Film looks back at National Lampoon’s ruthless satire laboratory

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This article was published 03/12/2015 (3925 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”

— Dean Wormer in National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978)

 

The genealogy of late 20th-century comedy, encompassing everything from Ghostbusters to Saturday Night Live, SCTV to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, can be traced to a single magazine.

National Lampoon was a raucous, subversive and often tasteless humour magazine that, issue after issue, hit the ’70s right in the zeitgeist. An offshoot of the revered college publication Harvard Lampoon, it began publishing in 1970 but became a satiric powerhouse around 1972, a counter-culture counter-punch to the era of the Vietnam war and the Nixon presidency.

By today’s standards, it was insanely offensive. It made jokes about the Holocaust (Michael O’Donaghue’s notorious article Children’s Letters to the Gestapo, for example), rape, drugs, racism and homosexuality. Some issues matched Playboy when it came to gratuitous female nudity. Its satire spurred Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall to lodge a complaint against the mag with the FBI.

It was a publication of its time, but its influence was far-reaching. This documentary by Douglas Tirola at least makes that point, emphasizing the mag’s origins and its two creative founders: Doug Kenney and Henry Beard. In particular, Kenney (you may remember him as bespectacled misfit Stork in Animal House, the 1978 hit comedy produced under the NatLamp banner) comes under the microscope as a comedy genius who succumbed to druggie excess in the ’80s.

The title refers to Kenney in particular, but it could just as easily refer to others in the NatLamp orbit, including the funny-angry writer-editor O’Donaghue, and especially John Belushi, who worked on National Lampoon’s radio shows before being absorbed into the nascent comedy machine that was Saturday Night Live. None of those guys made it out of comedy alive.

One of the reasons the film emphasizes Kenney in particular is because Chevy Chase participates in the film, he says, as a tribute to Kenney, his best friend. The story of Kenney’s suspicious demise in Hawaii is discussed, but the film offers no real conclusions about whether Kenney was a suicide or the victim of a tragic accident.

The film has a few other notables. Kevin Bacon intersected with the National Lampoon universe as a member of the Animal House cast, but he doesn’t make any significant contributions.

Given the chance to interview writer Anne Beatts, who exited the magazine to join the writing staff of SNL, Tirola doesn’t think to ask about the magazine’s decidedly sexist content. He also doesn’t think to ask libertarian Republican P.J. O’Rourke about the magazine’s political sea change under his editorial tenure.

Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead still stands as an invaluable look at a largely forgotten comedy institution. But it falls maddeningly short of being definitive.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca