When did the once tame and timid world of American humour forever change to become the no-holds-barred joke mecca of modern comedy? Here’s a hint: It didn’t all begin with Lorne Michaels and the Saturday Night Live crew as many would have you believe.
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead is a new documentary that places National Lampoon magazine at the epicentre of counterculture humour in the ’70s and ’80s that eventually went mainstream.
The Lampoon comes out of a venerable Ivy League tradition. The Harvard Lampoon was a campus humour mag that was literary and elitist in an S. J. Perelman kind of way. Founded in 1876, the magazine imitated its British equivalent, Punch, until a group of comedy rebels got hold of it in the late ’60s and changed it forever.
It was the right time for a revolution. The baby boomers, raised on a nihilism born of Vietnam and Watergate, were ready to engage in comedy warfare in a take-no-prisoners, no-topic-too-taboo kind of way.
Sex was everywhere in the magazine. Any excuse to show bare breasts was welcomed. The whole enterprise had a frat boy vibe about it because it was run by frat boys.
The chief miscreant, editor and culture disturber was Doug Kenney, a charismatic genius who looked like a surfer and wrote like Lenny Bruce. He worked hard and played hard, eventually spiraling into a drug-fuelled dementia that culminated in his unsolved death in Hawaii in 1980.
From the start, the Lampoon was full of Canadians. Sean Kelly and Michel Choquette travelled from Ottawa to join the crew. There were no barriers to entry. As one editor notes, ”Anyone could come to the office and show their stuff. If it was funny, you were hired on the spot.”
The Lampoon became big business, branching out into stage shows and movies like Vacation and Animal House, a game changer on the level of Jaws. By the mid-’70s, the National Lampoon had disrupted the tame and timid world of the American laughter machine.
The magazine was enjoying some success with its stage shows, Radio Dinner and then Lemmings, a spot-on satire of Woodstock, complete with precise and hysterical imitations of Joan Baez, Joe Cocker and others. What a cast they had assembled: John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Chris Guest and writers such as Anne Beatts and Harold Ramis.
Michaels, casting the first season of Saturday Night Live, scooped them all up, all but destroying the Lampoon show.
Of course there’s nothing illegal about this, and there’s nothing wrong about performers trading up to a better opportunity. But for decades, the official story has been that Michaels somehow found all this great talent from nowhere, but this documentary insists: he got them from National Lampoon.
Michaels also, to be fair, found his cast and writers from Second City and elsewhere. But history is written by the winners, and the Lampoon ceased publication in 1998. Saturday Night Live soldiers on, having the last word by dint of its survival. But Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead serves as a brilliant epitaph for a humour magazine that refuses to be written off.
