MAD Magazine Spoof No Joke for Circuit City

After initially pulling copies of MAD Magazine from the shelves of its stores that sell magazines, Circuit City Stores executives apparently decided the magazine's four-page "Sucker City" parody of the store's newspaper ads was funny after all. The corporation returned the August issues to the shelves of its 40 stores that sell magazines and issued an apology to MAD for the "knee-jerk reaction."

Circuit City spokesperson Jim Babb told Michael Felberbaum of The Associate Press, in an article "Circuit City Defends its Sense of Humor," that "some overly sensitive souls at our corporate headquarters" in Richmond, Virginia, had ordered the magazines removed from the shelves.

"We apologize for the knee-jerk reaction, and have issued a retraction order; the affected stores are being directed to put the magazines back on sale," spokesman Jim Babb said in an e-mail response. "The parody of our newspaper ad in the August MAD was very clever. Most of us at Circuit City share a rich sense of humor and irony ... but there are occasional temporary lapses."

The magazine spoof encourages readers to visit Circuit City stores "directly across the street from Best Buy" or "any of our other 600 stores directly across the street from 600 other Best Buys!" Items advertised in the spoof ad are guaranteed to be in stock "if you're friends with an employee who hid it in the back for you."

"As a gesture of our apology and deep respect for the folks at MAD Magazine, we are creating a cross-departmental task force to study the importance of humor in the corporate workplace and expect the resulting Powerpoint presentation to top out at least 300 pages, chock full of charts, graphs and company action plans," said Babb.

Babb said he sent an apology to the magazine's editors and offered them a $20 gift card toward the purchase of a Wii.

"We at MAD were shocked and confused by this entire incident -- mainly because we had no idea that Circuit City even sells magazines," said John Ficarra, editor of MAD. "Nonetheless, we accept their apology but hold out hope that their gesture of a $20 gift card is only an opening offer."

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Circuit City Defends its Sense of Humor

Photo Credit: Circuit City