first color appearance came on the crowded cover of issue #27.

  Under Feldstein, the face moved from decoration to centerpiece. Mingo painted the portrait that settled everything on the cover of issue #30. It presented Neuman as a supposed write-in candidate for the presidency. That image fixed his identity and appearance in the version used ever since. In November 2008, Mingo's original cover art sold at auction for $203,150.

  Mingo painted seven more Neuman covers through 1957 and became the magazine's signature cover artist through the 1960s and 1970s. He turned out 97 Mad covers in total, plus dozens of images for the reprint Specials and paperbacks. From 1958 to 1962 he concentrated on his advertising work. During that gap, Frank Kelly Freas drew Neuman for Mad. Mingo's total passed Freas' in 1965. Mingo kept the lead until 2016, when Mark Fredrickson reached 98 covers.

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• 5. Face Value

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  Andy Warhol once said that seeing Neuman taught him to love people with big ears. Most people notice something else first. Neuman's most prominent feature is his gap-toothed grin, and the magazine has enjoyed playing with it.

  On the cover of issue #236, dated January 1983, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial uses his famous healing finger to touch Neuman's mouth and regrow the missing tooth. A text gag on issue #263, from June 1986, claimed that the UPC bar code was really a close-up photograph of Neuman's missing tooth. Issue #411, from November 2001, was the first produced after the 9/11 attacks. Its close-up of Neuman's face showed the gap filled with an American flag.

  In 1958, Mad published letters from several readers who noticed a resemblance between Neuman and England's Prince Charles, then nine years old. Soon afterward, an angry letter on Buckingham Palace letterhead reached the Mad offices. It denied any likeness at all and told the magazine, "So jolly well stow it!" It was signed "Charles. P." The letter was authenticated. It was written on triple-cream laid royal stationery with an official copper-engraved crest. The postmark showed it had been mailed from a post office a short walk from Buckingham Palace. The original disappeared in the 1980s while on loan to another magazine and has never been found.

  For many years, Mad sold full-color prints of the official portrait through a small house ad on its letters page. Early prices were 25 cents for one picture, three for 50 cents, nine for a dollar, or 27 for two dollars. The ad often described the prints as "suitable for framing or wrapping fish".

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• 6. Covers Without Him

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  Issue #233, from September 1982, replaced Neuman's image with that of Pac-Man. Issue #195, from December 1977, carried instead the message "Pssst! Keep This Issue Out of the Hands of Your Parents! (Make 'Em Buy Their Own Copy!)" Even when he is not part of the cover gag, or the cover is all text, his disembodied head usually appears in miniature.

  The most notorious Neuman-free cover was issue #166, from April 1974. It showed a human hand giving the profane middle-finger gesture and declared Mad "The Number One Ecch Magazine". Some newsstands that normally carried the magazine chose not to display or sell that issue.

  His ubiquity as a grinning cover boy grew as the magazine's circulation quadrupled. Yet the single highest-selling issue of Mad showed only his feet. Issue #161 spoofed the 1972 film The Poseidon Adventure and pictured Neuman floating upside-down inside a life preserver. In 1992, Annie Gaines, widow of Mad founder and publisher William Gaines, bought the original art at auction for $2,200. She then placed it on permanent loan with Mad writer Dick DeBartolo. In 1998, the illustrator Mick McGinty copied the image for issue #369, spoofing the hit film Titanic.

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• 7. Beyond the Page

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  In late 1959, Mad released a 45 single built around his catchphrase, credited to Alfred E. Neuman and his Furshlugginer Five. An uncredited voice actor sang Neuman's part. The B-side, "Potrzebie", was an instrumental.

  Neuman also made a cameo in an episode of Mister Magoo. At the end of "Mr. Magoo and the Beanstalk", he appears as the son of the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk. A live-action Neuman, an uncredited actor in a mask, appears briefly in the 1980 film Up the Academy. In theaters, the film was titled Mad Magazine presents: Up the Academy. Mad then revoked its support, and the Neuman footage was cut from later North American home video and television releases. The segment returned on the 2006 DVD. He also appeared occasionally in the early seasons of MADtv, and briefly in the animated series Mad.

  Moxie Cowznofsky appeared in issue #44, dated January 1959. She was a female version of Neuman, occasionally described in the text as his girlfriend. She received her name in the letters column of issue #48, in July 1959. The two were sometimes drawn side by side, which ended any speculation that she was Neuman in female guise. Her name came from Moxie, a soft drink made in Portland, Maine and sold nationwide in the 1950s. Its logo was a running visual gag in many early issues of Mad.

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• 8. Neuman in Politics

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  In August 1971, National Lampoon put a Frank Kelly Freas illustration on its cover that merged the features of William Calley Jr. with those of Neuman. Beneath it ran the words "What, My Lai?"

  During the presidency of George W. Bush, editorial cartoonists such as Mike Luckovich and Tom Tomorrow frequently blended Bush's features with Neuman's. The image also reached magazine covers, notably The Nation. A large Bush and Neuman poster was part of the Washington protests that accompanied Bush's 2001 inauguration. Hillary Clinton noted the resemblance more than once. On the 11th of April 2005, she told reporters about a dangerous fiscal situation and said the administration was Alfred E. Neuman, asking "what, me worry?" On the 10th of July 2005, at the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival, she said, "I sometimes feel that Alfred E. Neuman is in charge in Washington".

  In October 2008, at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, presidential candidate Barack Obama joked, "It's often been said that I share the politics of Alfred E. Smith. And the ears of Alfred E. Neuman."

  After Newsweek was criticized for using computer graphics to retouch the teeth of Bobbi McCaughey, a political cartoon put Neuman in a split-screen comparison. On the Mad cover he wore his usual gap-toothed grin. On the Newsweek cover he had a perfect smile. Others compared to him over the years include Charles III, Rick Astley, Ted Koppel, Oliver North and David Letterman. On the 20th of July 2019, the German weekly Der Spiegel merged his likeness with that of Boris Johnson, then a candidate for leader of the British Conservative Party.

  On the 10th of May 2019, President Donald Trump said in an interview, "Alfred E. Neuman cannot become president of the United States". He was talking about presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. Buttigieg said he did not know who Neuman was, and Mad later referenced Buttigieg on social media. In the 2026 United States Senate election in Texas, Ken Paxton won the Republican nomination. Trump then repeatedly compared the Democratic nominee, James Talarico, to Neuman.

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