Missing the National Lampoon Story Again

It's with a heavy heart and an overstuffed mind that I present (The Onion's) AV Club article, "How National Lampoon became the lost paradise and missing link of modern comedy." The latter because I've spent many hours reading and pondering National Lampoon and could pour it all out right now.  The former because it sounds like there's no one putting together a complete picture, yet again.  And because the article is a reminder of how far The AV Club has fallen in just a few months.

Their "For Your Consideration" series typically uses some current event to paint broader strokes about the state of, say, the blockbuster or creator-owned comics or anything that falls into AVC's wide area of interest. Thankfully, this article doesn't fall into the normal routine, that is, telling us all about the writer's personal relationship with the subject and how his/her feelings changed as he/she progressed through life.  The kind of article one starts and then immediately stops at the tenth sentence that starts with "I."

This article, instead, takes the publication of That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick: The National Lampoon And The Comedy Insurgents Who Captured The Mainstream, by Ellin Stein, to muse--badly--on the circumstances and influence of NatLamp.

To take a page from better days at AVC:

Stray Observations

• The book itself has an interesting history.  According to the article, the first mention of it being written was in 1986 and the manuscript was completed over 20 years ago.  My ears pricked up at this because I inferred that its publication meant that the intervening years had been chronicled as well. This does not seem to be the case.  The upside is that there is material coming from participants who are now dead and the interviews that were conducted closer to the events they discuss.

• Separate from the subject:  The evidence that the book was being written in 1986 comes from a review Stein did of Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s Saturday Night, which is a fantastic book.  Their survey of underground early 70s comedy is the only one of its kind and gives great context to the comedy that surrounded SNL into the 90s.  Its picture of SNL's classic, breakthrough years and into the Eddie Murphy era is much, much better than Tom Shale's rosy walk down Memory Lane in Saturday Night Live. I highly recommend it.

• Commenter Gui Jambon points out that the book has many obvious factual errors, "errors that could have been corrected with the most rudimentary fact-checking."  This means that I probably won't read it because nothing stops me colder than finding the little clue that says, "This author has no idea what she's talking about."

• Another reason why I won't read the book is because, as Gui Jambon says, "it pretty much stops with [co-founder Doug] Kenney's death."  Which is the same place that all the other books stop, too.  That was in 1980.  The magazine published regularly until 1992, then very irregularly (as in once a year) until the early aughts.  In that time, it was bought and sold several times over, had multiple editorial changes, became part of the film industry, restarted and failed in the internet era and had (I hear) a couple of CEOs get in trouble with the law.  But no, focusing exclusively on the freshman class of the magazine is all that's interesting, even if that ground is well-trod.

• It's nice to see that early NatLamp is taking a position in conventional wisdom as being the primordial ooze from where the next thirty years of comedy evolved. That's great, but the picture is incomplete.  I get the impression from the article that Stein's book takes the same attitude toward the PJ O'Rourke era that all the old-timers do: What a smart-ass little shitbag.  My understanding, however, is that O'Rourke's era was very successful. The source of the disdain seems to be that the naked breasts in O'Rourke's NatLamp were more prurient than the naked breasts in the classic era.  Let's not forget that one of the most significant movie-makers of the eighties came from that era:  John Hughes.

• I'm thinking about expanding this into a series, but I'll conclude with the very brief resurgence in 1990-1991.  Something happened during that time and the magazine was completely revamped.  The magazine had a whole new crew of young writers who later contributed, in various degrees, to The Simpsons, Newsradio and Seinfeld.  I remember the Village Voice declaring it the "Best Magazine in America" during that year.  Then, just as suddenly, it all ended. Ownership changed hands.  The magazine declined to zine-quality.

• I'll be running a series on the last 20-25 issues, I think, because no one else will.  Stay tuned