In Billy Wilder’s classic film Sunset Boulevard, failed screenwriter Joe Gillis laments from the grave that “Audiences don’t know someone writes a motion picture. They think the actors make up the words as they go along.” Had Gillis possessed a livelier muse—as well as a portion of the talent, adaptability and motivation of Jack Mendelsohn—then he would have been content to have his success remain underground (as he himself was). Mendelsohn, a tremendously prolific writer and humorist, has left a mark in many media. With immediately recognizable credits—including genuine classics such as Mad and the animated Beatles movie Yellow Submarine—the lack of recognition afforded him remains a significant historical oversight.
As the one who wrote the words rather than drew the pictures, Mendelsohn and his creative contributions are often relegated to historical steerage by fans and historians. His frequent role as independent contractor surely didn’t help, partially explaining why his credits are often unrecorded; his innovative work is known to a relatively few insiders. His grasp of the ineffable connection between comic strips, animation, film and television has served as an important measure of his peripatetic success, survival and evolution as a writer. Mastering the nuances of one medium provided him the framework to adapt to them all. As a virtual cartooning Gulliver, Mendelsohn has visited many lands since the late ’40s, writing for characters made of pen and ink, paint on celluloid and flesh and blood. Mendelsohn is a writer’s writer who made the difficult transitions from gag cartoons to comic strips to comic books to animated features and Saturday morning fare to humor magazines to animated television commercials. These accomplishments alone would be enough for two careers, but Mendelsohn’s go on. He became head writer for top-10 television successes such as Three’s Company, The Carol Burnett Show and Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.
Though this interview deals with Jack’s career, it should hardly be viewed as an epitaph to it. As you read these words, this interview is likely out of date; now in his midseventies, Jack remains productive, always staying current with what today’s audience finds popular and funny. Though his career has endured many years, Mendelsohn’s humor, limitless energy and fecund imagination are as fresh and entertaining as tomorrow’s script for next
season’s hit. —John Province

John Province: During the last 55 years, your career has touched on virtually all media including writing for Mad and Panic, magazine gag cartoons, comic books, comic strips, live-action television and both Saturday morning and theatrical and TV animated films. When you’re approached by fans, what do they want to talk about?
Jack Mendelsohn: What fans? I have no fans! Why do you think I’m clinging to you?
Province: Well, I don’t believe that, so let’s just begin with your best-known venture into syndicated comic strips, Jackys Diary.
Prior to Jacky, how was your career going?
Mendelsohn: My very first job was at Famous Studios-Paramount as an opaquer, which nowadays would be called ink and paint. We colored in the cels. At the time, the studio was producing Popeye, Little Lulu and Superman. They had an apprenticeship program to train people to become animators. I was there about a year. There was so much to learn and everyone was so far ahead of me it seemed a long shot that I’d ever make it as an animator, or even as an in-betweener. So I left to try my hand at magazine gag cartooning. A fellow could make a lot of money because there were a lot of magazines in those days, many more than today. The problem was, being a fairly sophisticated writer, my stuff would only sell to upscale markets like The New Yorker, Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. I would often submit a rough and a magazine would buy my gag but have someone else do the finished drawing. I was jealous of other cartoonists who were selling a lot of medium and lower-end material at $15 to $25 each, because their drawings were better and more commercial than mine. The magazine cartoonists met on Wednesdays at various midtown restaurants, because that’s the day you showed your stuff to the editors and your fellow cartoonists. I remember Dick Cavalli, Jerry Marcus, Frank Ridgeway, Jack Markow, Sam Cobean, Charles Saxon, Don Tobin, Hilda Terry and Mell Lazarus. I wanted desperately to be a cartoonist and thought of myself as one, but I can’t honestly say I was all that successful at it.

Province: Did you think doing a syndicated comic strip would be an easier market than magazines?
Mendelsohn: I wanted to do a syndicated comic strip but realized that the competition was so advanced artistically that I could never meet those standards. I thought if I could do a comic strip as seen through the eyes of a child and drawn in that crude style, I could use my writing to do an “endaround,” bypassing the skills I lacked as an artist. I drew up a few pages and made an appointment to show it to Sylvan Byck, who was then head of comic features at King Features, and they bought it the very same day. Byck told me that Jackys Diary was the fastest sale that had ever been made in the history of the syndicate.
