List of film spoofs in Mad

This list of film spoofs in Mad includes films spoofed (parodied) by the American comic magazine Mad. Usually, an issue of Mad features a spoof of at least one feature film or television program. The works selected by the staff of Mad are typically from cinema and television in the United States.

The authors parody the original titles with puns or other wordplay. Characters are caricatured, and lampooned with joke names.

These articles typically cover five pages or more, and are presented as a sequential storyline with caricatures and word balloons. The opening page or two-page splash usually consists of the cast of the show introducing themselves directly to the reader; in some parodies, the writers sometimes attempt to circumvent this convention by presenting the characters without such direct exposition. This approach was also used for Mad's television parodies, and came to be identified with the magazine. The style was widely copied by other humor publications. In 1973, the promotional movie poster for Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye was designed in the introductory manner of a Mad parody, including the rectangular word balloons with self-referential dialogue; for verisimilitude, the poster was written and drawn by Mad regulars Frank Jacobs and Jack Davis.

Many parodies end with the abrupt deus ex machina appearance of outside characters or pop culture figures who are similar in nature to the film or TV series being parodied, or who comment satirically on the theme. For example, Dr. Phil arrives to counsel the Desperate Housewives, or the cast of Sex and the City show up as the new hookers on Deadwood.

The parodies frequently make comedic use of the fourth wall, breaking character, and meta-references. Within an ostensibly self-contained storyline, the characters may refer to the technical aspects of filmmaking, the publicity, hype, or box office surrounding their project, their own past roles, any clichés being used, and so on. In 2013, Film Comment wrote, "While film studies majors gasp over the deconstruction of genre in the works of David Lynch and the meta-movies of Charlie Kaufman, 'the usual gang of idiots' over at MAD have been deconstructing, meta-narrativing, and postmodernizing motion pictures since the very first movie parody (Hah! Noon!) appeared in 1954."[1] (However, that was actually Mad's second movie parody; the first had been Ping Pong three issues earlier.)

Almost all of the parodies are of a single, particular film. However, Mad has occasionally done omnibus parodies of film series, such as the James Bond movies, the 1970s Planet of the Apes sequels, and the Twilight Saga movies. It has also combined multiple mini-parodies of unrelated films into a single article. Some actors and directors have said that they regarded ridicule by Mad as an indication of major success in their careers.

In recent years, the parodies and their creators have been available outside the pages of the regular magazine. The March/April 2013 issue of Film Comment (Film Society of the Lincoln Center) carried Grady Hendrix's historical survey of Mad's film parodies, titled Cahiers du CinéMAD.[1] In August 2016, four of Mad's longtime contributors—editor/artist Sam Viviano, writers Dick DeBartolo and Desmond Devlin, and artist Tom Richmond—appeared at a public symposium in Nebraska to discuss their work in this particular medium.[2] Mad has also published thematic collections of their past spoofs, from Oscar-winning films to superhero movies to gangster films.[3]

In September 2020, with Mad having been reduced to a primarily reprint format, Tom Richmond and Desmond Devlin announced that they were crowdfunding a book of newly created movie parodies called Claptrap. They launched the campaign with the completed two-page opening spread for Star Worse: Plagiarizing Skywalker, a spoof of the ninth film in the Star Wars saga. The book will include twelve full parodies of older popular or iconic films that Mad had for various reasons opted not to parody at the time.[4]