Saturday 14th October 2000
Ebony the Hamster reports on the use of hamsters in the MAD magazines


[Editor's note - As noted in the first article, this series of articles were completed shortly before Ebony's untimely death but we felt that we should still print them after a 'cooling off time']

In previous articles I have already mentioned how I came to discover a MAD archive and I have already dealt with hamsters in the fifties and sixties publications and then into the seventies in two subsequent articles. Here, I intend detailing the three references to hamsters within the pages of MAD during the eighties.

Hamsters, even today, suffer from much maligning when it comes to intelligence and this was obvious in the first of our three appearances in MAD magazine in the eighties - July 82 to be precise - under the heading 'MAD's ABCs of writing successful Exams and Term papers'. Similarly to the seventies, this first mention wasn't so much about us as about one of our supposed weaknesses. When a human of very little intelligence needed to be described to the reader, the authors chose the phrase to be one who had 'the brain of a hamster', a fairly unkind and cruel observation when everyone knows that it's birds who are 'pigeon-brained' and that that's the correct turn of phrase.

But, be that as it may, there must have been some poor experience of a hamster within the employees of the magazine which summarised us as lacking intelligence. The article is reproduced on the right for the reader but one shouldn't pay it too much attention for, should any human ever attain to the intelligence of us rodents, the need for nuclear weaponry, armies and pre-emptive military strikes would be made redundant almost overnight. After all, which hamster do you know who has his paw poised on the button which would launch untold megatons of nuclear material on hostile countries? And which of our kind has ever needed to carry with them codes and passwords that would be used in the case of a nuclear strike?

So, although the MAD writers still regarded us as unintelligent, one has to ask just who the thick ones are.

Within two years - in Sept 84 - the MAD writers were at it again - this time with a positive attribution of our talents under the general heading 'Other Uses for Household Pets'. The only surprising thing was that we weren't credited with anything but the one Fall benefit we provide for our owners of clearing clogged drainpipes for them in return for a fresh supply of fruit and vegetables.

Why our talent of waking the masters' up in the middle of the night when our exercise wheel needs oiling wasn't mentioned, I have no idea. Neither was our ability of severing electrical wires into two pieces highlighted which is normally performed by Syrians on speaker cable after receiving notice from the neighbours that volume levels are getting out of control.

At least we were painted in a positive light, though, and we should, perhaps, extend a warm paw of thanks to the editorial staff were it not for the third and final article which appeared in Jan 88 which was a supposed list of updated children's book titles and which contained the review which I've reproduced on the right. I've deliberately removed the cartoon as I felt that it might be somewhat disturbing to young children.

I was thinking that, perhaps, I should consign this mention to the scrap heap as well, along with the other two references but I decided that we should at least see what misunderstanding of our abilities exist. After all, it isn't that we can't fly but that we choose when we want to fly and no amount of persuasion on the part of our owners will ever get us to change our minds.

I could tell you - though I'm sure you need no reminder - of the hamsters who flew in Spitfires during WW2 and of our first pioneering rodent who made it into space. And time would not permit me to tell of the rodents who took to flight on the backs of geese and who conquered nations by their observations of approaching armies from highly elevated positions above the clouds.

So the rodent's ability to fly is well-documented but one should never think that a hamster can be forced into flight for purely vain purposes - no way. We do it as and when the need arises and it would appear that this is something which the MAD editorial team had failed to understand.

The nineties saw a renewal of interest in the hamster in MAD's pages, not least because of the rising power of the hamster vote in human politics - but this I intend covering in a fifth and final article very soon.

Ebony the Hamster writes for the Rodent Weekly.
This article appears courtesy of that paper.



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