The Daily Omnivore

Forbush Man is the mascot of Marvel Comics’ satirical ‘Not Brand Echh’ (1967); he is the alter-ego of Irving Forbush, a fictional gofer at Marvel Comics. Forbush was dreamed up in 1955 by Marvel editor Stan Lee to refer to an imaginary low-grade colleague who was often the butt of Lee’s jokes.

Irving Forbush was originally introduced in 1955 in Marvel’s short-lived ‘Snafu’ magazine as a clone of the ‘Mad Magazine’ mascot Alfred E. Neuman (‘Snafu’ was itself a virtual clone of ‘Mad’). Forbush was given a line in the magazine’s content page where he was credited as Snafu’s founder (much as Benjamin Franklin was given the same credit in the ‘Saturday Evening Post’). (‘Snafu’ also listed another Forbush family member, as the other side of the magazine’s content column read ‘Losted [sic] by his cousin, Melvin Forbush’).

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The 2000 Year Old Man is a persona in a comedy skit, originally created by Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner in 1961. Mel Brooks played the oldest man in the world, interviewed by Carl Reiner in a series of comedy routines that appeared on television, as well as being made into a collection of records. In a Jewish accent, Brooks would improvise answers to topics such as the earliest known language (‘basic Rock’). The inspiration for the skit was a tape-recorded exchange between Brooks and Reiner at a party. The tape recorder was brought into the mix shortly after the opening salvos, as the two comics soon had the party audience in stitches.

In 1961, when the duo began doing the skit on television, Brooks had just undergone surgery for gout. Because of his post-surgical discomfort, Brooks quipped, ‘I feel like a 2000-year-old man,’ which led Reiner to begin questioning him about what it’s like to be a 2000-year-old man and to describe history as Brooks saw it. Many of the jokes (especially the caveman jokes) were eventually brought to the screen in Brooks’ film ‘History of the World, Part I.’