Yesterday I bought a small stack of 14 MAD magazines published between 1961 and 1970. I have seen some of the features reprinted before, but most of them were new to me. My older brother never read a comic book in his life (as far as I know), but he did collect MAD when he was young. He particularly liked the fold-ins, so before he traded them the the kid across thre street, he ripped off the back covers. The across-the-street neighbor passed them on to his little brother (my age) who wasn't a reader, so I eventually ended up with a stack of coverless MAD magazines and a manilla envelope of back covers. (I never knew what happened to the front covers.)
When I was very young, before I could read, my mother used to read the "Sunday funnies" to me. I would sit on her lap and point to the ones I wanted her to read. (I remember my favorites at the time were Li'l Abner, Pogo and Smokey Stover.) One time I was sitting with my sister and she read MAD to me. Again, I indicated the features I was interested in, but Dave Berg didn't appeal to me at the time (it looked too "grown up"). Instead of skipping it, I had to sit there quietly as she read it to herself! My grandmother used to read MAD to me, too, but one time I caught her trying to "censor" something she didn't approve of.
When I got a little older and started to read for myself, I still didn't rerad the entire magazine. (At that time, MAD was something you grew into, not out of.) The first MAD paperbacks bought specifically for me were the "Spy vs. Spy" ones. I loved those even before I could read. From there I moved on to the features drawn by Don Martin, Sergio Aragones and some of the other more "cartoony" artists. Eventually I began reading the entire thing and got a subscription. Every couple of years I go through a "MAD phase" and I'm just entering into one now. I'll probably add a few more posts to this thread as they occur to me, but I invite anyone who cares to to add his thoughts about MAD magazine.
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In addition to the magazines themselves, my brother also had several MAD paperbacks, among them MAD in Orbit and The Three Ring MAD. (He also had a few earlier ones which I didn't care for as much at the time.) As I mentioned, the first ones I picked out for myself were the "Spy vs. Spy" ones by Antonio Prohias, but I also had Don Martin Steps Out, Don Martin Bounces Back, Don Martin Drops 13 Stories, and of course The MAD Adventures of Captain Klutz. (I don't have any of those anymore, nor do I recall exactly what happened to them.)
I remember one time I was in the supermarket shopping with my grandmother and trying to convince her to buy The Mad Book of Magic (and Other Dirty Tricks) by Al Jaffe for me, but it was a hard sell. She was extremely leery about the word "dirty" in the title. I finally talked her into it, but continued selling her on the idea after we got back to her house by saying things such as, "Now that's a dirty trick!" as I read it.
Issues of Mad floated around our house for years, because it was read broadly by the four siblings and, occasionally, by our parents, but then only at the cottage*
The Mad Book of Magic and Other Dirty Tricks was, I think, the first Mad paperback we had. I still have a couple of paperbacks I got as a kid (Mad Strikes Back and The Portable Mad), but not that one. As an adult, I bought Maria Reidelbach's Completely Mad: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine, and John Benson and Jay Lynch's The Sincerest Form of Parody: The Best 1950s Mad Inspired Satirical Comics.
I held onto my intact copy of Mad 196 with their original Star Wars parody, but later gave it to a nephew who is a huge Star Wars fan. He still has it on a shelf with other Star Wars-related ephemera.
*We called it "the Camp." It was a literal log cabin, built by my dad and his brothers on land our bachelor uncle bought in the 1950s. It later got expanded into an actual cottage, and, after our parents' death (my dad inherited, as the last one standing), it sold. By then, the 1950s rural road off Lake Superior was a highish-end bedroom and cottager community. Not exactly a Mad memory, but it's a footnote, so what do you expect?
When I brought home my first issue of Mad my older sister felt compelled to tell our mother,"Mad is even worse than those comic books he reads!". Gee thanks, sis.
Of course that didn't stop me from reading Mad regularly for the next 5 or 6 years, nor did it stop my mother from buying me Mad paperbacks as stocking stuffers on more than one Christmas.