The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman (2026)
I came to The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman knowing almost nothing about the man, and not a great deal more about the magazine that made him. MAD is one of those American institutions that only ever reached these shores second-hand, through references in other things, the gap-toothed grin of Alfred E. Neuman glimpsed here and there without ever quite landing in the British consciousness the way it did across the Atlantic. So I sat down to Bart Simpson's documentary about as close to a blank slate as a film lover can be, and I came away feeling I had been handed a whole missing chapter of twentieth-century culture.
Because that, it turns out, is who Harvey Kurtzman was. Born in 1924, he founded MAD in 1952 and, in the handful of years he ran it, more or less invented the voice of modern American satire: sceptical, self-aware, and delighted to puncture anything that took itself too seriously. The film makes the case, patiently and persuasively, that the ripples from that one small comic book reached almost everywhere, and it has the talking heads to prove it. Terry Gilliam, Robert Crumb, Al Jaffee and a host of others line up to explain what Kurtzman meant to them, and you slowly start to see his fingerprints on Monty Python, on the underground comix scene, on a whole century of people who learned you could laugh at power and get away with it.
What I did not expect was how much of the film is about the cost of all that. Kurtzman was a perfectionist who walked away from his own creation over a matter of ownership, and the rest of his career reads as a run of brilliant, doomed projects and quieter compromises, most famously the long years spent drawing Little Annie Fanny for Playboy. Simpson does not flinch from the sadness in that, the sense of a singular talent never quite handed the freedom or the credit it deserved, and the film is richer and more honest for letting that ache sit right alongside the celebration.
It is also, and this caught me off guard, a really moving family portrait. Some of the warmest material here comes from the people who knew him at home, his wife Adele and his daughter Nellie among them, and their memories give the film a tenderness a straightforward career retrospective would have missed. You come to feel you have met the man, not just admired the work, and that makes the closing stretch, which deals with the cancer that eventually took him, hit far harder than I was ready for. It is done with real care, no wallowing, just a clear-eyed sadness at losing someone this gifted.
Formally, it is a treat too. The thing that will stick with me longest is the animation. Simpson brings Kurtzman's own artwork to life in a series of lovely animated transitions between chapters, so the drawings themselves become the connective tissue of the story. It is a beautiful idea, elegantly done, and it means the film is always alive with the very thing it is celebrating rather than simply cutting between interviews and archive.
If I have a reservation, it is only that a newcomer like me occasionally wished for a beat longer with some of the work before the film moved on. But that is the mild complaint of someone who was left wanting more, which is hardly the worst problem a documentary can have. As a way in it is superb, and I suspect the devoted will find every bit as much to love.
Four stars. A warm, sad, beautifully made portrait of a man I am a little embarrassed to have known so little about, and will not forget now. If, like me, you have only ever half-registered MAD from the sidelines, this is a wonderful place to start.
Reviewed from a screener provided ahead of the film's world premiere in the In Competition strand at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, where The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman premieres on 16 August 2026.
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