Drunk St oned Brilliant Dead: The St ory of the National Lampoon

In the Lampoon, the boomers kissed off stoics who raised them

Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon

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 formalist than the Lampoon, whose freewheeling pages found space for everything from ribald personal essays to carefully crafted faux-yearbooks.

McSweeney’s captures some of the literary absurdity with exactly none of the anarchic energy. Cracked and College Humour have taken its pop cultural musings and made them into a Minecraftian mini-world from which there’s no escape. Maybe Weird Twitter, such as it properly exists, is closest, with its jumbled amalgam of dadaist ramblings, pointed politics and freewheeling willingness to not just jab its thumb in anyone’s eyeball, but also lick it afterwards, for that extra creep factor.

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.

The Lampoon was one of the ultimate boomer kiss-offs to the stoics who raised them, a radical dive into buffoonery that rendered the old world ridiculous by making the whole world ridiculous.

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.

At one point Simmons says you could get a contact high just from walking into the office, and even watching this doc is likely to get you pretty close.

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 (I should mention here that of the famous faces, Chevy Chase is the most extensively quoted).

It’s not one Tirola is interested in, though. This is just about hanging around talking about the glory days, and as far as reminiscences go, you could do worse than the group of people who put out the funniest work of the ’70s. ★★ ½