A Look Back at National Lampoon

 

 

 

Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead (2010)

By Rick Meyerowitz

Harry N. Abrams Publishing, 320 pages.

★★★

 

In my book on the Marx Brothers I wrestled with the question of makes something “funny?” Comedy is usually transgressive, meaning it occurs when our expectations of “normal” are overturned. Some comedy is universal, some is timebound, and some is contemporary hoping to become classic. Beyond that, you’re on your own!

 

As a child I loved Bugs Bunny and Mad Magazine. Though I enjoyed a recent exhibit on Mad Magazine, my main feeling was one of nostalgia. Once I got wind of National Lampoon, I left childish things behind (except Bugs). NatLamp was my go-to mag for the 1970s because it was cheeky, irreverent, and didn’t give a fig about authority or propriety. It was the funniest thing going–until I discovered Monty Python. My point is that people often change when the Zeitgeist shifts. Later I discovered (in alpha order) George Carlin, Billy Connolly, Joan Rivers, Robin Williams, and Stephen Wright.

 

But back to National Lampoon. Recently I picked up a $1.99 copy of Rick Meyerowitz’s  look back at the magazine for which he did a bit of everything: art work, writing, spin-off radio broadcasts, movies, stage shows…. He did the famed “Mona Gorilla” cover, in my mind, the second funniest after the brilliant “Buy this magazine of we’ll kill this dog” cover that outraged some people and made others double over in laughter. National Lampoon began in 1970, an offshoot of Harvard Lampoon, and ceased publication in 1998, though it ran out steam in the 1980s.

 

Meyerowitz bit off a big task by spotlighting the voluminous cast of writers and illustrators who passed through the doors. Founders Doug Kenny and Henry Beard hired Meyerowitz, plus such well-known wits as the venomous Michael O’Donoghue and the only slightly more contained Christopher Cerf, Michel Choquette, and George William Swift Trow. You might notice that all of those names are male. Lampoon was accused of being sexist in content and production. It absolutely was! Anne Beatts was its first female writer, but she came aboard with more male writers like Tony Hendra, Sean Kelly, Charles Rodrigues, and Arnold Roth. Beatts remained the only female creative until the late 70s. Other familiar names such as Stan Mack, Bruce McCall, P. J. O’Rourke reported for duty, but NatLamp remained well behind the feminist curve with its large-breasted women and cheap sex jokes. Lampoon was also charged with being anti-Semitic, but you will notice from the number of Jewish names in its production staff that this was self-deprecating humor.

 

A challenge in a Lampoon survey is that Meyerowitz was an insider. The staff was often drunk and/or stoned and some indeed are dead. Were they “brilliant?” Most were highly educated, but National Lampoon shared a trait with Mad in that its content can be charitably called “uneven.”  This leads to a critique of the book’s organization. It is divided into seven sections: The Founders, Present at Birth, The Cohort, The First Wave, The Second Coming, The End of the Beginning, and The Art Directors. Each of the personalities involved is introduced by another staffer telling us how utterly brilliant that person was; more times than not, that person tells us how brilliant another colleague was. Such profiles don’t tell us much and read as what they are: a mutual admiration club. Some of what they “reveal” as dazzling today reads as tedious. An example is an early 12-page piece by Henry Beard and John Weidman, “Law of the Jungle.” It’s an erudite and absurdist parody of natural law and its implications for flora, fauna, land, etc. complete with footnotes. Clever? Yes, but a violation of a principle not discussed therein: thou shalt not stretch a joke until it disintegrates. 

 

Okay, so not everything worked, but TheStupidGroup is fresh and relevant. Things such a parody of the existential threat posed by the Dutch; caricatures of Reagan and the Ayatollah; Hitler’s tropical paradise; “The Socratic Monologue,” Anne Beatts’ VW ad; “Strange Beliefs of Children;” Bernie X; fake yellow pages and New Yorker covers; and tons of zany comics are hysterical.

 

In my view, National Lampoon lost it edge with its spinoffs, which had to be toned down for wider audiences. Some of what made Lampoon “funny” was that it was often offensive. Why not; “whether you know it or not, the Universe is laughing behind your back” (Deteriorata).  And, yes, it inspired Saturday Night Live.

 

Rob Weir