In the sixth grade, I received my first-ever bad report card, from Mr. Brown, who also had been my fourth-grade teacher. My mom and dad usually came home from parent-teacher conferences with glowing accounts; I had always been something of a teacher’s pet, eager to please. But this time, the vibe was different. With solemn, shaming faces, they sat me down for a talk. What had happened? According to Mr. Brown, I’d gone from being a model boy to…a “smart aleck.”

I swore I would do better, but I knew the truth: What had happened was Mad magazine, and there would be no turning back.

This was 1969, in Northern California. A few years later, I read an interview with an editor of the National Lampoon who said that Mad had saved his childhood. It saved mine too, I realized. Some kids had rock ’n’ roll or rap or “Star Trek” or skateboard culture or Tolkien or, God help them, Ayn Rand. I had a magazine full of parodies, provocations and cartoons in which people burped and picked their noses.

That might not sound like much, but for me, it was a revelation, a transmission from some exotic, faraway place—New York, as it happened—that I instantly tuned into. It gave license to my unruliest impulses, freed my inner skeptic, validated my sneaking suspicions that I wasn’t always getting the whole truth and nothing but the truth from grown-ups. Plus it made me laugh, which was most important of all.

Gratitude toward Mad is commonplace among smart alecks, professional and civilian alike, voiced over the years by notables such as Stephen Colbert, Judd Apatow, J.J. Abrams, Jerry Seinfeld, Roger Ebert, Mark Hamill and “Weird Al” Yankovic. Which is why the news last week confirming that Mad’s parent company, DC Entertainment, was effectively shuttering it broke so many normally non-sentimental hearts. Though the magazine has gone through cycles of creative doldrums, just last year it was rebooted—successfully, to my mind. Now it will only repackage its old material, sort of like the sad, vestigial Life. Blame not just DC but parent-parent company Time Warner and, perhaps especially, new parent-parent-parent company since last year, AT&T . (The fact that a vast telecommunications company is now the steward of a nose-thumbing children’s humor magazine is a bizarre feature of the 21st-century economy worth a snarky line in Mad.)