When they bought it, I was surprised because I had only drawn six sample Sunday pages, so I had to start working immediately to begin making deadlines. We were only in about 13 papers when it debuted and it surprised me that they would get behind it with that low a circulation. But King Features was confident it was going to be a huge success and launched a very expensive publicity campaign proclaiming it “the first really new comic strip in 20 years!”
Province: Did you produce Jackys Diary with kids in mind?
Mendelsohn: I never at any time considered Jacky a children’s strip. On the contrary, I considered it very adult with the use of wordplay, puns and satirical observations, somewhat along the lines of what I did in writing for Panic and Mad. I don’t think the average child would have fully appreciated what I was doing. For example, Jacky goes to the circus and sees the strongman. You and I would see a muscular individual testing his strength, but Jacky sees a man who can make his face turn red by pulling on a chain “but it finally busted, so he couldn’t do the trick any more.” Sometimes, if it was an elaborate story, I would take two weeks to tell it, such as one I did on the history of the Roman Empire.
Province: Did it take long to keep ahead of the deadline?
Mendelsohn: It may have been a case of work expanding to fill the time one has to complete it, but between the writing and drawing and the endless edits I would make, a Sunday page would take me almost a week to finish. Some of the crosshatching was time consuming, and the work is actually more detailed and complicated than it appears. As I looked over my originals recently, I hadn’t realized how many paste-ups I did. Also, my originals are quite large—huge, as a matter of fact.
Province: Scott Shaw is a great Jackys Diary fan, and he told me recently that you were his childhood inspiration for becoming a cartoonist. He recalled, “If this guy can get a comic strip, so can I!”
Mendelsohn: [chuckles] Scott told me that same story. We worked together at both Hanna-Barbera and DIC, where he produced and directed “Camp Candy” while I story-edited it.
Province: You kept your Jackys Diary originals?
Mendelsohn: I thought I had them all. That’s why I’m so surprised you have one here for me to autograph. The only one I remember giving away was as a gift to my former brother-in-law, so I have no idea how this one got away from me.
Province: It turned up at the International Museum of Cartoon Art auction, and it’s the only one I’ve ever seen, which is why I made sure I got it. During its run, you did quite a lot of promotional work for Jackys Diary, didn’t you?
Mendelsohn: I did two theatrical animated shorts, one called “A Leak in the Dike” and another based on a Sunday page telling the story of George Washington; this one was nominated for an Oscar by the Motion Picture Academy. I also drew some comic books for Dell that ran for a few issues. I also made up some Jackys Diary stationery to answer fan mail . . . not that I got to use much of it.
Province: How long did Jacky last, and what ultimately caused its cancellation?
Mendelsohn: It started in January 1959 and ran for exactly three years. It was canceled because ultimately it was too expensive for the syndicate to continue running. My contract called for me to get half of the gross income, with the expenses for producing and distributing the feature to come off of their end.
I should explain that unless you’re talking about Prince Valiant or Tarzan, with hundreds of client papers, syndicates make no money from features that are exclusively Sunday pages. The profit is in the dailies. The daily pages were reproduced on a pasteboard matte, which costs literally pennies. It’s cheap to produce and ship. The Sunday page, on the other hand, involves making metal plates for printing, shipping them and, in a case like Jackys Diary where half the client papers were European, you’re now talking about paying a translator to translate it into Norwegian or Yugoslavian, and flying the metal plates overseas. Ultimately, Jacky became an expensive hobby King Features could no longer afford. I’m still very proud of Jackys Diary and consider it, along with writing The Carol Burnett Show, one of the best things I’ve ever done.
Province: Would you have been willing to produce a daily strip?
Mendelsohn: I would have loved to have done a daily. I even drew up a few samples, but it just didn’t work. I needed the space a Sunday page provided to let the gags develop.
Province: Just out of curiosity, which feature took your spot on the page?
Mendelsohn: Lee Holley’s Ponytail. Lee had an advantage over me in that it first ran for about a year or so as a daily and was able to build a readership by the time they launched the Sunday page.
Province: You’re a second-generation cartooning professional, your father being a business associate and a family friend of Winsor McCay’s. Was Little Nemo the inspiration for Jackys Diary?
Mendelsohn: I don’t think so. At least not that I’m aware of.
Province: Could we talk a bit about your father’s relationship with McCay?
