In March 1976, a great American portrait debuted to an adoring public. It was a bicentennial appreciation of George Washington ..
. of a sort. Inspired by The Athenaeum Portrait , Gilbert Stuart’s 1796 painting featured on the one-dollar bill, this rendering of the first president featured one distinction.
The original showed Washington with swollen, tightly closed lips due to a new set of ill-fitting dentures, while the 1976 version had a gap-toothed smirk instantly recognizable to America’s middle school reprobates. Equally recognizable was the blank stare that those same kids knew evoked the iconic question: “What, Me Worry?” Drawn by 80-year-old illustrator Norman Mingo , Mad magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman graced the cover of Issue No.
181 in a glorious powdered wig. It’s one of 275 original drawings—alongside 150 physical objects—on display in “ What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine ,” an exhibition running through October 27 at the Norman Rockwell Museum in western Massachusetts. It covers the full 72-year history of Mad , highlighted by the stretch from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, when the magazine pilloried mass culture—television, movies, politics and more—in a way that introduced satire to kids raised on tamer entertainment like “Leave It to Beaver.
” Nothing was off-limits in Mad , a newsstand stalwart that would reach peak annual sales in the 1970s of 2.5 million issues by delivering belly laughs and self-satisfaction to.