If other magazines are doing these big, full-color foldouts, well, cheap old Mad should go completely the opposite way and do an ultra-modest black-and-white Fold-In!
The Fold-In is among the few recurring features remaining in Mad today, as the magazine switched to a nearly all-reprint format in 2019.
A Mad Fold-In consists of a single drawing, with a paragraph of text underneath, and a panel across the top with a question.
depicted a stream of placard-carrying marchers, but folded into the image of the underside of a worn-out sole and the answer, "SHOE SALES."
A drawing of a fearsome panther stalking a variety of jungle animals accompanying the question "What predatory creature most threatens the survival of endangered species?"
Following the 1991 Tailhook scandal, a Navy war room became a female officer being sexually molested by a gauntlet of her comrades.
The Far Side creator Gary Larson described his experience with the Fold-In: "The dilemma was always this: Very slowly and carefully fold the back cover... without creasing the page and quickly look at the joke.
His Fold-In design for issue #495, for a question about "packaging garbage," prominently showed two separate halves of the Pixar character Wall-E within a larger drawing of a junkyard.
But both Wall-E halves were on the wrong side of the fold, and thus disappeared into the real picture, which was about the TMZ gossip website.
Jaffee only used a computer for typographic maneuvers, to make certain fold-in tricks easier to design.
In 2008, Jaffee told the Cape Cod Times, "I never see the finished painting folded until it's printed in the magazine.
Editor John Ficarra described the process: "We'll call him up with a Fold-In idea and we'll say, 'In the first picture, we want the Civil War, and we have to have both the Confederate and Union soldiers in it, and there's got to be a cannon in it.
"[6] Jaffee's first three Fold-Ins featured gags about the Elizabeth Taylor–Eddie Fisher–Richard Burton love triangle, Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller's battle for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, and The Beatles' departure back to England.
Fold-In subjects from the mid-1970s dealt with the gas shortage, "Saturday night special" handguns, and revelations about the CIA bugging American citizens.
Fold-In topics in the years 2008 and 2009 included Guitar Hero, teen pregnancy, and Jay Leno temporarily leaving The Tonight Show.
"Before anyone knew it," wrote comics historian Christopher Irving, "the hundreds of Fold-Ins created a timeline of American history, political satire, and entertainment."
And the only thing that popped into my head was that Elizabeth Taylor had just dumped Eddie Fisher and was carrying on with Richard Burton.
The insert included a Fold-In, showing a trade ship about to embark on a voyage, which folded into an African-American arm in chains.
Four Fold-Ins were patterned after Al Jaffee's other Mad feature, Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.
The first, in #222, shows Humpty Dumpty sarcastically refusing to be put back together again, which folds into a plate of scrambled eggs.
The fourth, in #499, shows a snowboarder fending off stupid questions, folding into an image of him crashing into a stone wall.
This turned out to be untrue, as the trial was delayed until October 2014, some 18 months after the editorial decision to nix the Fold-In was made.
[13] And in the annual "20 Worst of the Year" issue, the Fold-In is used as one of the 20 items, thus appearing as an internal page of the magazine.
"[14] Nevertheless, Jaffee's final Fold-In appeared in the August 2020 issue of Mad after the cartoonist retired at the age of 99.
Appearing during a stark recession, it depicted the magazine's mascot Alfred E. Neuman with an atypically worried expression, in front of a dozen shuttered businesses.
Later in the episode, Bart’s father Homer Simpson misfolds the page, reads “The All Ighty Ollar,” and laughs anyway.
[16] In a 1993 episode, Marge Simpson’s prison cellmate has a Fold-In tattooed onto her back; when she pushes her shoulder blades together, the question “What kind of slime would I marry?”, becomes "What, me worry?"
Also mimicking Mad's design, the top and bottom rows of the crossword both featured an "A" and a "B" in their horizontal grids, which needed to be folded together to touch one another to produce the desired result.
In 2010, he recalled: I got a call from The Daily Show — they asked me if I would contribute a fold-in to their [2004] book, America.
And that's where I met Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart and all the writers, and they told me it was our work in Mad that inspired them.