This has been bothering me since 2020. Millennials and Zoomers on Hexbear: without googling, do you know who Alfred E. Neuman is?
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'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.
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
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.
I thought mad magazine stopped being published in like the 90s or something. I'm pretty sure most people my age don't even know what that is. I just know because I used to read cracked and they had some sort of rivalry going on. Also why the fuck would I know off the top of my head what their fucked up looking mascot boy's name is lmao.
I know him from the mad covers when I was a kid and used to browse video game magazines in the grocery store. Anyone remember trading card game magazines? They'd have cool fantasy covers by artists like Keith Parkinson and would cover games like mtg or pokemon.
I only know it's the Mad Magazine cartoon mascot guy (or whatever) because of a podcast that riffed on it. Otherwise, never heard of him. How does anyone even know his name? It's not like the cover of Mad Magazine explains his backstory or something.
So I know the character but I never knew what his name was. There are so many cases like this one, I have an excellent visual memory (being an artist and all, thats kind of normal), but my names memeory is scuffed. So i think many people know the character but don't know what his name is.
Neuman was (and still is?) a Mad Magazine fixture and I can't believe Mayo Pete never looked at the magazine and he never learned who Neuman was. If I'm right - he lied and it was a win-win. He got to do some pushback to Trump with zero effort and he pretended not to be the nerd that he actually is.
I know who Alfred E. Neuman is, but I didn't know the name until much later, he was the ”Mad cover guy” to me as a kid.
I was a kid in the 90s so that was probably after the heyday of Mad, but Pete is older than me so he probably should've known. It's possible he's just a weird nerd though and not in a good way: I remember him saying in an interview that he used to have a RATM poster on his wall, but he didn't even listen to them, he just liked the look of the poster.
(appropriate, because he looks like the kid on the cover of Evil Empire)
I do but I have the cultural cache of someone twice my age.
Although, Cartoon Network had a MAD cartoon around 8-10 years ago that wasn't a huge hit, but IIRC they used Al in some of the title cards and interstitial segments between cartoon skits.
As a millennial, I've read Mad Magazine and Cracked before when I was a kid, but I always saw him as "the Mad Magazine mascot." I think I only learned the dude's name from Wikipedia. It's not like the magazine itself goes out of its way to spell out the dude's name. And besides that, I mostly skipped to Spy vs Spy and those fold-ins.
I’m an elder millennial and I have known who Alfred E Neuman is for most of my life despite not reading Mad magazine regularly (always felt like more of a Gen X/late Boomer thing). Obviously the Simpsons referenced Mad a lot, and MadTV was the greatest sketch comedy show on Saturday nights.
For what it’s worth, I think that was Mayo Pete trying to insult trump in the weakest way possible, and it was an utter failure.
No idea who he is. I was born in the mid 90s. Looking him up now
Edit: yeah I’ve heard of mad magazine but that’s really it, never was part of my experience growing up. I think the first possibility is probably the right one though, a rare instance of Pete being right
I used to get mad magazines out at the library and they'd already have the fold in done. It was a real treat when there'd be a new edition amd my parents would let us get a fresh one I'd share w my siblings, i only got to do a fold a few times in my life amd it's oh so sweet