07 May 2026

Spoken in Jest

by Sarah Weinman

When a near-mint run of MAD Magazine from the mid-1950s through the 1980s showed up at our home—the collection had belonged to my father’s cousin—my brother and I devoured them, to the point of irreparable damage; we were, alas, clueless about archival preservation. We loved MAD for its anarchic humor, over-the-top images, and note-perfect song parodies, impeccable in scansion and timing. The latter, especially, became an essential ingredient in my pop culture education, since I often read them before gaining exposure to the original source materials.

Eventually I noticed that the same byline appeared over and over, on parodies of Star Wars (“The Force and I”), My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof (“Antenna on the Roof”), and so many other movies, television shows, and other cultural artifacts of their day. Who was this Frank Jacobs guy, and how was he so good at parodies?

From the Jacobs obit in the *New York Times*.

Jacobs, who died in 2021 at the age of 91, was born to a Jewish family in Nebraska, flailed in various deadly dull jobs through his twenties—and then chanced upon an issue of MAD in 1957, realized its sensibility wholly matched his own, and showed up at the New York City offices with pitches at the ready. He became the ultimate freelance writer, contributing so often to MAD that he became the magazine’s unofficial historian, even writing a mostly-authorized biography of publisher William Gaines in 1973.

Jacobs lived by that Flaubertian maxim, “a calm and orderly life.” He was married for 57 years to the same woman, and was generally thought of as a kind, unassuming guy, who produced hilarious, wildly acerbic work well into his eighties. But this illustrious career as “the dean of the song parody” was very nearly derailed at the start, thanks to litigation that proved to be a turning point in the evolution of First Amendment rights. This is the story of how one very upset songwriter, a magazine already used to fending off lawsuits, and an infamous appeals court judge collided to change legal history.