Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great [ハードカバー]

There was a time, kids, when popular humor meant more than LOLcats and people getting hit in the crotch on America's Funniest Home Videos. It gave us deft, subversive parodies of Titus Andronicus, da Vinci's notebooks, Kafka, and the Code of Hammurabi and dared the audience to keep up.

The National Lampoon was a pure flash of genius in 1970s America due in no small part to its corps of genius artists, who finally get the celebration they deserve in Rick Meyerowitz's wonderful book.

For a kid like me discovering the scathing power of satire at the intersection of Vietnam and Watergate, 1972-73, the National Lampoon was a gust of visual and verbal nitrous oxide in an oleo world; nothing in my life has made me laugh harder. NatLamp boldly ran long, texty pieces that would likely be spiked today over lack of faith in readers' attention spans; one high point was a perversely intricate 12,000-word overview of the "law of the jungle" (literally, an invented legal system for animals) complete with demented Latinate citations, lovingly reprinted here.

But it was the art direction that genuinely made your jaw drop, and a lot of the best of it is in here. You'll find astonishing, gorgeous, dark-side takes on Herge's Tintin books, the Yellow Pages, SAT tests, Nazi zeppelin tourism brochures, insane niche mag titles they made up like Brave Dog magazine... from artists like Gahan Wilson, Charles Rodrigues, Bruce McCall, Brian McConnachie, and so many more... this was genius, fearless, hysterical and important stuff of a type wholly AWOL from today's scene. People who forward Onion or Colbert links to each other today would probably be struck dead silent by NatLamp's Vietnamese Baby Book parody or fake - and hilarious - Dutch hate campaign. The Onion is pretty thin soup in comparison.

But what gets you about this excellent collection of Lampoon high points is how the artists and writers trusted their audience to get it - catch the allusions, make the connections, and dig the bravery of the thing no matter how far it went. We got it. Today, on the other hand, big swaths of Onion and Colbert fans have to have it explained to them that these are jokes they're enjoying.

So I wish it were possible to call the Lampoon "seminal" -- there's a word that gets trotted out a lot for important old work -- but that would mean we'd see its descendants all around us today. I don't. The mag dried up in the 1980s, SNL grew cautious and corporate, and today our culture has grown sour and ultra-sensitive; we shall not see the like of this work again.

I loved this magazine for its literacy, intelligence, and fearlessness and this book captures the very essence of National Lampoon in its high-water years, 1970-77 or so. If you're old enough to remember and love that era but failed to save your back issues, this book will delight you. If you're not, and you think you know what far-out subversive humor is, this book will educate you.

I spent a good portion of the 1970s in my room listening to music and reading National Lampoon. During its prime years it was probably the funniest magazine that ever existed - at least to my teenage mind. I still have a pile of them in storage, including the 1964 Yearbook, the 199th Birthday Book, and The Very Large Book of Comical Funnies. Pure gold! This book is great. Rick Meyerowitz gives us a generous selection of the magazine's greatest work. He also includes reminiscences about the writers and artists who made it all possible. In 1976 I thought these guys had the greatest job on earth. I was probably right.

Loved the book. Well done by the author. Explained just enough too not too much of what it was like to work at NL with the crew.
I did not realize there were so many personalities in one office. A hell of a clash.
If this book brought back memories as a reader, I can only imagine what it was like to have lived it.
I guess the title of the book says it all.