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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] 3 points 5 months ago

As a millennial, I've read Mad Magazine and Cracked before when I was a kid, but I always saw him as "the Mad Magazine mascot." I think I only learned the dude's name from Wikipedia. It's not like the magazine itself goes out of its way to spell out the dude's name. And besides that, I mostly skipped to Spy vs Spy and those fold-ins.

And damn, the dude who came up with the fold-in lived to be over 100 and he stepped down at 99 year old. What a trooper.