MAD ABOUT THE FIFTIES: The Best of the Decade.\o7 By "The Usual Gang of Idiots\f7 .\o7 " Compiled by Grant Geissman\f7 .\o7 Little, Brown: 288 pp., $19.95\f7

I lost my virginity one night in 1958 on a carpet in the publisher's office at Mad magazine. Since I was a gopher and freelance writer for Mad and still lived with my parents, Bill Gaines had befriended me with a key to his office. That's where I brought my date, but to open the convertible sofa would have interfered with our compulsive spontaneity. Copies of Casket and Sunnyside, the magazine of the funeral industry, were on Gaines' coffee table. Original paintings of his famous horror-comic-book characters--the Old Witch, the Crypt Keeper, the Vault Keeper--were hanging on the walls. And there was a framed portrait of Alfred E. Neuman, Mad's gap-toothed young mascot, whose entire philosophy consisted of "What--Me Worry?" He was watching over me while I lost my sexual innocence, just as he had been watching over a whole generation while they were losing their cultural innocence.

Now an anthology, "MAD About the Fifties" by "the usual gang of idiots," has been published on the heels of anthologies from the '60s, '70s and '80s. Its countercultural roots burst with boomer nostalgia.

Much of the humor in "MAD About the Fifties" seems corny and superficial in retrospect, but the '50s so reeked with repression (McCarthyism), piety (Norman Vincent Peale's "Power of Positive Thinking") and blandness (Snooky Lansom singing "It's a Marshmallow World" on "The Lucky Strike Hit Parade") that there was a hunger for almost any kind of rebellion. Something, somebody, had to break through this thick haze of conformity that had dulled our national consciousness. And some did. In literature, there were the Beat writers and Norman Mailer's "The White Negro" (which today, of course, would be called "The Caucasian African-American"). In the movies, there was Marlon Brando in "The Wild One." In music, Elvis Presley. And, in the media--before there was National Lampoon or Spy, before there was "Laugh-In" or "Saturday Night Live"--there was Mad, serving to unite those who had previously felt that they were the only Martians on their block.

Mad was originally launched as a comic book in 1952, then became a magazine in 1955, but Grant Geissman in his foreword presents a bit of blatant misinformation: "[Mad Editor Harvey] Kurtzman had been entertaining a job offer from Pageant, and he told Gaines he was thinking of leaving. To keep Kurtzman in the fold, Gaines offered to let him reinvent Mad as a 25-cent slick, an offer Harvey readily accepted."