I miss National Lampoon.

Cafe Society
1

Yes, I know it has a website, but it’s nowhere near as good as the magazine used to be. There was more of a rawness to it back then, as well as some truly twisted parody.

Like the letters pages: each letter started out with Dear Sirs: then put a twist on some current topic or just went into a weird rant. Like this one:

Dear Sirs:
Take my wife, that goddamn cock sucking whore PLEASE!
So one day my wife said to me, I’d like to go someplace for our vacation that I’ve never been to before. I said how about the kitchen you festering slut from HELLLLLL!
Henny Kinison
updating the act

I miss the comics pages. There was Politeness Man, drawn in the 50’s squeaky clean style. PM carried around a steel hanky and threw it at people who showed bad manners, like hookers, pimps, drug addicts and serial killers, also drawn in that 50’s squeaky clean style. There was also Trots and Bonnie, the story of a preteen girl coming of age and her talking dog. But the coming of age stories were always just plain surreal and twisted, like the time a customer she was trying to sell girl scout cookies to got her to balance the cookies on top of her head while naked and dance like a geisha. They children’s artists like the guy who drew Casper to submit stories about sleazoid grocery store managers.

PJ O’Rourke wrote for them, as well as some SNL writers. I remember Zen Bastard talking about how he went to the airport to pick up Sinead O’Connor for a benefit concert, and wound up crashing into a deer on the way back. She insisted he strap it on the roof and find a vet. This being July and 100 degrees, the deer wound up cooking like it was on a grill. The vet wound up shooting it.

There was the time when they published a spread that reprinted all their past covers with captions. One showed a Frazetta style painting with a naked girl being tied to a post. Caption: We discover tits, readers discover us, sales soar. There was another cover with Stevie Wonder wearing 3D glasses. Caption: Yes, it’s a sick joke, but he’ll never see it.

It was raunchy over-the-top humor, but there was some intelligence behind it. It didn’t just shock with dirty words. It went for the throat.

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I miss Spy, at its best. Which, admittedly, wasn’t often.

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God some of that brings back memories. While most kids would be sneaking Playboys into their rooms, I was hiding National Lampoon. I remember the original short story to Vacation, where it ends with dad actually shooting Walt Disney.

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To tel the truth, I never much liked National Lampoon. Occasionally they did something that made me laugh. Too much of the time they seemed to be doing non-PC humor and winking, saying “we know it’s not PC, and that it’s not right, so we can do it”. This let them get away with doing immigrant humor that would’ve been condemned in any other national publication.

Gimme my Mad, any day.

5

I started an NatLamp appreciation thread awhile back. I started with the first issue and subscribed soon afterwards. The Lampoon revolutionized comedy (especially since it was a major influence on SNL – Michael O’Donoghue was an SNL writer and an early member of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, and several of the original SNL regulars got their start with National Lampoon’s Lemmings).

The best thing about their site is that it reprints the best articles, including “How to Write Good,” the truly bizarre “Remembering Mama,” “The Utterly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs” (O.C. and Stiggs were Bevis and Butthead, though much more amoral), and “My Penis.” They’ve also just put up a selection of letters on the site.

The writers for the original NatLamp included people like O’Donoghue (whose insight into the nature of comedy was very disturbing), Henry Beard, O’Rourke, Ed Subitzky, Doug Kenney (some say he was the best), Bruce McCall, Chris Miller, John Hughes, and many others.

Spy and The Onion are lame imitators.

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If You Don’t Buy This Issue We’ll Shoot The Dog

You don’t see humor like that anymore.

Except maybe on Jackass.

And for good reason.

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Everybody forgets today just how smart NatLamp was at the beginning. Their intention was a New Yorker for the revolution. Henry Beard and Doug Kenney had come out of the Harvard Lampoon, which they had turned from an occasional humor mag to a nationally-known institution with their parodies of Life and Time, and most especially their Tolkien spoof, Bored of the Rings. (They had some help from the slightly older Christopher Cerf, who I believe had paved the way with his Playboy parody and whose book, The World’s Largest Cheese, with much Harvard Lampoon material, is one of the great unknown humor books.) Michael O’Donoghue was the outsider, someone who had dropped out of the University of Rochester - two or three times - but a genius at humor.

