Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead

Douglas Tirola’s fast moving look at one of the most important humor magazines may make you like the publication less after watching it. The mag could be raunchy and crass and satirically sharp (and very funny) in equal measures. The film, unfortunately, sometimes seems more interested in the debauchery of its founders than in the magazine itself.

The general public may know that famous Hollywood movies originated from a magazine called National Lampoon, but have no idea the influence NL had on comedy in general. NL as we know it was originally a spin-off of the undergraduate Harvard Lampoon, founded in 1876. Among its members and contributors over the decades were William Randolph Hearst, John Updike, Conan O’Brien and Pulitzer prize winner Robert E. Sherwood. National Lampoon was created by Henry Beard and Doug Kenney after the enormous success of their 1969 Harvard Lampoon parody paperback, Bored of the Rings.

National Lampoon was, from the beginning, willing to tackle any subject matter, no matter how reprehensible, with wicked humor, aided by writer Michael O’Donoghue and longtime artists like Gahan Wilson and Neal Adams. The magazine’s height in terms of quality may be its hilarious 1974 “National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook Parody”, written by Kenney, satirist P. J. O’Rourke and Christopher Cerf (writer for Sesame Street and son of Bennett Cerf). It’s meticulous in its replication of high school yearbooks, with character studies and sub-plots which can be followed throughout the book. If it had been the only publication NL ever created, NL would still be justly famous.

It was NL’s extra-curricular projects that partly resulted in a loss of talent and quality. The National Lampoon Radio Hour, which ran in ’73-’74, used the talents of John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Harold Ramis (director of Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day), Richard Belzer, Christopher Cerf and Christopher Guest (This Is Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind). Much of the same group performed live in NL’s Lemmings, an off-Broadway parody of the Woodstock Festival. Two events in 1975, though, spelled trouble for the magazine: the magazine’s founders took a buyout clause in their contracts for $7.5 million, and producer Lorne Michaels lured Michael O’Donoghue, Chevy Chase, John Belushi and Gilda Radner away to debut Saturday Night Live. The magazine never completely recovered from this wholesale loss of talent. Douglas Kenney died mysteriously in 1980 at the age of 33.

Tirola’s movie is most successful at conveying the influence of the magazine’s creators on the mainstream, from the the Hollywood hits Animal House (1976) and National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) to the entire catalog of John Hughes films (Vacation was based on an article Hughes had written for the magazine). NL contributors went on to write for The Simpsons, The David Letterman Show, The New Yorker magazine, Paris Review, Spy magazine, Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show and much more. (The movie astoundingly runs for 93 minutes without once mentioning Mad magazine, the previous and – at the time of NL’s publication – current subversive and influential American humor magazine – a petty decision.)

Tirola utilizes a lot of archival footage of the creation of work (including Christopher Guest doing a spot-on parody of James Taylor) and features a wide range of interviewees, including novelist Christopher Buckley, film directors John Landis, Judd Apatow and Billy Bob Thornton, actors Kevin Bacon, John Goodman, Beverly D’Angelo and Meat Loaf.

Where Tirola’s movie disappoints – and it’s a major error – is acting as if the last fifteen or twenty years of the magazine don’t exist. The documentary stops in the early ’80s. I was very much interested in the history of the brand since then, the various corporations the magazine has been sold to, the ways they’ve been legally required to keep the brand alive, etc. Tirola spends the time instead on Kenney’s cocaine-fueled downward spiral, in a way that borders on hagiography.

An aside and warning: every issue of National Lampoon is available for free downloading on Internet Archive, but the content has been censored and edited for legal reasons. eBay and comic book conventions are probably the best sources for the real stuff.

—Michael R. Neno, 2018 Oct 2