Birth of National Lampoon begets ‘Futile and Stupid Gesture’
Stars of the Netflix film discuss humor magazine’s impact and legacy
n “A Futile and Stupid Gesture,” director David Wain tells the story of Doug Kenney, one of the co-founders of National Lampoon, the humor magazine that after its debut in 1970 launched a generation or two of writers, comics and actors, led to such films as “National Lampoon’s Animal House” and Kenney’s own project, “Caddyshack,” which arrived a month before his untimely death in 1980.
The Netflix film that arrived Friday has a huge cast of actors playing real-life people, from Will Forte as Kenney to Martin Mull as Modern Doug, the narrator, and a sort of Ghost of Kenney Future, and Domhnall Gleeson as Henry Beard, Kenney’s best friend at the Harvard Lampoon and partner in launching National Lampoon.
Joel McHale plays Chevy Chase, one of Kenney’s best friends in the final years of his life, and Emmy Rossum is Kathryn Walker, Kenney’s girlfriend until his death — a slip or a jump, it remains debatable, though it was ruled accidental — in a fall from cliff in Hawaii.
This week, as those four actors were in Park City, Utah, for a screening of “A Futile and Stupid Gesture” at the Sundance Film Festival, they came to the phone in pairs to talk about making the movie, the legacy left by Kenney and his work, and how much they actually knew about National Lampoon and Kenney before taking on their roles in Wain’s film. On what they knew of National Lampoon: “I knew nothing of National Lampoon and I think one of the things I’m happy about for the movie is that more people will know Doug Kenney and the impact he had,” said Gleeson, who at 34 wasn’t even born until after Kenney’s death.
“I had met Doug on several occasions, nothing very extreme,” said Mull, who at 74 is three years older than Kenney would have been had he lived. “But I knew very well (National Lampoon staffers) Michael O’Donoghue, Anne Beatts, P.J. O’Rourke, Tony Hendra, guys like that.”
Rossum said she knew nothing — she’s just 31 — but McHale said it was always a name that meant something to him as the 46-year-old was growing up.
“When you heard it it was like hearing IBM or Betty Crocker, one of those things that was always around,” McHale said. “And you comedy.”
He was too young to watch “Animal House” when it first came out, but “Caddyshack,” which Kenney wrote and produced, was a touchstone for him as it was for Wain and many other comedians and filmmakers of that succeeding generation.
“(Kenney) was like the Alexander Hamilton of comedy,” McHale said. “For the influence that he had he was not nearly as famous as the members of Monty Python or Richard Pryor or Steve Martin.”
On inhabiting a time and place people:
“I knew it was being recreated as a movie so I was able to dissociate myself when I left at the end of the day,” said Mull, the only adult to have lived through the early days of National Lampoon in the ‘70s. “It was like visiting. It was like going to Disneyland and going to Yesterdayland, and then at the end of the day you go home to Tomorrowland.”
Gleeson said that though the events of “A Futile and Stupid Gesture” happened “before I entered consciousness, it’s one of the great joys of the jobs that we do that we get to see lots of different worlds and live in them for a few minutes at a time.”
Added Mull: “Just listening to that I realize we were both unconscious in the late ‘70s. He wasn’t born and I was doing my knew that it made really great and its
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