Mendelsohn: He was McCay’s agent for the animated films, not the comic strips. McCay had a vaudeville act in which he would include his animation, using a giant-size Gertie the Dinosaur. I remember as a child having copies of these films and running them; wonderful work, and all hand-drawn by McCay on rice paper. Amazing. At one time our house was filled with his original Little Nemo Sunday pages and reels of his animated cartoons. Unfortunately, they weren’t taken care of and ultimately decomposed. We used to visit his home in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and though I was just a child at the time I remember him as a very nice man, very kind. We also had, through my father’s association with McCay, a big stack of originals stored in in our attic, which, unfortunately, fell victim to a leaking roof and were gradually turned into a pile of priceless mush. Of course in those days, original art had no value and no one cared about them. I recently came across a few things of his, including a single Little Nemo panel among my things. My wife auctioned it on eBay and it sold for $1,800. Just one panel!
Province: After Jackys Diary, you worked on other King Features venues such as animated cartoons.
Mendelsohn: Al Brodax, who was a former William Morris agent, ran the syndicated animation division of King Features. He had recently sold a series of cartoon shorts based on Krazy Kat, Beetle Bailey and Snuffy Smith. Brodax was an admirer of Jackys Diary and hired me to write all 100 of both the Krazy Kat and Beetle Bailey four-minute shorts. I’d never written for animation before but was pretty sure I could pick it up. I wrote not only the episodes but also storyboarded them for the animators, which is how I always worked when I wrote for comic books or animation. That job led to my writing the Beatles’ Saturday-morning TV show and eventually to my writing for Yellow Submarine, the Beatles’ animated feature.
Province: I’d like to talk about Yellow Submarine, but first let’s touch on the Beatles’ Saturday-morning TV show, which I remember very well. That show was a very big hit at the time.
Mendelsohn: They were fun to work on and I enjoyed it. I did stories in four segments, taking the Beatles all over the world, and I’ve included some of my original pencil layouts for this interview, where they’re in Transylvania. One of the animators told me they were easy to follow because they looked like caricatures of the Beatles and were reminiscent of Milt Gross’ loose style. Being a great admirer of Milt Gross, this naturally pleased me very much. It was a compliment I’ve always remembered.
Province: How did King Features, primarily a newspaper syndicate, manage to latch on to a musical act like the Beatles?
Mendelsohn: In 1964 King signed them for the animated cartoon series, so they had them locked in early. Producer Brodax somehow connected with Brian Epstein and the Beatles were eager to do it at the time because they were an up-and-coming group. No one really knew they were going to become as big as they eventually would be. At that time I think everyone may have considered them just another passing fad. Brodax must really be given the credit for that. Without him I doubt any of it would have come about. He was very clever to recognize the potential.
Province: Did the Beatles do their own voices for the Saturday morning show?
Mendelsohn: No. They had actors doing impressions of them, just like when they recorded Yellow Submarine.
Province: Why an animated feature-length film after successful live-action pictures like Help! and A Hard Day’s Night?
Mendelsohn: The Beatles originally signed a three-picture deal, but by 1968 they were superstars and couldn’t afford to take a year off to make a movie. They would lose millions in recording and concert money. They were trying desperately to break the contract when Al Brodax came up with the idea of a feature-length animated cartoon in which the Beatles themselves wouldn’t have to do anything. We made the film using actors to do the Beatles’ voices and wrote the script around existing songs from their Sgt. Pepper album. The Beatles gave their blessing but totally disassociated themselves from the film; they wouldn’t discuss it and wanted nothing to do with it, because they weren’t in control. But when they were finished touring and finally saw the finished product, they were so enthusiastic and they went on doing that little live-action tag that you see at the end, so they could somehow adopt it as their own and be connected with it.
Province: So you did not work with the Beatles on actual production in any way?
Mendelsohn: No, we didn’t, although I did meet Ringo years later and he told me how much he enjoyed Yellow Submarine. He even gave me an autographed cel, which I’m sad to say I gave away.
Province: You mentioned Milt Gross earlier. What other cartoonists did you like?
