Arnie Kogen

Origins and early life

Arnie Kogen was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937 to Jewish parents, and he began writing for Mad magazine soon after finishing at New York University, in 1959.

Work and career

He stayed with the magazine for decades and produced more than a hundred film and television parodies among his hundreds of bylines, a body of work that taught two generations of American readers how to take apart the things they loved. Mad was itself a Jewish institution of postwar American humour, founded by Harvey Kurtzman and published by William Gaines, and Kogen belongs to the writing tradition it created: the outsider's eye turned on the mass culture that had just adopted him.

He worked in parallel in television, writing for variety shows and sitcoms, and he was among the writers of The Carol Burnett Show, where he wrote several of the recurring sketches and worked closely with Tim Conway. He won three Primetime Emmy Awards for outstanding writing in a variety series, in 1973, 1974 and 1975, from seven nominations, and a Writers Guild of America award. His son Jay Kogen became an Emmy-winning comedy writer in turn and was one of the original writers of The Simpsons, which makes the Kogens one of the rare father-and-son pairs to have shaped American television comedy across two eras.