John Ficarra is standing in his office at the corner of 53rd and Broadway in Manhattan, staring down at the neat bundle in his hands. His gaze is warm, benign, serene. The 47-year-old magazine editor looks like a first-time papa.

Then he grins, wickedly. What Ficarra holds with such reverence is, indeed, his baby. It's the 50th-anniversary edition of Mad magazine, which hits newsstands tomorrow and celebrates, Ficarra laughs, a half-century of sheer, unadulterated stupidity.

The golden jubilee is, no question, a baby-boomer milestone for the scores of Mad fans who have worshipped at the feet of this goofy rag and its nebbish mascot, Alfred E. Neuman. Ficarra and his co-editor Nick Meglin (the pair prefer to be called co-conspirators) promise that the 72-page Mad will deliver what it always has: Basically, a left hook in the chops to any moronic politician, any vapid movie star, ridiculous film, schlocky commercial or misguided powermonger.

Like the 422 issues that came before, it will lampoon everything it deems ludicrous in American pop culture. It will test the First Amendment. It might even tell a fart joke.

"But most of all," Ficarra practically roars, "it will not settle! We have never done that!"

After that passionate outburst, some sanity returns. Meglin explains the impact that Mad has had on American pop culture, post-Second World War. "Mad is a cultural touchstone," he says. "It's the first voice to a lot of young readers to say, 'Hey, the world ain't so hot out there. There may be people lying to you, whether it's politicians, teachers, parents, or other magazines,' " says Meglin, in his late 50s, who hired Ficarra 17 years ago and has worked in adjacent offices with him since.

"The key to our longevity is that we've never written down or dumbed down," says Ficarra. "Our message is simple. Don't believe everything you hear and read. Regardless of who says it, whether it's from the nation's capital, the religious centres of the world, or, God knows, from our offices.

"We're not cynical," he adds. "But we do point out the absurdity of reality. A healthy skepticism is good for people."

And so issue No. 423 follows in the 50-year tradition established by founder/owner Bill Gaines. It's full of the usual raunch, rancour and irreverence, alternately juvenile and insightful. It contains a healthy serving of the Mad lexicon, words like glork, squit, womf and bleechh. It has caricatures of its most famous contributors, including the irradicable Gaines, Spy vs. Spy creator Antonio Prohias, The Lighter Side Of creator Dave Berg and lead cartoonist Don Martin.

It's got the usual movie satires (Road to Perdition and Minority Report). The cover is the gap-toothed Alfred, with the honking big ears, in his various incarnations over the past five decades: Mr. T, Yoda, Uncle Sam, Dennis Rodman, Don King, Tootsie, Barbra Streisand and a California Raisin (to name a few). And, of course, it takes aim at its parent, AOL Time Warner. "We can't help ourselves," Ficarra says with a devilish smile and little shrug. "We're the pimple on the mosquito on the butt of the elephant that is the behemoth Time Warner. But we've got the best jobs in the place.

"Working for Mad means never having to grow up. There's no question we're all arrested in a ninth-grade sensibility."

Recent issues attest to that. A few months ago, Mad adroitly answered the question, What is a terrorist? "A terrorist indoctrinates children at a very young age as part of a campaign that will ultimately result in thousands of deaths." The second answer also hit the nail. "A terrorist does not respect human rights or our constitutional freedoms and acts as a law unto himself . . . like the IRS."

After tempers and nerves had calmed somewhat post 9/11, the magazine did a spoof on kid's books mocking the Taliban-related book craze. Titles ranged from Clifford, the Big Red Infidel to Curious George Goes to Tora Bora.

One of Ficarra and Meglin's prouder moments was in the Clinton-leaves-the-Oval-Office era. Again it used children's books as a foil, changing the classic Goodnight Moon, to Goodnight Room. It added as a tag line: "Goodnight, stained dress."

Insolent? You bet. Funny? Well, that all depends on the placement of your funny bone.

Over the past 50 years, Mad has carved a niche for itself as a kind of rite of passage for teenage boys (its readership is more than 80-per-cent male and the average age, 26). It's always been a guy thing, says Ficarra.

He figures the Mad scales are tipped so heavily toward testosterone because the humour is so aggressive. "It's not subtle," he explains. "And the magazine speaks to a more male sense of humour than to a female's. Mad doesn't take specific direction, and when was the last time you heard a guy ask for directions?"

Dick Hanchette, a veteran Mad collector and operator of the http://www.collectmad.com Web site, says he thinks the publication's appeal lies in the fact that it is written on so many different levels. Intellectual and downright ridiculous; highbrow and decidedly in the gutter.

"There's slapstick and there's satire," says the Strasbourg, Ohio-based businessman. "It's kind of like watching Leslie Nielsen," he says, referring the Naked Gun and Airplane! actor."You can watch it two or three times and you see something different every time."

He became engrossed in all things Mad when he was 8, and happened upon a magazine at his aunt's house. "That's when I started badgering my parents to buy them for me," says Hanchette, now in his early 50s.

