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.
No. not a clue. I’ve heard of Mad magazine but I don’t know that much about it.
I know who he is, but I also just found out I’m older than mayor Pete.
Life is passing me by and i’ve yet to fix bread prices.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.
never heard of him
oh it’s the MAD guy? didn’t know he had a name
Yeah dude. Feel like I learned it as a bit of trivia later on though. I did see some Mad Magazines growing up though.
You are not alone. Pete definitely knows who that is
I’m over 30, and no. Nor Mad Magazine before adulthood, and even then its just in references.
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.
And damn, the dude who came up with the fold-in lived to be over 100 and he stepped down at 99 year old. What a trooper.
Don’t know who that is. Late 20s
Who?
I know who Alfred E. Neuman is and I’m 28. I’ve even still got some old issues of mad magazine lying around my house.
Im 33. I kinda thought it was the mad magazine kid, but I’m pretty sure I learned that from a Chapo Trap House episode. I have never in my life read mad magazine.
I recognize the face but not the name
Me too.
Millennial, never really read Mad but was vaguely aware of it. I know of Alfred E Neuman though.
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.