NatLamp did so many parodies of famous works of literature that they were able to put out an entire collection, This Side of Parodies. Imagine anyone doing that today. I rank Beard as one of the top five parodists of the 20th century.

And the political satire was top-notch. There was a book of those as well, Would You Buy a Used War from This Man? This ended pretty much when Nixon did.

It wasn’t until later, when Chris Miller and P. J. O’Rourke took over, that the magazine dumbed down a lot and fell entirely into gross-out humor. (Although the cartoonist S. Gross was there from the beginning.)

They had a heyday of about five years, which seems to be about as long as any humor group ever stays together.

Christmas is coming up. If you don’t already own Matty Simmon’s If You Don’t Buy This Book We’ll Kill This Dog: Life, Laughs, Love and Death at National Lampoon, start dropping huge hints for your loved ones to hunt up a used copy.

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The magazine’s gone? That’s too bad, considering I never knew where to get a copy until recently, when other life issues belonging upfront distracted any itinerant thoughts worthy of a “to-do” list. I’m lucky enough, however, to have ran across a few issues in the early 90s despite being too young to appreciate most of the humor other than, say, the humorous signs such as “Soft D®inks” and “Fuk King Mattress”, among others.

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O.C. and Stiggs!

Great guys. Don’t see the movie, unless you want to loose all respect for Robert Altman.

Politenessman was great. I found a childrens book he and his wife wrote which involved a town where all the weather was food. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs I think it was.

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As a pre-teen, I used to enjoy reading Nat’l Lampoon. Especially for the fact that I was allowed to buy it…and there were naked breast in it! Hey–I was thirteen…gimme some leeway here…

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I’ve seen copies of the magazine. The Onion kicks its sorry ass before they’re even out of the starting gate. Guess I missed the “heydey” period which Exapno speaks of. Of course if you had never read Mad before and picked up an issue today, you could be forgiven for thinking it sucks too.

-fh

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The Onion is the Adam Sandler of comic magazines: like a knockoff of Jim Carrey doing a knockoff of Jerry Lewis. The Lampoon did it first, did it better, and is still a major influence on comedy today. The fact that the Onion is so well regarded shows just how pathetic humor in America has become.

NatLamp was first class up until C. Dennis Plunkett took over toward the end, at which point it fell apart rapidly. It was a pretty impressive run.

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Wow, my gf and I were talking about Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs the other day but neither of us could remember the title. Thanks, Frankd6!

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Umm has anyone went over and checked out

http://www.nationallampoon.com/
You can go to the archives and check out the classic writes thanks to “Scannerbitch”

My personal favorites were the Tales of the Adelphian Lodge (how did they manage to write my college years back in the 70’s?)
These stories were the basis for Animal House and it began with

The Night Of The Seven Fires (which you can read in Flashbacks)
and of course, Evil Clown Comics

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My alltime favorite letter in National Lampoon:

Sir,

99 Luftballoons
Eurofag commies suck my dick.
*Let’s see you play *that on MTV.

Sincerely,

Casper Weinburger

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I remember reading a"documentary" about farts that was probably the funniest thing I have ever read in my life.

I have no idea what year or issue.

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Dear Sirs,

Wanna know a secret? I was pretty impressed.

–Jodie Foster

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SPY was always at it’s best you short fingered vulgarian!

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“If you read this, you’ll go blind” An entire adult novel, 200 something pages was microprinted across 2 pages in National Lampoon. The type was just barely big enough to read . . . . :slight_smile:

Cheech Wizard, The Appletons, Gahan Wilson’s Nuts: they had lot’s of funny stuff back in the Day.