By day, Hanchette sells advertising for a local radio station. The rest of the time he collects Mad paraphernalia through the Internet -- everything from T-shirts to a hard-to-come-by copy of the Alfred E. Neuman for President campaign kit and a Mad slot machine.

When he divorced a few years ago, Hanchette says indignantly, his ex-wife held "my Mads hostage. It wasn't until two or three years later that I got them back after a truce one Christmas."

Mad took root in the era of McCarthyism and the Cold War, when Communists lurked in every corner. The publication made its debut in 1952 with Gaines, a bearded eccentric, at the helm, along with the cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman (as editor).

The first issue, a comic book, sold for 10 cents (it's now closer to $4 U.S.). All seemed well until Gaines, who owned other comic-book titles such as Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science and Two-Fisted Tales, started getting heat from Congress and censors, who felt his publications were a bad influence on kids.

The Comics Code Authority came into being, putting a severe crimp in Gaines's publishing empire. To get around this roadblock, Gaines (who died in the early 1990s) morphed Mad into a 32-page publication in magazine form.

They were off to the races. Alfred E. Neuman first appeared on the cover of The Mad Reader paperback in December of 1954. He was made its cornerstone by December, 1956.

Over the years, this nerdy iconoclast, who looks like a crazed Richie Cunningham and whose mantra is What -- Me Worry?, has run for president, and been depicted with a condom pulled down low on his head.

In the 1950s, the magazine was investigated by the FBI, who apparently did not take kindly to J. Edgar Hoover digs and kept five files on Mad. Its offices were also reportedly visited by the U.S. Treasury Department in the late 1960s after Mad issued a $3 bill with mascot Neuman on the face. The fake bill apparently duped the new dollar-changing machines scattered across the United States.

At its peak in 1973, Mad had a circulation of 2.8 million, inspiring knockoffs such as Cracked and Thimk. Today, it's down to 250,000 subscribers, with 12 foreign editions. The decline has been relentless and steep, Ficarra admits. "We lost readers to the computer age," he says. "Young people today don't read as much because they've got all those electronic devices."

To offset the decline in magazine sales, the Mad franchise branched out. It made a movie, called Up the Academy, released in 1980, that was apparently so bad that Gaines paid to have the Mad logo and references to it removed from future releases and ads.

Other efforts were more fruitful. Today, Mad counts more than 229 paperbacks and "big books," as Meglin calls them, from veteran contributors such as Sergio Aragones (who spoofs movies and decorates the margins with the zany cartoons), Al Jaffee (who does the back-cover, fold-in gag picture) and Duck Edwing (the character Avenging Oar). This fall, Mad Inc. is publishing a coffee-table book called Mad Art, "so people can see the visual impact that Mad has made on the country," adds Meglin. It's also started a new comic strip on the Sunday funny pages of some U.S. papers. And its spinoff MadTV on Fox (it takes on Saturday Night Live head-on) is a success.

Meglin says the biggest challenge for Mad is to stay as current as possible. "Society has really sped up. With fax machines, Fedex, the Internet and television itself," says Meglin. "It's very hard for us to compete as a magazine with a two- or three-month lead time. We have to stay focused on our targets."

In other words, riff inanity off the news and give it that distinctive Mad flair. One of Meglin's favourite targets was Bill Clinton. In a feature called Kenneth Star Wars, the magazine spoofed the image of Luke Skywalker holding his light sabre up to the sky, replacing it with Bill wielding a giant cigar. "Some breakaway republic over in Eastern Europe took that poster and made it a sheet of stamps," boasts Meglin. "Since we reflect society, we hold a mirror up to society. Society gives us our targets. We don't create anything."

Danny Kasman, a high-school student at Vaughan Secondary, north of Toronto, got hooked on Mad after an uncle gave him a year's subscription as a birthday gift. He reads it voraciously, he says, because it makes him laugh. "With everything going on in the world now, Mad's like a little piece of sanity. A little oasis from the rest of the world."

Kasman's bedroom is littered with copies of the magazine. "There are stacks of them," says the student, who recently picked up another 100 issues at a garage sale for $5. "I hit the jackpot!" he says enthusiastically. "I'm the only kid I know who has an Alfred E. Neuman key chain!"

He admits that very few of his classmates share his addiction to Mad. "But when I bring it into school, they read it," he says.

In March last year, Mad -- always a drumbeater for anticommercialism -- caved in on taking advertising, greatly upsetting the Mad purists. But in this information-frenetic age, Ficarra and Meglin reasoned they had no choice. To keep young eyeballs, they needed colour and slicker paper. So they began accepting ads and cover boy Alfred E. endorsed Land's End and Tang.

The furor over that tactic has long since died down. And now the co-editors are busy plotting Mad's next deliberate misstep. While neither man shrugs off the challenges Mad faces, they're confident it will persist. "It'll make another 50 years easily," quips Ficarra. "It has to. I've got a half-century left on my mortgage."

On a more serious note, he adds: "As long as Hollywood continues to make bad, pretentious movies, as long as politicians continue to lie to us and do stupid things, as long as parents continue to think they know best in every situation and advertisers continue to sell schlocky products . . . there will be a place for Mad."