Saturday 28th 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, the seventies and, most recently, into the eighties in three subsequent articles. Here, I intend detailing the references to hamsters within the pages of MAD during the nineties upto 1998 when the CD ROMs end.

In their still largely negative way, MAD continued to comment on hamsters - but one couldn't help but wonder that there was now a different approach - as if they were looking over their shoulders not to make their texts and graphics too unpopular to the rodent readership. However, there was still an inclusion in Sept 93 which I have omitted here which I have found particularly unedifying.

Nevertheless, although we could take offense at Dec 90's mention of us under the heading 'Nine real reasons why your parents won't let you have a pet because...', one has to acknowledge that this was something which was, to a great many keepers of hamsters, inherently true (see right). I mean, which hamster among us hasn't at one time or another been attracted to the smell of freshly cooking cakes and gently simmering corn? And it upheld our known attributes of escaping from any confined area at will, something which came in very useful in Colditz during WW2 when the Allied POWs needed messages taking to the Resistance when their time of escape was fast approaching.

So we shouldn't view this cartoon in a particularly bad light.

I must admit that June 92's 'You've been looking for Waldo...now where's Hank the Hamster?' has me all but totally baffled. Just where is this hamster supposed to be, eh? I have the advantage of being able to magnify the picture at a much higher resolution than the reader does have here but even I remain bewildered as to where the hamster is supposed to be. In the cat? In the cake? On the woman's head bringing in drinks? I haven't a clue but, as far as I can see, it doesn't appear to be offensive - another indication that hamsters were beginning to receive respect and acceptance within American society.

Finally, two cartoons were printed in Feb 98's publication under the title 'Approaches to avoid when your child dies' and these both remain personal favourites of mine. The first (reproduced on the right) refers - supposedly humorously - to the death of a hamster compared to that of the grandmother.

But there's a hidden agenda here which we would do well to note. For humans don't always like 'grandma' and one can't help but see in the cartoon a self-confession of the sketcher who is commenting on an old relative who they feel less than drawn towards. We should leave the comparison of love to one side, I know, but there you have it in a nutshell - humans love rodents with cuddly fur who curl up in a ball for endless hours, rather than senior relatives of theirs who smell of moth balls and surgical stockings. Admittedly a harsh reality but one which is quite obvious from the picture.

The other cartoon is a little bit more silly and totally in keeping with MAD's own inimitable style, depicting a father asking after the state of the hamster as the kids go out to bury it in the garden (one presumes that the hamster's dead by the looks on the faces and that it isn't just that it's 'not well'). I've known many humans like this, so caught up are they with the latest soap opera or film that's captivating their attention at that precise moment.

Perhaps we shouldn't see this as a humorous sketch but as a damning indictment of the father-son relationships which have begun to break within America as a whole. After all, satirical humour can be used effectively to cause society at large to sit up and take notice of its own misdemeanors.

And there you have it. One has to conclude when we look at the range of articles and comments that have been recorded within the pages of MAD that the hamster vote has become ever more noticeable in the way that hamsters have been portrayed. In the early years, hamsters could be pictured as cruel or unintelligent - in the last decade there have been positive observations which have supported the hamster campaign to elect a rodent to the Whitehouse in 2000.

I hope that the reader has enjoyed this series of articles as much as I've enjoyed writing them. It has been a trip down memory lane, I'm sure, for many humans but, what we mustn't lose sight of is that hamsters have now attained a platform from which they may launch themselves into mainstream society as important and independent animals of notable standing. Supported by increasingly positive trends within human publications, there remains nothing - nothing, I say - that can now be considered to be outside our sphere and influence.

And, for the sake of humanity, that can't be such a bad thing, can it?

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

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