"You've never seen any of them. At least, let's hope you haven't."
August 4, 2015 10:43 AM   Subscribe

The recent reboot "Vacation" is packed with call backs to the original 1983 film, but one thing that is conspicuously missing is the name "National Lampoon" preceding the title. Vulture recently published a short history of the National Lampoon and how it has gone from it's peak in the 70's and 80's way down to the unfortunate straight-to-DVD output of the last fifteen years. Bonus: The trailer for the upcoming documentary: "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of National Lampoon".
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI (28 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm a little afraid to see this documentary in case it fucks it up, misses the point, or worst of all, rewrites history with childish or self-serving revisionist invention (see "The Wrecking Crew" and about half of Wikipedia), because this is something that's kind of meaningful to me. I was very young at the time, and I'm sure my parents and those of my friends would not have approved of our reading Nat Lamp or listening to the National Lampoon Radio Hour if they'd had any idea what was actually in it. There was a brief period following what for this purpose I'll characterize as the heyday of the underground comics era (though it was informed by very much more than that) in which it was possible for something like it to exist, but the moment passed.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:16 AM on August 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


The Wrecking Crew book read like a high school research essay, only with more exclamation points.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:20 AM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


(And yes, I refer only to Nat Lamp of the first half of the 1970s. Some of their output was good or at least okay a little beyond that, perhaps up until Animal House, which drew largely on earlier published material, but that was the limit.)
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:22 AM on August 4, 2015


National Lampoon made a big impact on me as a kid. I couldn't stomach the Vacation movies, because they always had animal abuse or death in them, and to this day I have a hard time watching a movie where this happens to pets. But I got ahold of a lot of my dad's Lampoon magazines as a girl.

I remember the boobs, and the butts, and the way women were treated in all the layouts and the articles. I didn't have the vocabulary to say why this made me feel a little sick to my stomach, and why it seemed less and less fun to scan through for the jokes that weren't this way. It was because the whole magazine was saying to me: fuck you, woman.

When I got the answer to this question about an old Lampoon story, I was curious to learn more about the Lampoon writer Tony Hendra. And I did learn more about him. What with him and O'Rourke, to say nothing of Belushi and Chase, there seems to be a coating of slime on everything Lampoon touched.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:24 AM on August 4, 2015 [24 favorites]


I saw Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell before it got picked up by National Lampoon, and loved it so much. When I heard that NL was distributing it, I hoped that it signaled a shift to a new generation of rebellious comedy.
posted by roll truck roll at 11:28 AM on August 4, 2015


I devoured every issue of NatLamp back in high school in the 70's, and loved listening to the Radio Hour. I agree. I'm a bit fearful to watch the documentary, too. I think, instead, I'll just pull out my Sunday Newspaper and see what's going on back in Dacron.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:31 AM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Countess Elena, yes, looking back recently I was surprised that Tony Hendra had had so much to do with it. Even before his real abuses came out he was known -- certainly within creative circles at least -- as a massive plagiarist and liar. I think to this day he claims to have created or co-created Spinal Tap, rather than being an actor who might perhaps have contributed to the ad libs.

Apparently now he's peddling his redemption stories on The Moth. I haven't had any desire to listen to them.

And I certainly understand how you could have reacted to the magazine in the way that you did. One of the reasons we enjoyed it was not that it was transgressive in good way but also in a bad way. Hey, we were preadolescent kids. But there was a lot more to it than that stuff, such as the conceptual art of Bruce McCall. Not everyone's going to take the same things away from it.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:45 AM on August 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


I remember the boobs, and the butts, and the way women were treated in all the layouts and the articles.

I remember one feature where they asked readers "send a photo of your girlfriend naked with a bucket over her head." And then they published a gallery of photos of naked women with buckets over their heads.

Thinking about whether this was only gross objectification or also absurdist liberation, I then realize "well, it wasn't send a photo of yourself or your boyfriend with a bucket over their head."

