Fenster writes:
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead is a documentary film chronicling the life and death of the highly influential humor magazine National Lampoon.
It is worth viewing but don’t expect all that much humor. It is not a revue or a series of snippets, like, say a film in The Best of Saturday Night Live series. It is for the most part a straightforward documentary chronicling the life and times of this interesting publication, and the many influences it has had on American culture since its founding in 1970.
It makes sense that it would not be a series of sketches highlighting the humor. After all, National Lampoon was (at least in its first incarnation) a magazine. Film can show a graphic, like a cartoon or photo, but the humor in National Lampoon was at its heart pretty dense stuff. A lot of writing. A lot of detail. You had to pay attention. You had to read. The film gives this density some glancing blows but for the most part it just marches on, chronologically, moving from year to year to year and commenting on the flow of characters and styles.
For me it was a lot of fun to watch the story unfold. I read a lot of National Lampoon in the 1970s, and knew roughly of the narrative arc: brainy Harvard duo Kenney and Beard morph from the Harvard Lampoon to a national magazine almost by chance; immediate success because of the no-holds-barred approach to humor; the magazine spawning related media like the revue Lemmings, radio shows and eventually films. And the eventual draining away of its energy, a combined result of exhaustion, drugs, changing attitudes, genre depletion and the collision with Hollywood. The latter problem is well-explained here–how are you going to keep them down on the farm, at an odd little print magazine, when Big Media and Big Money and Big Fame come calling?
Some of the film plays a little too much like inside baseball. It will mostly be completists who will care what the effect on design was when Peter Kleinman replaced Michale Gross as art director. But small issues like this aside, the film is fun as nostalgia for those who know something of the subject from experience, and it ought to be informative to a younger demographic which is less familiar.
My son, for instance. When he saw I had the movie he remarked that sure he knew National Lampoon. “They did those movies.” Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead demonstrates nicely how much more they did than “those movies”.
Moreover, a glance at the current humor scene will demonstrate quite clearly how much of National Lampoon we still have with us. This is a mixed blessing of course. The Lampoon’s ultra-ironic approach to all subjects was and is tremendously appealing, especially to youth and especially to smarty-pants types that figure they are better than everyone else. That’s the Harvard influence–Kenney and Beard may have been brilliant but they were also awful snobs. If you have ever yearned for some escape from–even for a brief respite from–a diet overly rich in irony you have the Lampoon very much to blame for your condition.
And here’s another irony: while the influence of the Lampoon remains very pronounced in American humor today, much of its material would be absolutely verboten today. The goofy sex stuff may live on in diluted form in Judd Apatow films, but a good deal of the sexual, racial and political humor that was embraced by the smart set back then falls into the category of what Blowhard Esq. calls “couldn’t do it today.” It is pretty shocking in retrospect to see just how outrageous a good deal of the material actually was. It causes you to reflect on how our current era has magically managed to combine anything goes with a new Puritanism.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
I really enjoyed this too. I vaguely remember stealing some glances at the magazine in the late 70s, on a Boy Scout trip no less, so I’m too young to have been there during its rise. But I’m a comedy geek and studied it pretty thoroughly in my high school years. It’s hard to overstate the Lampoon’s influence on popular culture in general, and you’re right, for better and (mostly) worse. To my mind, the really arch, ironic and studiously sophomoric stuff should remain at the fringes. Once it hits the mainstream, the original material gets diluted while mainstream culture gets coarsened in a sad, but inevitable, entropic race to the middle.
I hadn’t seen some of the more outrageous stuff, like the Vietnamese baby’s first year but. Man, that’s dark but effective. Michael O’Donoghue, who wrote that bit, is a fascinating figure. Check out the book “Live from New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of SNL…” for more on him. Incredibly smart and but nasty as hell. I also didn’t know much about Kearney. What a nut.
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“To my mind, the really arch, ironic and studiously sophomoric stuff should remain at the fringes. Once it hits the mainstream, the original material gets diluted while mainstream culture gets coarsened in a sad, but inevitable, entropic race to the middle. ”
Not to derail the conversation, but you perfectly expressed my problem with Quentin Tarantino.
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That JV has a way with words.
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Here’s National Lampoon’s February 1977 “Grand Fifth JFK Inaugural Edition”
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/11/50th-anniversary-of-death-of-jackie.html
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Interesting that when you track the lineages back you come to both right and left. Making fun of the establishment/power/grown-ups was a countercultural thing was generally leftie back then, and most comics and comedy out of this tradition tilts left. But the Harvard elitism also allowed room for tories, too,. like PJ O’Rourke, who was about to become editor in chief when the JFK thing was published.
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I remember my parents’ eccentric, right-wing, pot smoking Southern friends always had this magazine lying around their house in the early 1980s, and I used to enjoy perusing it. It seems Amazon.com has some bound collections of their work, in some cases for very cheap used editions. I think I shall avail myself of that opportunity.
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Just bought this: http://www.amazon.com/National-Lampoons-Truly-Tasteless-Cartoons/dp/0809239132
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funny that this is marketed as “tasteless”, as a kind of apology for twistedness. “Yeah we’re sick and this is sick humor.” In the moment I don’t think the Lampoon had any impulse to be self-deprecating. The humor was a mark of their superiority. Superior humor meant that they were better than what the people who they made fun of found funny. At least that’s how I interpret the game they were playing.
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Some of my favorite bits from National Lampoon…
First Blowjob by Doug Kenney http://www.popeye-x.com/antippx1/000002f7.htm
Joan Baez sings “Pull the triggers…” (VERY NSFW) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NafrFdBXfrk
Oct. 31, 1978 by Tod Carrol (two teen sociopaths wreak havoc on their neighborhood; a precursor to OC and Stigs) http://reginaldjuice.tumblr.com/post/140910159229/october-31-1978-by-tod-carroll-from-national.
My Penis by John Hughes http://www.tgfa.org/fiction/MyPenis.htm
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I thought it was a great documentary. Loved how they used the Kleinman and Gross art direction from the magazine to frame the film narrative. The Doug Kenney story was sad but his vision and comic style obviously lives on in our culture and in Hollywooden. Too bad the PC world of today couldn’t even allow a Lampoon to exist for a minute. Imagine laughing at racial humor?
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