The glory days of National Lampoon revisited
Maybe it’s just the diminished, fractured media landscape, but there isn’t really a proper modern analogue for the National Lampoon of the magazine’s ‘ 70s heyday.
The Onion and its spinoffs are certainly its satirical equal, but they’re far more formalistic than the Lampoon, whose freewheeling pages found space for everything from ribald personal essays to carefully crafted faux- yearbooks.
Cracked and CollegeHumor have taken its pop cultural musings and made them into a Minecraftian mini- world from which there’s no escape.
All of which is to say that as much as the Lampoon still looms large over comedy — most directly over GenXers, who were the teenagers gleefully soaking up the glory days of holding a gun to a dog’s head and demanding you buy this magazine — it was also an institution very particularly of its time. At one point in Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, a writer likens the process of putting together the magazine to going into a neglected attic and pulling out all the previously ignored treasures.
Director Douglas Tirola limits his view almost exclusively to the institution’s golden years — the title could just as easily refer solely to Lampoon co- founder Douglas Kenney, whose wild and well- chronicled life tracks almost perfectly with the Lampoon’s peaks and valleys, right down to his untimely death in 1980 — which constitute a run that essentially defined comedy for the next two decades. This will be most recognizable in the parade of famous faces that would get their start on the Lampoon’s stage and radio shows: John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, almost all of the original Saturday Night Live ( a point that is brought up with some bitterness by publisher Matty Simmons), Harold Ramis and Christopher Guest. But the movie also makes a convincing case for the actual writing, tracking its highlights ( in particular that faux- yearbook, which was eventually developed into Animal House), alongside the relentlessly ribald antics of everyone involved. Lurking behind this is a whole other interesting doc about the decline of the Lampoon and its main creatives, really a story as much about bad decisions — the brand basically started descending into nothing but boobs- and- balls jokes in the early ‘ 80s — as the inevitable path from radical to establishment to fuddy- duddy It’s not one Tirola is interested in, though. This is just about hanging around talking about the glory days, and as far as reminisces go, you could do worse than the group of people who put out the funniest work of the ‘ 70s.