What? ‘Mad’ Worried? Not in TV Format : Television: After four decades as an American magazine, the late Bill Gaines’ irreverent vehicle for parody moves to the small screen.

Advertisers are lying to you. The government cannot be trusted. Artistic endeavors are merely fodder for parody. And life is, essentially, absurd.

Such is the unsentimental education that children of the last 40 years have absorbed if they’ve been devoted readers of the gleefully irreverent Mad magazine. From its mid-1950s inception under the direction of founder and publisher William M. Gaines, Mad delighted innumerable preteens with pointed satire that speared the hypocrisies and excesses of American life. Noses were thumbed at any and all authority figures, and sacred cows were carved up with gusto.

Now, Mad is making the jump to television. Beginning tonight, Fox will present “Mad TV,” a fast-paced, one-hour sketch comedy show that will attempt to capture some of the anarchic spirit of its magazine model--and to steal some viewers from “Saturday Night Live.”

“We’re after the spirit more than a literal translation,” says executive producer David Salzman. “And for me that spirit was always in the comeuppance of authority, rebelliousness rewarded and corruption exposed. This is a TV show, it’s not the magazine on TV. But the show is consistent with the magazine’s no-target-too-sacred approach. And my connection with the show definitely began with buying my first copy of Mad as a fourth-grader.”

Former readers will recognize a few of the magazine’s memorable features. The cartoon antics of Spy vs. Spy and Don Martin will be brought to life directly from the pages of Mad by animators at Klasky/Csupo, the studio responsible for “The Simpsons” and “Duckman.” And glimpsed in fleeting moments throughout the show will be its longtime guiding spirit--the gap-toothed, jug-eared, cheerfully dim Alfred E. Neuman.

The show will primarily feature a speedy assemblage of pre-taped film bits and sketches shot before a studio audience. The old Mad bite may be apparent in such material as vicious ad takeoffs (dueling phone company spots accuse each other of murder and atheism) and cleverly twisted film parodies (“Gump Fiction”).

Salzman, who is partnered with Quincy Jones, began pursuing the idea of a Mad-for-TV show in the late 1960s but was rebuffed by Gaines, who feared that paid advertising, which was never a part of the magazine, would defeat the point of any TV show.

In the late ‘80s, Gaines reconsidered and sold the TV rights to Salzman. Gaines died in 1993, and the current publishers of the enduring magazine have no direct ties to the show. This year, Jones and Salzman decided that Fox was the proper home for Alfred E., and they pushed for a late-night Saturday slot.

With a creative staff reflecting combined credits from “SCTV,” “Kids in the Hall,” “Culture Clash,” “The Ben Stiller Show” and “Saturday Night Live,” “Mad TV” would seem to stand a good chance of supplying some wicked laughs to late-night Saturday viewers. Those laughs and those viewers have dwindled over the last couple of years as sketch warhorse “SNL,” now in its 21st season, has faltered. “Mad TV” will be the first serious challenger to “SNL’s” late-night turf.

“We should be half as lucky as ‘SNL,’ ” Salzman says. “They’ve had a great history. But I think it’s time for some new voices and approaches. Some people think sketch comedy has been done to death. But before ‘ER,’ people said that about medical dramas too. That show doubled the pace of the old shows and brought a rock ‘n’ roll sensibility to the material. We hope to compare ourselves to ‘SNL’ in the same way--speedier and edgier.”

Veteran “In Living Color” writers Fax Bahr and Adam Small are also executive producers here, handling the day-to-day responsibilities of making “Mad TV” happen.

“We grew up on the magazine,” Small says. “And we really responded to all that darkness and subversion. The trick was to take the hipness we saw in Mad when we were 12 and bring it into the ‘90s.”

Bahr says that hipness won’t be achieved by simply stretching network tolerance of expletives and tastelessness.

“There’s nudity and profanity all over cable now, and that makes it tougher for a network sketch comedy show to stand out as something revolutionary, the way ‘SNL’ did when it began,” Bahr says. “We take on that challenge in the point of view of the material. If that point of view is fresh and strong and funny, that’s what will attract people. You don’t need a nude cast that swears a lot to be edgy.”

Mad politics show up in such bits as “Republican Gladiators,” wherein dead-on human caricatures of Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich don spandex and protective headgear and pummel each other mercilessly. More visceral humor turns up in at least one ad parody, where any viewers’ desires to witness a less-happy meeting of frogs and beer trucks will be rewarded.

The young cast of “Mad TV” brings together a mix of actors, stand-up comedians and improv players--some of whom credit Mad magazine with their choice of career.

“Without a doubt, reading that magazine shaped my whole sense of comedy,” Phil Lamarr says. A graduate of the Groundlings Theatre, Lamarr may be most familiar to film audiences as the back-seat passenger who takes an inadvertent bullet to the head in “Pulp Fiction.” In one “Mad TV” sketch, he portrays Spike Lee shilling for a sandwich spread, encouraging consumers to get a hold of the product “by any means necessary.”

“Mad exposed me to the power of satire early on,” Lamarr says. “That kind of humor stays in your system.”

Not every cast member has fond Mad memories, though. “I don’t think I ever really got it,” says Nicole Sullivan, who, in a “Clueless of the Lambs” sketch, will portray the fashion-conscious half of an Alicia Silverstone/Hannibal Lector crime-solving team. “I think I grew up as more of a Highlights gal. I didn’t understand my dark side back then, but it’s being cultivated for ‘Mad TV.’ ”

Salzman hopes that, in the tradition of the magazine, “Mad TV’s” darkness will also lead to some comedic enlightenment.

“Our job isn’t simply to push the gross-out envelope of network TV,” Salzman says. “It’s to be smarter and different than what’s gone before. The magazine had multilevels of appeal and context. There were booger jokes mixed in with some really biting political satire. That’s what we’re after.”

* “Mad TV” premieres at 11 tonight on Fox (Channel 11).