Mad Guide to Parents, Teachers and Other Enemies

The "MAD Guide to Parents, Teachers and Other Enemies" by writer Stan Hart and artist Jack Davis was first published in 1985. To be clear, the guide is ABOUT parents, teachers and other enemies and not FOR parents, teachers and other enemies. The book is not organized by types of enemies (mother, father, brother, teacher, etc.) but rather the way they act so that the sections are devoted to key characteristic such as overprotectiveness, non sequiturs, invasion of privacy, the double standard, etc. The idea is that if you "understand the behavior of these everyday menaces" this would constitute the first step to combating these enemies. Each page in this paperback provides a specific lesson about the appropriate topic. For example, the exploration of "anxiety" includes anxious mothers showing up at Little League games, fathers peeking into bedrooms to make sure you are asleep, teachers wanting you to go to an Ivy League College, and an older sister going on a diet. The better sections of the guide have to do with turning parental foibles to your advantage, so that an overprotective parent who is convinced you are on death's door when your temperature is 99.2 can mean that your can avoid mowing the lawn since you might get overheated or catch a cold. My favorite section is probably the one devoted to "Things That Go 'Bump" in Your Life," which is devoted to THINGS that are your natural enemies instead of people. This includes such things as school hot lunches, the loose loose leaf page, and the evil smelling egg salad sandwiches. This underscores that the best parts of this guide have to do with being a student more than with being the offspring of your parental units. So this is a hit and miss collection, whose grand finale of the "Academy Awards for Enemies" is one of the weaker sections, but the hits are enough to round up on this "MAD" paperback.