76th Conference Friday Night Keynote Speaker: Dr. Judith Yaross Lee, Ohio University

A New York State of Mind: Mad Magazine and the Spirit of Our Times

When Mad magazine began life in 1952 as a comic book parodying other comic books, it silently built on a series of regional communication traditions. A comic take on the contemporary scene marked New York periodicals dating back to the 1830s, when William T. Porter’s Spirit of the Times (1831-1861) and The Knickerbocker (1833-1865) carried the regional media scene to a national audience, as did the twentieth century’s two most influential humorous magazines: the New Yorker in the aftermath of World War I and Mad in the years following World War II.  Mad’s zany humor has received credit for inspiring the development of the graphic novel as well as for launching the counterculture of the Baby Boom generation, but it also deserves recognition as a downtown (and outer-borough) counterpart to the New Yorker and an avatar of postmodern rhetoric, with its penchant for parody, contrarian standpoints, and the visual turn.

Judith Yaross Lee (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1986) is Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Charles E. Zumkehr Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University’s Scripps College of Communication in Athens, OH.  An interdisciplinary Americanist, she studies popular rhetorics at the intersection of media, social, political, and intellectual history.  Lee is the author or editor of five books, most recently Twain’s Brand: Humor in Contemporary American Culture (2012), three journals (including Explorations in Media Ecology as founding co-editor with Lance Strate), and some five dozen essays and articles in scholarly books and journals, most recently “The Sociable Sam Clemens: Mark Twain Among Friends” (2018).  She served as 2016 Fulbright Senior Professor of American Culture at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and has lectured widely in Europe and Australia as well as across the U.S.  Her current projects include Seeing Mad: Essays on Mad Magazine’s Humor and Legacy from Cover to Fold-In, co-edited with John Bird of Winthrop University, and American Humor and Matters of Empire, a theoretical revision of American comic rhetoric.