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This has been bothering me since 2020. Millennials and Zoomers on Hexbear: without googling, do you know who Alfred E. Neuman is? (hexbear.net)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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In the 2020 primaries, Donald Trump said that Mayo Pete looks like Alfred E. Neuman (which is devastatingly accurate), and Pete countered that he'd never heard of Alfred E. Neuman and it "must be an old person thing." That was incredibly weird to me, because I'm younger than Pete Buttigieg and I know who Alfred E. Neuman is.

It seems like there's three possibilities: One is that Pete does know who Alfred E. Neuman is, and his retort was simply try-hard and pathetic. Another possibility is that Pete does not know who Alfred E. Neuman is because he's been such a careerist psycho his whole life that he knows nothing but the most basic of pop culture references and whatever his staffers tell him about. The third possibility is that I'm unusual in my age cohort for knowing Alfred E. Neuman. My friends and I read Mag Magazine as kids, but we were nerds, and it may have been well past the heyday when Mad was a universal cultural touchstone for kids.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

I only know it's the Mad Magazine cartoon mascot guy (or whatever) because of a podcast that riffed on it. Otherwise, never heard of him. How does anyone even know his name? It's not like the cover of Mad Magazine explains his backstory or something.