Cartoons, Magazines and Animation

American cartoons and comics have commented, humorously or scathingly, on American life since Thomas Nast or earlier. Humorous print cartoonists of note include Charles Schulz, Scott Adams, Jim Davis, Gary Larson, Walt Kelly, Johnny Hart, Bill Watterson, and others.

Mad is an American humor magazine founded in 1952 which offered satire on all aspects of American life and pop culture. With its first issue (October-November, 1952), Mad was a comic book, and part of the line of EC Comics. It became a slick magazine in 1954. Throughout the 1950s and continuing until today Mad featured parodies focusing on the familiar staples of American culture, exposing the fakery behind the image. The magazine has leant its name to the current television program MadTV.

Other U.S. humor magazines of note include Humbug, Trump and Help!, as well as the National Lampoon, and Spy Magazine.

National Lampoon began in 1970 as an offshoot of the Harvard Lampoon. The magazine regularly skewered pop culture, the counterculture and politics. The magazine was at its height in the 1970s, and its influence spread to films and comedy programs. In the mid 1970s, some of the magazine's contributors left to join the NBC comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL). The magazine stopped publication in 1998, but films and other programs attributed to "National Lampoon" continue.

In the twentieth-century film allowed for animated cartoons of a humorous nature. The most notable of these perhaps being Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry. Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Mel Blanc (as a voice) and Friz Freleng playing critical roles in this. Humorous animated shorts like What's Opera, Doc?, Duck Amuck, and One Froggy Evening garnered critical enough appeal to be inducted into the National Film Registry. The Warner Brothers cartoons often dealt with themes beyond US culture or society, but did involve a great deal of commentary on American life. Although many of the American winners of the Academy Award for Animated Short Film are not examples of American humor a significant percentage would qualify as such. On television noteworthy American cartoons include The Flintstones and The Simpsons.