Someone recently posted about Jay's Chicklets parody, and laid out a seemingly obscure possible explanation for its inspiration. I just bought a collection of MAD comics imitators from the '50s called "The Sincerest Form of Parody", and Jay did the intro for it. In it he says, "The main thing I have gleaned from reading the works of the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget over the years is that the ability to learn requires that a child retain information that he doesn't understand until he is later furnished with the key to understanding that info. Many of the obscure references in MAD comics, and some of its imitators as well, remained hidden to us kids until decades later. In the MAD parody of Archie comics titled "Starchie", for example, the parodied Veronica character is named "Salonica". Though I didn't understand the implication as a kid, a decade later, in a college classroom, while listening to a lecture on the city of Salonica, the Greek city to which Sephardic Jews fled to avoid the Spanish Inquisition, it suddenly dawned on me. For five centuries Salonica had been the home of Sephardic Judaism, and I didn't know it until I was in college. Thus I finally grasped the "Jewish American Princess" implications of the parodied Veronica name in "Starchie". It took me ten years to get that gag! In the same way, when the Andy Capp comic strip came out, it took me a decade or so to realize that the name "Andy Capp" was "handicap" in Cockney dialect, apropos due to the title character's penchant for playing the ponies. I contend that one cannot learn effectively unless one retains stuff that one doesn't understand until the missing piece shows up. AND I OFTEN REFERENCE SUCH OBSCURITIES IN MY OWN WORK [emphasis added]. Sure, you don't understand my stuff now...but if you can't hold it in your mind for the next 20 years, or until the key to it shows up and you finally do understand it, then go read Dell comics or Superman or something else, sez I." With that in mind, the Chicklets interpretation was probably right on target!
