“What, me worry?” was the slogan of Mad Magazine’s fictitious Alfred E. Neuman, whose boyish image became the magazine’s logo. Cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman, who helped develop the icon, remarked that his was “a face that didn’t have a care in the world.”
In truth, few people past the age of 18 have carefree faces, and by the age of 25, even fewer would adopt “What, me worry?” as a guiding principle of life. “The world is too much with us,” William Wordsworth wrote, and for most of us, that’s just a plain fact. Unlike Neuman, we worry.
