Mad #413 (Nick Meglin and John Ficarra) - Dumbest People 2001 - January 2002

The poetry by Frank Jacobs is excellent and the drawing by Mort Drucker is superb, but does Michael Jordan belong in the "Dumbest" 20?  He is so dumb that he made over $90 million during 15 years of professional basketball while also taking off for four years.  Jordan is so dumb that he now has a net worth of $650 million.  For the record, Jordan came back to basketball for two years at the age of 38 and scored over 3,000 points in 142 games.  Such a dummy!  The case for dumbness is much easier made for Jerry Falwell (1933-2007), Danny Almonte (and his parents and coaches), Anne Heche, Sean Combs, Gary Condit, the Bush twins and the nine substance abusers.  Bill Clinton and Al Gore have not always been wise but on the whole they have been excellent public servants who made mucho dinero since 2001.  I will however agree that five of those Supreme Court Justices [William Rehnquist (1924-2005), Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor] proved to be the dumbest of the dumb by stomping on states' rights and launching G.W. Bush into the White House.  This will go down in history as the worst SCOTUS decision ever.  [JAM 3/4/2014]

Continuing a long tradition of self-criticism/parody, The Mad editors included themselves in the Dumbest 20 for accepting advertisements.  The fake cover on page 44 showed ads for Goodyear, Absolut, Green Giant, Coca-Cola, Coppertone, Ragu, Sprite, Target, Nike, Pepsi-Cola, CBS, Apple, Bic, Mercedes, Breathe-Right, Volkswagen, The Gap, Jif, Levis, Burger King, Warner Brothers, McDonalds, AT&T, Cingular and AOL.

Color Pages: 36 of 52 pages (69%)
Humorous Content: 47 of 52 pages (90%)

Departments:
Crass is in Session - Boston Pubic
Serge-In General - A Mad Look at Security
Shock by Mail - The Controversial Artist Instruction School
Joke And Dagger - Spy vs. Spy
Letting the Gene out of the Bottle - Amazing Facts (and Surprising Discoveries) from the Human Genome DNA Project
Angster's Paradise - Monroe & ... Tinsel Teeth
Grieving Las Vegas - Mad's Celebrity Cause-of-Death Betting Odds  [Eddie Murphy]
The Mad 20: The Dumbest People, Events and Things of 2001
Have Your Primate And Eat It Too - How Many Mistakes Can You Find in This Picture of a Monkey Hunt  [fake department]
Corn on the Mob - The Sopranos Family Circus
Claus And Effect - Season's Greetings 2001 from the Usual Gang of Idiots

Fold-In - Gary Condit