Mendelsohn: I enjoyed Al Capp’s Li’l Abner. Not because of the art, which was brilliant, as much as the humor and language. He was a genius at that outrageous type of satire. I actually wound up working for him briefly in the late ’40s after I was discharged from the Navy. Capp had a small publishing outfit called Toby Press, and practically all of his relatives worked there. I was literally the only one who wasn’t related to him. Mell Lazarus was there before me and suggested me for the job when he left to do his Miss Peach comic strip. Al’s brother Elliot ran the office; Al’s niece was the secretary, a brother-in-law was in charge of merchandising and his sister ran the PR department. Another relative functioned as a glorified pimp. He was the one who arranged for liaisons for Al and various newspaper clients at an East Side apartment Al kept for just that reason.
Province: What was your personal impression of Capp?
Mendelsohn: He was a larger-than-life figure, very loud and blustery. You definitely knew when he was in the room.
Province: What was your job at Toby Press?
Mendelsohn: At Toby I edited a small cartoon magazine they published called The Most. It featured gag cartoons rejected by all the other magazines that we could buy real cheap—$5 each, maybe—and put together in a magazine that sold for 25 cents. I was sure I was improving most of them by writing new captions or punching up the gag line. It’s a hard habit to break. Even today when someone tells me a joke, I find myself editing it in my head as it’s being told, taking out words and substituting others.
Province: Jack, you’ve been a comedy writer for more than 50 years, and God knows humor changes from decade to decade. How do you stay current and keep writing for today’s taste and audience?
Mendelsohn: It’s important to stay informed about what’s going on around you. The words may be different, but the basic formula for comedy remains the same. In other words, the elements may change, but the format doesn’t. I think I just coined a metaphor.
Province: It’s interesting that you’re known as a writer, but your mental pattern appears to be visual, given the fact that you storyboard like an animator or cartoonist rather than writing them out in script form.
Mendelsohn: I’ve always thought in terms of pictures and I always worked that way, whether I was writing comic books like Rocky and Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right for Jay Ward or Beetle Bailey for Mort Walker.
Province: Can we talk a bit about your Jay Ward days?
Mendelsohn: Oh, yes. He was one of the most wonderful men and one of the sweetest souls I’ve ever met in my life; very funny, exceptionally generous and entertaining. Jay had a very small studio, only five or six director/animators. I never worked there; I worked at home. But payday was Friday, and I’d come in to get my check and he’d take us all out for lunch at Frascatti’s, we’d all get sloshed and somehow never get back to the studio. There was a big hotel on Sunset Boulevard and on the top was a 40-foot statue of a showgirl with a spinning globe in her hand. Jay’s studio was directly across the street and he put up a 12-foot statue of Bullwinkle holding a spinning Rocky Squirrel. That was his answer to the showgirl, and I think it’s still there to this day. The studio is now a souvenir shop selling Bullwinkle memorabilia and is operated by his wife and daughter.
Province: How did you meet Jay?
Mendelsohn: I had been at Hanna-Barbera, where I was working on a Saturday morning show called The Impossibles, which was basically the Beatles with super-powers. I was fired suddenly and I was wondering what the hell I was going to do. I was married, I had a wife and kid and had just moved to California and didn’t know a soul. When I’d heard Jay Ward was beginning a new animated series, I wrote him and sent over some Dudley Do-Right and Rocky and Bullwinkle comic books I had written for Dell, along with a note saying I was available for work. Jay called me and I immediately began writing the George of the Jungle and Super Chicken Saturday morning animated cartoons, and I was quickly made head writer. Jay offered me another series about a race-car drivers, called Tom Slick, which I turned down. It was just too much work.
I also wrote most of the studio’s Quisp ’n Quake and Captain Crunch animated TV commercials.
Province: You made a comment I can’t let pass: Why were you fired from Hanna-Barbera?
Mendelsohn: Because I wanted a contract. The way the place worked, when things slowed down they would lay you off until they needed you again. I mean, if things slowed down for two or three weeks you were out of a job. This included artists who had been with Bill and Joe for 20 years. They were sent home to wait by the phone for the call that they needed you again. While I was there they laid off a writer, then called him a week or so later. Joe was very upset to learn the writer had found another job and loudly complained that he’d been “betrayed.” I was there with Alex Toth, Mike Maltese, Gene Hazelton, Doug Wildey and scores of other super-talented people. I kept asking Joe to give me a contract, but he would constantly put me off about it. After a few months of my pressuring him, I was abruptly called into the Business Affairs Office and my deal was terminated. It was explained that
“contracts make Mr. Barbera uneasy.” I did eventually return a few years later as creative director of the studio, so I guess in a way I had the last laugh.
