By Mark D. Zimmerman
Al Jaffee died last week at the age of 102. Jaffee was one of “The Usual Gang of Idiots” who wrote and produced Mad Magazine under the leadership of editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines. Mad Magazine’s humor had a very Jewish slant, including regular use of Yiddish and faux-Yiddish words, such as furshlugginer, bveebleftzer, ganef and farshimmelt, as a result of the fact that so many of their writers were Jewish. Jaffee was best known for creating the fold-in back cover and writing the “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” feature. Besides writing for Mad Magazine, Jaffee was a regular contributor to the Moshiach Times, a children’s magazine published by the Chabad Lubavitch movement, where he wrote The Shpy, about a bumbling secret agent/Torah scholar whose mission was to defeat the YH, the Yetzer Hora (the Evil Inclination). In an homage to the speech pattern of Humphrey Bogart, the Shpy pronounced words beginning with the letter S in a “softened way” with an SH sound.
For example, the Shpy once said, “I shtarted Shpy pre-shchool when I was very young and shtudied hard in the hope that I might eventually get into Shecret Shpy Shchool.” And when he invented a repellent to keep the Yetzer Hora away, he marketed the product with the slogan “Let us shpray.” What character did Al Jaffee create who assisted the Shpy on his missions?
A. Sham Shpade.
B. Mendel the Mensch.
C. Captain Klutz.
D. Kalman the Kosher Cowboy.
E. Alfred E. Jewman.
Link to answer: http://
*
Mark Zimmerman is the author of a series of Jewish trivia books, under the title RASHI, RAMBAM and RAMALAMADINGDONG: A Quizbook of Jewish Trivia Facts & Fun.