MAD About the Seventies

1996, first edition, from Little, Brown and Company
Compiled and interior design by Grant Geissman (but yes, being alphabetized under M for MAD)
MAD About the Seventies: The Best of the Decade by "The Usual Gang of Idiots"
Original price $19.95, purchase price unknown
Worn paperback
C+

If this actually were the best of the decade in which I became a MAD reader, I'd rate it higher.  But I didn't really feel like there was anything classic here.  (One of the best things I ever saw in MAD was their pairing of quotes from Watergate and Alice in Wonderland, but it's not here.  Nor is their classic Diff'rent Jokes parody, although that might've been from 1980.)  I'd start warming up to the book a bit, and then there would be something offensive.  (Could Dick DeBartolo not have said something to Larry Siegel when the Star Roars parody they cowrote has "a fag robot"?)  Ironically, one the things that Geissman thinks wouldn't work twenty years later because of political correctness, the feature about the futility of arguing with a bigot, is actually still pertinent.  

The look of the book is nice, with color sections for things like issue covers.  The dimensions are the same as an issue, although of course much thicker.  It's not a bad collection, but it didn't make me laugh.