Province: At this point we’re talking about approximately 1968, and you’re on the cusp of your leap from animation to live-action TV.
Mendelsohn: I was still working for Jay Ward and making about $600 a week, which was a decent amount of money for the time, but it began to bother me that I wasn’t doing much of anything other than arriving at the studio on Friday to pick up my check. It wasn’t so much my ethics as it was my drive. I was too ambitious to just wait for Friday and a check; I could be on unemployment and get the same thrill. I told Jay I wanted to get into live action, so he arranged for me to meet his agent. We met and I told him I’d heard of a new summer-replacement show called Laugh-In. I knew this was something I could do in my sleep as it was pretty much a live-action comic strip. The agent’s next-door neighbor was the Laugh-In producer, George Schlatter, and he arranged a meeting—which was a disaster! On the drive in, I broke a tooth on a hero sandwich and I looked like Alfalfa Switzer, and I was afraid to smile. We met on the Laugh-In set and the atmosphere was like a three-ring circus; they’re rehearsing, they’re shooting, literally every ten seconds someone else is coming up to Schlatter with another decision to be made. I had reams of comedy material to show him but couldn’t get his attention. Suddenly, something dropped out of my briefcase, and he picked it up. It was something I’d done for Jay Ward called The Reagan Budget Book, a send-up of Ronald Reagan who was then governor of California. It was all about him being so cheap. Schlatter laughed out loud reading it and called the following day offering me a staff job on Laugh-In.
Province: Which of course became one of the most-watched shows in TV history. Are you most comfortable with satire?
Mendelsohn: Oh, absolutely. That’s what has always attracted me and I guess I do it well. I’ve always said that for all the preteen shows I’ve written, I’m really writing for myself, and if the kids don’t get it, well, that’s tough! If I were writing for preschoolers I’d get bored, and it would be hard to know how to even start entertaining that age level.
Province: You know, it hadn’t occurred to me until you mentioned it that Laugh-In was in fact a live-action comic strip, and to some extent so was The Carol Burnett Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show and all the other variety shows you’ve been involved with.
Mendelsohn: Oh, absolutely. When variety TV died, it was like a close friend passing away. Sketch comedy is really a cartoon; very unbelievable and far removed from reality, and because I didn’t want to die along with vaudeville, I moved into writing and story-editing sitcoms like Three’s Company, which are semirealistic as opposed to the pure surrealism of sketches. There are new rules to learn—and you’d better learn them fast!
Province: Let’s move back to EC. How did you begin writing for Panic?
Mendelsohn: As I mentioned, my drawing was never good, but writing came easy to me. Guys who were excellent cartoonists but who didn’t write well would hire me to write for them. After a while, I was writing for an entire stable of comic-books artists. Al Jaffee became aware of my work and brought me to the Mad offices on Lafayette Street and introduced me to Mad’s editor, Al Feldstein. Feldstein started me writing on Panic, and I remember being paid $10 a page. I started writing it cover to cover with issue #7. I didn’t think anyone knew or even cared about this Mad knockoff until those hardback collections came out years later with an entire section about my contribution.
Province: Do you recall any of the stories you wrote for Panic?
Mendelsohn: I wrote “Them There Those,” which was a takeoff of the science-fiction film Them! Also “20 Thousand Leaks Under the Sea.” I did everything: operas, movie satires, comic strips, TV shows, whatever was current and popular. “Irving Oop” was mine, drawn by Will Elder. I wrote “Panic Peeks into Some Old Under Paints.” I had read an article about how they were finding paintings by the Old Masters that had been painted over so they could reuse the canvas. I thought it would be a funny springboard for a story. “Beau Brummel” was mine. I remember sitting in the theatre watching the movie and taking notes in the dark. I wrote “Charlie Chinless,” a takeoff on Charlie Chan movies, with drawings by Elder. I also wrote the little gags and signs that were included in each panel. I was inspired by Elder to do all of those. I can’t believe I did that much work for $10 a page!
Province: They’re still very funny and almost seem like a satire within a satire; a secondary goof on themselves. Did you go back and add those little gags, or were they written in as you went?
Mendelsohn: They were written in as I went along, and I could do pretty much whatever I wanted. There was no direction or guidelines. I didn’t work at the Mad office. I would write at home, come in and turn in my work, get a check and leave.
