Sam Viviano: Art Director Emeritus, MAD Magazine
- Debbie Brenner Shepardson
- Dec 13, 2025
- 3 min read
Sam Viviano spent 19 years as the visual steward of MAD Magazine. He decided how a joke would read long before anyone saw a finished page — the choices that shaped what the reader noticed first, what could disappear, and where the composition carried or broke the gag. Most of that work stayed invisible, but it defined the look and rhythm of MAD for two decades. We talked about composition, constraint, and the unseen structure that decides whether humor lands or dies.
When you’re deciding how a gag should be handled, what’s the invisible choice behind assigning it to the right artist?
In a general sense, every gag has a limitless number of ways it can be presented. My job during the 19 years I was art director of MAD Magazine was to assign each article to the most appropriate artist (Does this piece need a naturalistic or a surrealistic approach? Is it zany or more “life’s like that”? Does it require strong caricatures? Would it be best with each gag illustrated or with a single all-encompassing image?).
Once you’ve assigned the article, what part of your job comes next in helping the artist find their way into the material?
My job was to help that artist find his or her way into the material. Sometimes that would mean providing conceptual doodles, and sometimes it would be best to leave him or her alone to come up with a personal response.
When you’re shaping an illustration to sell a gag, what has to be right before anything else can land?
The whole point is to create an illustration that best sells the gag. This of course starts with the composition of the image, with all significant elements arranged in a way that allows the reader to “read” it in the intended manner. Drawing style and finishing detail are important as well, but if the image is not composed well no amount of flashy draftsmanship, finicky inking or intense color will compensate for that.
MAD kept contributors for decades. What made that long-term collaboration work so reliably?
One reason MAD had so many contributors who had been with the magazine for as much as five decades was that we knew what they were capable of giving us, and they knew what we were looking for from them.
With newer artists, what early signs told you whether they could eventually settle into MAD’s way of working, or whether they weren’t going to adapt to the magazine’s voice at all?
Artists newer to MAD, no matter how skillful or talented they may be, needed a lot more guidance and hand-holding to arrive at something that worked well with MAD’s overall “voice.” Some artists never survived their first job, either because we realized they simply didn’t “get” our point of view or because they found our oversight heavy-handed and unacceptable. Others eventually settled into the same groove as many of what we called our “Usual Gang of Idiots.”
When Sam talks about illustration, he isn’t talking about style or polish. He’s talking about the underlying structure that decides whether a joke reads at all. For him, the invisible work is the part that tells the reader where to look and what to feel before they even know it.
Learn more about Sam at:
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