Lots of the classic humorists - him, Perelman, Thurber - became very bitter because humor was treated like a minor appendage to writing not to be compared to the real writers. That today we remember their names and the great majority of the “real” writers of their day are forgotten is ironic but doesn’t help them any.
Henry Beard had a case of that, too. He was the best literary parodist of his generation and who knows or cares about that? He never did a “big” book, though, and he’ll be remembered for nothing but Bored of the Rings.
I did not know Perelman was such a complete asshole. I was aware that late in his life, he hated talking about the work he did as a screenwriter on several Marx Brothers movies and would curtly snap at anybody who brought it up. He also seemed to deeply resent being popular among young people (i.e., anybody below the age of 40) who he regarded as subliterate barbarians. However, I just attributed it to old age and senility.
Also check out the documentary on the National Lampoon Drunk, Stoned, Brilliant, Dead which can be found on Netflix as well. Directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak (except for Doug Kenney, of course, dammit).
Two things happened that broke up the party. 1) Beard and Kenney had a deal with the publisher that after five years upon demand he would have to buy them out. They demanded, collected their checks, and split. (Though Kenney was lured back.) 2) Lorne Michaels hired away most of their staff and all of their actors and comics and that became Saturday Night Live.
Beard was the lou gherig of the lampoon. He wrote almost all of the news on the march by himself. But he chose not to go for the fences after the lampoon. He wrote dumb trade paperbacks about golfing and stuff. He was happy doing this and god bless him. But he could have done a lot more. That’s on him.
You dont want to see the film because it might be interesting?
I listened to Lemmings in High School! You have very rare and precious memory. I started buying the lampoon as soon as I saw the violence issue. I saw a natlamp show once, maybe it was “…not funny that’s sick…” or something. I used to listen to the radio hour and tape it, and do the bits like they were on an album. I actually have managed to obtain about half of them on the dl. Maybe I’m biased but I think you ought to put those tapes on and convert them post haste. There are still missing ones. Let me know.
I think it was O’Donoghue who rewrote those famously clever quotes of Winston Churchill to be completely rude and profane, and in high school I thought that was hysterical. Good stuff. But it was worth his going to SNL, because we got to see O’Donoghue’s idea of what would happen if the Mormon Tabernacle Choir plunged long needles into their eyes.
My other big memories of National Lampoon were the hilarious but also completely disturbing story “My Penis”, followed at some point by its sequel (the also hilarious and completely disturbing) “My Vagina”.
When Henry Beard collected his buyout from Matty Simmons he said to his staffers “I never liked any of you and I never want to see any of you again.” And walked out. Justlikethat.
I’m too young to remember Lampoon in its early days, though I am older than SNL, if only by a matter of days. So I was only passingly familiar with the history of it.
I loved the movie. I did find the end a bummer because I, being too young to have been part of the experience, didn’t know the true story and I fell for the Martin Mull stuff. After I watched it it rang all sorts of bells. Like I know I heard the joke about “too bad he didn’t take Chevy with him”. I’m sure I knew he was dead and it just didn’t connect. But if you know that going in, it’s not going to be like “Argh, they fooled me!” It still might be sad, but not AS sad.
Based on everyone’s rec here, I watched the Drunk Stoned etc documentary too. I enjoyed that as well.
So I can say as someone who never saw this stuff as it came out originally (as I was not born or not old enough to read), I had to pause to laugh my ass off a few times at the things they showed. The articles, the art. It really holds up well and it wasn’t nostalgia laughter because it was mostly all new to me. I mean, even I had seen the dog with the gun to its head and the giant bush, but I hadn’t seen Hitler on vacation and I almost died.
The first six issues of “NatLamp” were pivotal in my radicalization… so thanks for this thread. I’m watching it now.
The “deconstructing the documentary” is great (“Do you really think I looked like Will Forte at 27?.. Do you think Will Forte looks 27?”) – and running the big list of “Changes we made for the movie” was brilliant.
I wasn’t aware of that connection, but, as an aside, one must also appreciate the deep ties between the Second City and SNL. I’ve always been an admirer of the talent at The Second City and it’s amazing how many stars they’ve produced, among them Bill Murray, John Candy, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Steve Carell, and Stephen Colbert. The typical pattern is: make it big at Second City, then if you’re very lucky, SNL and maybe on to super-stardom.
Tony Hendra remembered it a bit differently in his book Going Too Far. As I recall, it was more like “I understand some of you are hoping for some kind of bonus from me. Frankly, I think you have all been very fairly compensated with your paychecks.” Then he gave the office one last look-around and added “I haven’t felt this great since the day I left the army.” With that, he made his exit.
The legend is that he never saw any of them again. But after Hendra’s book came out, he co-wrote several books with Lampoon alum Christopher Cerf and one illustrated by Ron Barrett.
The funeral scene was complete fiction. If he was there at all, there was certainly no food fight.
I just checked: He was at he funeral, and was in fact a pallbearer. There was no food fight; Paul Krassner briefly considered starting one, but thought better of it.
I knew all that about Benchley. I recall a couple of very poignant stories about him from the biographies I read. (All this is from memory, at least 45 years old.) The first is that when his beloved older brother was killed in WWI (I think) his mother’s first reaction to the news, in Robert’s hearing, was “Why couldn’t it have been Robert?”
The other was that, as you said, he was a teetotaler, until one day someone offered him a drink (rum, I think), and he realized that its evocative odor was the smell he had always associated with a favorite uncle. Apparently that memory set him on the road to drink.
But although Benchley was flawed in many ways, we agree, do we not, that his faults were mostly self-destructive, unlike Perelman, and that he is more to be pitied than censured? It would be hard to say the same of Perelman.
You think I can remember any of the specific skits? That’s why I was asking you all! As with the Lemmings memories, I have vague recollections of bits and pieces, and thinking at the time that it was wonderfully funny.
No, I may choose not to see it because I don’t want to be depressed. The Perelman incident was an occasion when I was sorry I knew more about a personal idol’s private life than I needed to. The founders of Nat Lamp have never been on that high a pedestal in my personal iconography. So I may very well watch this movie.
I have the tapes, I have a tape deck. What I don’t have, and probably won’t for some time, is the time to do anything about it. Is there no complete archive of the shows anywhere on the Internet? I would find that very surprising.
I love the lampoon and I would read or see anything about it. And it would be hard to stick with only nice stories having to do with your creative hereoes. This one sounds a little peevish at best to me. Plenty of more horrifying break up stories. Oh well.
There is no centralized collection. There is a site listing the episodes and a description. Most of the Radio hour episodes were rerun on a satellite comedy channel at some point, maybe in the 90s. You can hear the bumpers when you listen. SO they all may be out there but just not shared yet. Is your collection a lot of shows? There was some of John Belushis best work on there. You could probably take the tapes to some business and have them converted to mp3.
I honestly have no idea how many shows I have or which ones they are. All I know is that there are some tapes labelled National Lampoon Radio Hour that I recorded off the local NPR station sometime in the 1970s. I don’t even know if these were their original airings, or later syndication (if that happened). I haven’t looked at the tapes in a while, but I’d be surprised if the 18-19-year-old me was very systematic in recording them or labeling what’s on the tapes. I’d probably have to play each tape all the way through to find out what I have.