dir: Woody Allen
MAD #296, July 1990
w: Stan Hart
a: Sam Viviano
Oh, Woody. If only he'd hung up his hat after this he'd still be a rich man that went out at the top of his game, but he had to continue on and be a wildly inconsistent 85-year-old guerilla filmmaker, and when he passes on will be pariah, with pedophilia as the headline to his obituary with film and comedy not coming up until the third paragraph.
This is only a couple panels from Video Reviews in MAD #296 in July 1990.
Since the panels are by Sam Viviano, one of the few MAD artists I knew, and I have so much space, I guess I should mention this long-winded story that has nothing to do with this movie. Relax, it turns out positive.
In 1990, I was a student at School of Visual Arts majoring in both cartooning and illustration. I was only supposed to major in one but at that time the cartooning department was kind of a joke. To me, anyway. Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner were teachers, and the reason I went to the school, only to find out by the time I went there they were well past their prime and in declining years, and most of their classes were taught by assistants. You weren't even allowed to take any cartooning classes until your second year. The school was trying to steer you towards being a superhero artist with most classes taught by Marvel and DC artists, who I liked but had no interest in following in their footsteps. I pleaded my case with the school and was allowed to be a double major.
I did that mid-year and so changed my schedule accordingly, so many of the classes I entered second semester without taking the first one. I dropped courses I didn't think I needed like Inking 101 or whatever in favor of new ones. One such class was Caricature.
Caricature was taught by Sam Viviano, whose work I remember growing up in Dynamite and Bananas. It was starting to appear in MAD, which I wasn't reading on a regular basis at that point. The first thing he mentioned to me when taking attendance, which it did say specifically in the course manual, was that students were required to take the class first semester before taking it the second semester. He said that, however, even though I didn't read what it said, if he liked me and everyone else liked me by the end of the class, he might let me continue on.
During the first half of the three hour course, I believe we had a model, and he walked around the room giving pointers. When he got to me, he started doing things like mocking the way I held my pencil and rolling his eyes anytime I said anything. When we put our finished work on the wall, he'd point to me say things like “Do we really want this guy in our class?”
What makes Don Rickles funny is that he's an equal opportunity offender. If he singled out only one person while being nice to everyone else you'd feel sorry for the guy and that guy would be pissed off. Like I was. And I was humiliated in front of people I took other classes with. Sam was right though, you weren't supposed to enter mid-year. I still didn't think I deserved to be treated like this and I wasn't going to come back. But we had one more assignment before the class was over, to draw him. This was my opportunity to give back a final “screw you”. I drew his head onto the end of a penis.
I don't know if my doing so had anything to do with it or if the previous few hours were a hazing all students went through the previous semester, but after that he dropped the act, and I continued the rest of the year without what I had gone through. To be sure, everybody underwent some kind of roasting at one time but that was more in an affable comedic way than some kind of mindgame. He was fairly supportive of everyone and even bought mini-comics from students. He said to me once “Your work has kind of a vicious streak... I like that.”
My own work hasn't had as much caricature in it, save for a few movie review illustrations I did for New York Press. But the point of his class was kind of to apply your own style to a caricature. Most cartoonists would draw in their own style, then when confronted with doing a likeness, copy from him or Mort Drucker or Drew Friedman, often with just the head drawn on a body in their own style, making it look even more out of place. Drucker called this the 'lollipop' school of caricature, heads and bodies interchangeable. Viviano taught to draw not just a likeness of the head, but the whole body as well.
I've run into him in the street a couple times, and once at MAD when I was considered as a writer and he was art director, we're friends on Facebook, but I don't think he remembers me, let alone my drawing his head on a penis. There was probably a smart-ass every year. I don't remember much about SVA, even though most of my best friends I still have today come from there, but I remember his class.
Now that you've scrawled past my boring anecdote just like you always did with the introductions to MAD's articles, onto what you came for. Mainly...
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