NSFW gallery
posted by zippy at 11:46 AM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Just read this, and it's great:

John Hughes Original Vacation '58 Story
posted by cell divide at 11:56 AM on August 4, 2015 [5 favorites]


They really should have devoted a separate section for those who submitted pictures with trash cans, laundry baskets, and lampshades on the head instead.
posted by dr_dank at 11:58 AM on August 4, 2015


The greatest thing National Lampoon ever published was a T.S. Eliot parody in 1972: "The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover" by Sean Kelly, the complete text of which sadly does not seem to exist on the Internet.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:03 PM on August 4, 2015


I have some fond memories of National Lampoon's Senior Trip (1995), although thinking back there are definitely some problematic scenes. But, what's not to love about Kevin McDonald as a crazed crossing guard / uber-Trekkie on a mission to destroy Romulans (our protagonists)? Throw in Matt Frewer and Tommy Chong and high-school me had a lot of fun watching it.

I think it might be the only Lampoon movie I've seen other than Christmas Vacation.
posted by homotopy at 12:24 PM on August 4, 2015


One of the reasons we enjoyed it was not that it was transgressive in good way but also in a bad way. Hey, we were preadolescent kids.

I stuck with it until about the age of fourteen or so, but I wasn't particularly well socialized, and even then I think that I eventually dropped it because of what Countess Elena points out, a sort of intrinsic meanness that was their default setting.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:28 PM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


It doesn't 100% hold up, but I will always have love for the first Vacation movie for the following reasons:

1. It was the first R-rated movie I got to see in a theater. (Thanks, parents!)
2. The song "Holiday Road" is the perfect way to begin a breezy, energetic, good-time American comedy.
3. Chevy Chase's bumbling, but well-meaning Clark Griswold was so much like my dad that for years afterward, we kids would insist that every family road trip begin with him enthusiastically shouting out "Waaally Wooorld!"
4. The scene where Clark has fallen asleep while driving was the loudest I've ever heard my mom laugh at a movie.
5. The timeless hotness of Beverly D'Angelo.
6. The abominable perfection of Randy Quaid as Cousin Eddie.
7. Every scene with Aunt Edna.
8. Chevy Chase going nuts and punching in the nose of the talking Marty Moose statue.
9. John Fucking Candy.
posted by Atom Eyes at 12:36 PM on August 4, 2015 [7 favorites]


If you don't watch this movie we'll kill this dog.
posted by HuronBob at 12:38 PM on August 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


To me Chevy Chase's legendary humor has always been a case of the Emperor's new clothes. He has this deadpan schtick which is okay as far as it goes, but he somehow managed to get an entire career out of rather than just the few career highlights which it really warrants... because he's learned how to do it in a way that you read the humor you want to find into it. He's good at playing you with this one thing he does over and over again, which is not really the same thing as being a humorist.
posted by George_Spiggott at 12:48 PM on August 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


> a sort of intrinsic meanness that was their default setting.

I have not seen this movie and I'm not going to, but the trailer features a hi-larious joke about a woman getting killed in a traffic accident (in a call back to a similar joke in the original that I'm pretty sure didn't involve anyone being killed).
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:01 PM on August 4, 2015


I grew up stealing my sister's National Lampoon magazines (well, those and her Playgirls) and feeling sort of sophisticated and titillated and countercultural in that suburban lockstep sort of way in which you were countercultural if you owned an invisible dog leash or a Steve Martin head arrow prop and loved Frank Zappa's weakest work...and then thirty-five years passed and holy crap, but that sure was a sexist white boys club of not-funny sarcasm unearned by any actual talent beyond the sort of hardy-har-har easy hits of stoner jerks making fun of fat girls walking by the smoking area at a high school. I guess it seemed funny when the country was in the toilet in the polyester years, or, under Reagan, when it sold its soul to Satan, but yikes.

I have to wonder sometimes if the people in the grades a few above my own have the same sort of sinking feeling upon revisiting NL that their supercool youth might have actually sucked that I get when I try to revisit Sixteen Candles and cringe every time Hughes hits that "Oh, hey, it's Gedde Watanabe!" gong or recall that the denouement of Revenge Of The Nerds was when the hero of our story raped a girl, but it was okay because he was really good at sex.
posted by sonascope at 1:06 PM on August 4, 2015 [9 favorites]


I'll admit the humor in NatLamp was often pretty ugly and sexist. My love for the magazine, though, was centered on many of the artists they featured in the pages. Shary Flenniken, for example. And Gahan Wilson, Charles Rodrigues, M.K. Brown, etc. Great stuff for a young artist to digest.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:26 PM on August 4, 2015 [5 favorites]


