Born on March 30, 1929, Jacobs made his debut as a teenager with five stories in issue #33 of MAD (cover date June 1957), including the George Woodbridge-illustrated strip “Why I Left the Army and Became a Civilian.” Common themes in Jacobs’s work included obituaries for fictional characters (which often imagined ludicrous reasons for their deaths), as well as “Do-It-Yourself” news reports, and song parodies. Comedy music artist “Weird Al” Yankovic once noted, “Frank Jacobs wrote most of the song parodies for MAD – one of my all-time heroes.”
It was these spoof lyrics that earned Jacobs infamy in 1964, when several songwriters, including Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, launched a lawsuit against MAD. The case, Berlin et al. v. E.C. Publications, Inc., led to the ruling that musical parodies were protected by fair use laws. Jacobs would go on to appear in the PBS documentary Make ’em Laugh: The Funny Business of America, singing his healthcare insurance-themed homage to Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” “Blue Cross.”
Jacobs was recognized during his lifetime with the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing in 2009. MAD Magazine released a statement after Jacobs’s passing, which reads, “There aren’t words to express our sadness at the passing of MAD Magazine writer Frank Jacobs. One of MAD‘s most prolific writers, Frank set the standard in satire and parody for six decades. MAD would not be MAD without him. R.I.P.”