Province: Looking at those old Panics and Mads, it occurs to me that Chuck Jones did two opera cartoons, and as wonderful as they are, you fellows were doing scads of literary satires, spoofs on opera, stage plays, films, language and poetry in every single issue without a fraction of the accolades.
Mendelsohn: It’s true. But that’s the difference between film and comic books. We never had the audience a motion picture could have. You had to be fairly bright to get our stories.
Province: Was Will Elder a favorite artist? Did you write stories with him in mind?
Mendelsohn: Sometimes yes, and I liked his work very much. He was a great inspiration to me. I liked Jack Davis and Harvey Kurtzman as well. Some of the artists had no feel for certain kinds of material—like Wally Wood. You had to be very careful what type of story he was given. It was a delight seeing Will Elder at the San Diego comic convention a couple of years ago. We sat on an EC panel together, though I don’t think he remembered who I was.
Province: As the original writer, did you receive any royalties from the sale of EC art when it was auctioned off years ago?
Mendelsohn: No, I didn’t receive anything. As a writer, there would have been nothing to sell. Unfortunately, as with Yellow Submarine, I’ve received nothing, because the film was animation and not live action. Had it been live action, I would have received residuals. Because it’s a cartoon, it’s a different union and not governed by the same rules. It’s only recently that the Writer’s Guild is making some headway getting animation writers some points, Social Security, residuals, hospitalization and all the things they deserve.
Province: Why did you leave Panic?
Mendelsohn: I decided to move to Mexico and would have liked to continue working from there, but they felt the mail was not reliable and it wouldn’t work. Feldstein begged me not to leave; he even offered me commission which turned out to be an entire dollar—which would have raised me to $11 a page! [chuckles] I continued freelancing material to Mad, though, the same way I always worked, sketching out my pages. It wasn’t a regular thingbecause I had other projects, but every once in a while I’d send them an idea, which solidified my status as one of “the usual gang of idiots.”
Province: Professionally speaking, leaving the country at the time was a pretty bold move. I know a couple of cartoonists who lost some comfortable and lucrative long-term jobs with well-established syndicated strips because they wanted to leave the country.
Mendelsohn: It is amazing, and I did turn down good jobs, not that writing for Panic was a good job. Joe Oriolo offered me the chance to direct the Felix the Cat animated series, but I turned it down because I was dead set on relocating. I just had to get away for a while.
Province: Do you work best by yourself or are you able to function in studio setting with a bunch of guys pitching gags at each other?
Mendelsohn: I’ve done both and can function either way. At Hanna-Barbera I certainly had to work with a group. The variety shows and sitcoms I’ve worked on certainly meant I had to come in every day and work in an office, and I can tell you, most comedy writers are very competitive. It’s like being in a rugby scrimmage, with everyone trying to outshout and one-up each other with bigger and better gags.
Province: Jack, when you live on the edge, like any writer, artist or actor in that land where you’re only as good as your last sale, are there many lean periods?
Mendelsohn: Oh God, yes! When I came back from Mexico with my wife and new baby, I was at the very bottom both professionally and financially. I really had no idea where to turn, and it was a real blessing that Mell Lazarus asked me to both ghost-write and draw the Miss Peach comic books. There were periods of absolutely nothing and eventually I found myself back to writing comic books for ten bucks a page. So there was a long drought between Jackys Diary, which ended in ’62, and starting to write for Brodax in ’64–’65. You can’t make a living and support a family doing comic-book pages for $10 a page, so you do everything you can: gag cartoons, writing advertising copy, animation. It’s like working three or four jobs all the time. You learn not to say no to anything. I was well into writing successful and well-paying prime-time TV shows, and I’d still come home at night and write comic books for ten bucks a page. I became head writer of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the ’80s, and I was pretty pleased that an old fart like me—a guy in his late sixties—was supervising scripts for the biggest, hippest animated series in the country, one whose audience was mostly eight years old. I’m still working that way, and I can still get pretty excited about all the things I’ve accomplished as I approach the three-quarters of a century mark. I’ve often thought of myself akin to Woody Allen’s Zelig. No one knows my name, but I’m there in so many old photographs, alongside so many things that have gone on to become classics, like Mad or Laugh-In or Yellow Submarine. They’ll live forever. It was sheer luck that I got involved with them.