{"id":6815,"date":"2016-03-04T07:19:04","date_gmt":"2016-03-04T13:19:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=6815"},"modified":"2016-03-04T07:19:04","modified_gmt":"2016-03-04T13:19:04","slug":"the-long-tangled-history-of-alfred-e-neuman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=6815","title":{"rendered":"The Long, Tangled History of Alfred E. Neuman"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"http:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/03\/a-boy-with-no-birthday-turns-sixty\/\">Sam Sweet<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>In a 1975 interview with the New York Times, MAD Magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman recalled an illustration of a grinning boy he\u2019d spotted on a postcard in the early fifties: a \u201cbumpkin portrait,\u201d \u201cpart leering wiseacre, part happy-go-lucky kid.\u201d It was captioned \u201cWhat, Me Worry?\u201d<br \/>&nbsp;<br \/>&nbsp;That bumpkin became Alfred E. Neuman, MAD\u2019s mascot, who turns sixty this year\u2014kind of. The impish, immutable redhead made his official debut in December 1956, when he appeared on the cover of MAD #30 as a write-in candidate for president. He\u2019s appeared on almost every MAD cover since: possessing, spoofing, and spooking cultural icons with nothing more than a drowsy rictus. Though MAD gave him a purpose, a permanent home, his origin story remains elusive. It involves, among other things, a plum-pudding advertisement, a dubious lawsuit, and a traveling nineteenth-century farce<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sam Sweet: In a 1975 interview with the New York Times, MAD Magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman recalled an illustration of a grinning boy he\u2019d spotted on a postcard in the early fifties: a \u201cbumpkin portrait,\u201d \u201cpart leering wiseacre, part happy-go-lucky kid.\u201d It was captioned \u201cWhat, Me Worry?\u201d&nbsp;&nbsp;That bumpkin became Alfred E. Neuman, MAD\u2019s mascot, who [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6815"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6815"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6816,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6815\/revisions\/6816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}