Trace modern American satire back far enough and you hit Harvey Kurtzman. That means “The Simpsons", “Saturday Night Live", “The Daily Show", and the whole underground comix movement. He founded MAD and provided Robert Crumb with an early opportunity. Gloria Steinem got one of her first jobs at his magazine, Help! He hired a young Terry Gilliam as his assistant. Yet ask most people about Kurtzman, and you’ll get a blank stare. That gap between a giant influence and a name almost nobody knows is the real subject of “The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman.” Director Bart Simpson knows it.
Yes, that’s his real name. The Canadian filmmaker, a producer on the award-winning documentary “The Corporation," wrote and directed this 92-minute Canada-U.K. co-production from Intuitive Pictures and Aconite Productions. Gilliam is an executive producer. The film had its world premiere in competition at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and festival reviewers called it breezy, nimble and quietly melancholy.
Simpson doesn’t build a monument. He builds an archive, and then he shows us how fragile it is. The present-day frame follows Kurtzman’s youngest daughter, Nellie, his literary executor. She sorts her father’s work with his longtime friend, the cartoonist and publisher Denis Kitchen, and visits artists who still hold original pages, getting them ready to go to Columbia University’s library, where the Kurtzman archive lives. One of those artists says flatly that whatever she doesn’t take, he’ll burn. The film lets that line sit there unchallenged. It’s a missed opportunity, but it’s also a shudder. It shows how close a whole chapter of American visual culture comes to the incinerator when nobody fights for it.
The film's deeper thesis is that being influential is not the same as being recognised, and a legacy lasts only if someone keeps it alive. Anyone who has covered Black musical history or watched archives of artists of colour get scattered, lost or sold off will recognise the stakes right away.
The biography goes through the major chapters with confidence. Kurtzman was born in Brooklyn in 1924, the son of immigrants. He drew his way into EC Comics in the early 1950s and edited “Two-Fisted Tales” and “Frontline Combat.” These were war comics shaped by his own army service, and they refused to make combat glamorous. That alone drew FBI attention during the anti-communist panic. Then came MAD in 1952: a comic book that mocked the culture it was sold in. When newsagency pressure threatened it, Kurtzman turned it into a magazine.
He walked away in 1956 after a financial dispute with EC publisher William Gaines, who later sold MAD for millions. The film presents the event as the hinge of his life without overplaying it. What followed was a string of brilliant, short-lived ventures: Trump, Humbug and Help! Then came more than 25 years of writing “Little Annie Fanny” for Playboy. That gave him financial security, and the film suggests it quietly dimmed his larger ambitions, including plans to direct movies that never happened.
The voices featured in the film include many of the individuals whose careers he helped to shape: Crumb, Gilliam, Matt Groening, Sergio Aragonés, Steinem and Columbia curator Karen Green. Stan Lee appears in archive footage, and that link between two very different traditions of American comics gives the film one of its most resonant moments. Best of all, Kurtzman speaks for himself through television interviews, walking through his craft. He seems modest, reserved and almost painfully self-effacing for a man whose work was so loud.
Visually, Simpson makes the archive move. Original pages, storyboards, letters and animation are cut into lively montages that feel like the collision Kurtzman lived in, where comics, advertising, underground culture and mass entertainment all fight for space on the same page. A jazzy original score keeps the energy loose and improvised, which fits a man who treated the comics panel like a bandstand.
The film’s weakness is its manners. With admirer after admirer, Kurtzman’s influence starts to feel inevitable instead of hard-won. The film provides only a brief overview of his family background and later personal life. The Playboy years needed a harder look, too. Did a satirist who skewered American hypocrisy have any trouble working for Hugh Hefner? The film doesn’t ask. Viewers outside the United States may also want more context on the postwar America that MAD was laughing at.
But when Simpson leaves Kurtzman’s contradictions unresolved, the film comes alive. His perfectionism, his stubbornness and his business misfires all stay on screen. His late struggle with Parkinson’s also contributes to the final stretch towards mortality, memory, and the question of who keeps an artist alive once the artist is gone. Kurtzman died in 1993.
“The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman” isn’t radical filmmaking, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s a correction to the record. The man who taught America to laugh at its own pomposity spent his life being outsold, out-negotiated and overlooked by the machinery he mocked. Recognition delayed is not recognition denied. This film, and Nellie Kurtzman’s stubborn archive work, make sure of that.
