In the 2020 primaries, Donald Trump said that Mayo Pete looks like Alfred E. Neuman (which is devastatingly accurate), and Pete countered that he’d never heard of Alfred E. Neuman and it “must be an old person thing.” That was incredibly weird to me, because I’m younger than Pete Buttigieg and I know who Alfred E. Neuman is.
It seems like there’s three possibilities: One is that Pete does know who Alfred E. Neuman is, and his retort was simply try-hard and pathetic. Another possibility is that Pete does not know who Alfred E. Neuman is because he’s been such a careerist psycho his whole life that he knows nothing but the most basic of pop culture references and whatever his staffers tell him about. The third possibility is that I’m unusual in my age cohort for knowing Alfred E. Neuman. My friends and I read Mag Magazine as kids, but we were nerds, and it may have been well past the heyday when Mad was a universal cultural touchstone for kids.
I recognize the face but not the name
Me too.
i’m two years older than that pod person and i totally know. i think mad magazine was something kids who went to convenience stores in the late 80s/early 90s unsupervised would know about. pete seems like his entire existence before the age of 20 was some kind of daily stage-managed romp through political career incubators and society tutelage before retiring to a special bath where a silent old woman would bath him in buttermilk for 45 minutes and then lay out cheese cubes for him to snack on while watching taped interviews with Henry Kissenger.
i don’t think pete knows what anything is, except as it can be handed to him on an index card by a bodyman.
These are the same people who don’t know what woods porn is.
For zoomers like me who were like “I mean, I don’t know what that is, but I don’t want to look like I’m not in the know afront my venerable elders”:
woods porn = porn you find or keep in the woods. It’s that simple.
Youngsters had more woods to explore and more freedom to explore them, and porno was at this time mainly sold as physical magazines — so, if you didn’t want your mags caught, you would keep them (or specific pages) in various locations “off the beaten path”, so to speak. Other youngsters might stumble upon each others’ caches while exploring the great outdoors, and this was naturally seen as quite a valuable and cool find.
This is at least how I understand it from a quick Web search.
It took me like 20 seconds to remember it’s the mad magazine kid. I saw plenty of those magazines but people never really said the name Alfred E. Neuman
I read all of the mental illness themed humor magazines
Did you know Cracked’s archive was destroyed because of the 2001 anthrax letters?
Damn, that’s a shame
Zoomer who knows him but I’m a bit of an esoteriphile
who need they obscurussy ate?
You ever heard of Seymour Butts?
Yeah he’s friends with Hugh Jass
Yes, but my grandparents had a collection of Mad Magazines at their house.
Older millennial - don’t know.
I saw like two Mad Magazines ever when I was a kid. I got the impression they were more of a Gen X thing.
You are not alone. Pete definitely knows who that is
What, me worry?
“What kind of slime would I marry?”
never heard of him
oh it’s the MAD guy? didn’t know he had a name
Nope, never heard of him in my life. My mom knows who he is and told me when I asked her just now, but she’s a boomer*, so that doesn’t really answer your question.
*She insists that I refer to her as a “late boomer”.
Edit: If you’d shown me a picture I would say “the Mad Magazine kid” but I don’t know him by name because I never read Mad Magazine.
Yes i used to read mad magazine in the store while my mom shopped
Yup, but through the Simpsons
