Fun little article on how Mad Magazine repeatedly tweaked J Edgar Hoover, whose FBI not only held ever-growing files on publisher William Gaines, but kept sending people over to the magazine's offices to "firmly and severely admonish them concerning our displeasure" over their satire in an iconoclastic vein.
The remarkable thing to me is that the very idea of poking fun at J Edgar Hoover was so outrageous (to Hoover, at least, if not to his devotees) that the Bureau took it so seriously as to formally "advise them of our displeasure." That this sense of lèse majesté didn't stop the magazine is a tribute to Gaines, et al., but is a reminder of the temptations and pretensions of power; had the FBI had any leverage in their files about Gaines, would they have hesitated to use it for the honor of their director and Bureau? If Hoover and his boys had access to NSA data routinely collected today, what further investigation would they have done to silence the mockery? And can we be sure that similar petty uses of that kind of data won't be similarly abused in the future — or that they haven't already?
(More info here: http://cbldf.org/2015/07/j-edgar-hoovers-fbi-unamused-by-mad-antics/)
When the FBI Went After ‘Mad’ Magazine
The magazine wasn’t just polluting young minds; it had the gall to mock the honorable J. Edgar Hoover.
But mad is funny
I remember the kerfuffle. Most kids I knew (including myself) didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about, but it did make us want the magazine, and allowances that would normally have been spent on candy and a movie, went to purchase the Evil Mad Magazine instead.