Here is a great National Lampoon Archive.
posted by dougzilla at 1:38 PM on August 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


And the greatest magazine cover of all time. (Referenced by HuronBob above).
posted by rtimmel at 1:51 PM on August 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


I was a faithful Lampoon reader, but it was a different time. Pre-internet, pre-video, pre-cable. There wasn't much else.
posted by pracowity at 2:08 PM on August 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


The greatest thing National Lampoon ever published was a T.S. Eliot parody in 1972: "The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover" by Sean Kelly, the complete text of which sadly does not seem to exist on the Internet.

here you go
posted by zippy at 3:16 PM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


In my opinion, A Futile, Stupid Gesture is the best book on Lampoon's history, and it (rightly) focuses on Doug Kenney, who died not long after Caddyshack came out. Had Kenney lived, I suspect the Lampoon might've at least had a shot at staying relevant, but without him, it was like the air was let out. (I read Matty Simmons's Buy This Book or We'll Kill This Dog, which was lousy. Simmons was the publisher and not really editorially involved. He seemed way more interested in "correcting the record" about his accomplishments than actually telling a compelling story.)

Anyway, the older I get, the more I realize how much privilege and mass media are intertwined, and you can't get much more privileged than a bunch of mid-20th century Harvard grads like the Lampoon's founders. So while they could be incredibly perceptive and funny, they also had blinders on about things like wealth, race, and especially sexism. It was, in many ways, an old boys club for new boys.

Go figure that their most durable contribution to pop culture, Vacation, was written by a middle-class, non-Harvard alum Midwesterner, who was a latecomer to the magazine. For as much as they liked to write about underdogs, Hughes had a much more humanist core, although even he stumbled along the way (see Long Duk Dong, et al).
posted by gern at 4:26 PM on August 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


There were a lot of brilliant Lampoon contributors (O'Donoghue, Beatts, Flenniken), but I think what I'd like to see is a Lampoon RUN by Beatts and Flenniken, with basically an inverted gender ratio. Where people'd think of O'Donoghue as being "just as funny as the rest of them, even though he's a dude!"

Honestly, if the current NatLamp rights holders want to get back the legacy, I'd figure the inverted gender ratio would be a good way to start, especially with modern day equivalnets of Beatts/Flenniken/&c.
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 6:13 PM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Thanks, dougzilla, that's fantastic. Just dove in at random in the early 70s and immediately stumbled on a Shary Flenniken piece other than the Trots and Bonnie strip she was best known for. She's more brilliant than I remembered -- I didn't have the background to understand the comic strip influences she drew upon, and truth to tell I had a much less sure understanding of her themes, and her point, than I supposed I did at the time.

That archive.org is putting these up is one of the most welcome things I've seen in a while.
posted by George_Spiggott at 6:55 AM on August 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


Thanks to Zippy + anyone else who linked to the National Lampoon archive. Yay! That most famous National Lampoon issue is the first one I bought. My mom found the magazine in my room, took one look at the cover and said, "This is my house. Get rid of it now." And she wasn't kidding. Apparently it offended every fiber of her quivering, righteous Southern Baptist self, which is probably why I liked it. I gave away that issue but snuck a few more issues into the house.

If I reread the Lampoon I'm sure I'd be horrified by the sexist bullshit. Just as rereading Heinlein was a shock--I didn't notice in high school because I had pretty much had no framework for non-sexist stuff. Nevertheless, I will always think fondly of the Lampoon. Because it introduced me to porn via a story by Chris Miller called A Thanksgiving Memory (trigger warning: festive, consensual incest and cooked-turkey violation). That story was literally my first masturbatory aid. I was 17 and a boy had only recently introduced me to the idea of touching myself, which was shocking. (Did people do that? Could I do that? Why yes, yes I could.) And I love the ending: "No thank you. I'm a vegetarian."
posted by Bella Donna at 10:53 AM on August 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


George_Spiggott: "To me Chevy Chase's legendary humor has always been a case of the Emperor's new clothes. He has this deadpan schtick which is okay as far as it goes, but he somehow managed to get an entire career out of rather than just the few career highlights which it really warrants... "

One might even call him a medium talent.
posted by Chrysostom at 3:16 PM on August 5, 2015


« Older Both children were punished for behavior related...   |   Love is Dead. Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments