"What? Me Worry?"

[Fred Shapiro]

On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, Sam Clements wrote:

> I'm playing pinochle with three guys tomorrow night who actually deal in
> this kind of paper ephemera. Together they have 100 years of experience in
> just this kind of thing.  I'm sure that two of the three have owned these
> cards, and one may actually have one that I can view.    I"ll try to run by
> them the whole issue.  I'll post back on Wed night.

Thanks to Sam and Ben Zimmer for their great posts on this.  It seems to
me that this is really a Mad Magazine quote with the advertisement as a
closely related precursor.  Can anyone tell me what was the exact date of
the first issue of Mad with "What? Me Worry?," and was that the exact
punctuation and capitalization there, and was it definitely Harvey
Kurtzman who came up with this slogan?

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
  Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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