Potrzebie - Appearances

Appearances

The word first appeared in the letters column in Mad 10 (April 1954) in response to the question "Please tell me what in the world 'Furshlugginer' means." The editors replied: "It means the same as Potrzebie." Actually, "furshlugginer," also spelled "ferschlugginer" or "fershlugginer," is a Yiddish word meaning "confounded" or "darned" and was used in that sense in Mad.

Potrzebie was first used in a story in Mad 11 (May 1954), where it was the exclamation of a character who spoke only in foreign languages and song lyrics, in "Murder the Story," a parody illustrated by Jack Davis. It was used again in Bernard Krigstein's "From Eternity Back to Here!" in Mad 12 (June 1954) on an airplane advertising banner. With the same type font, it reappeared in Jack Davis's "Book! Movie!" in Mad 13 (July 1954), pasted into a panel as the title of an abstract painting seen in the background. It was illustrated as a rebus in "Puzzle Pages!" in Mad 19 (January 1955). These stories, like others in Mad comics, were written by Harvey Kurtzman. Frequent repetition gave it the status of a catch phrase or in-joke among the readership which continues to the present day. In the first Mad Style Guide, edited by Bhob Stewart in 1994, the word was made available for display on T-shirts and other licensed Mad products. It also sees occasional use as a metasyntactic variable by hackers.

A typical appearance of the word is exemplified by the Mad version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (from Mad 43, December 1958), which begins:

"Whon thot Aprille swithin potrzebie,

"The burgid prillie gives one heebie-jeebie.