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(More customer reviews)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.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great
From its first issue in April, 1970, the National Lampoon blazed like a comet, defining comedy as we know it today. To create Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, former Lampoon illustrator Rick Meyerowitz selected the funniest material from the magazine and sought out the survivors of its first electrifying decade to gather their most revealing and outrageous stories. The result is a mind-boggling tour through the early days of an institution whose alumni left their fingerprints all over popular culture: Animal House, Caddyshack, Saturday Night Live, Ghostbusters, SCTV, Spinal Tap, In Living Color, Ren & Stimpy, The Simpsons—even Sesame Street counts a few Lampooners among its ranks. Long before there was The Onion and Comedy Central news shows, there was the National Lampoon, setting the bar in comedy impossibly high!Praise for Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead:"The other night I started laughing so hard I had to leave the room . . . And then I realized that I hadn't laughed so hard in 35 years, since I was a teenager, reading National Lampoon." --The Wall Street Journal "If you grew up with the Lampoon, this book is a trip down memory lane like no other; if not, it will demonstrate that the much maligned 70s could produce humor that has never been surpassed." --Vanity Fair "Meyerowitz delivers more than he promises [in his introduction]. The alumni reminiscences he commissioned, taken together, paint a vivid picture of a tight-knit family of twentysomething humorists at the dawn of their careers." -Newsweek "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead is a coffee-table book-big, colorful, and fun to flip through. But it also serves as an important reminder: Where would American humor be without the National Lampoon?" -The New Yorker"With page after page of exquisitely reproduced articles and illustrations, DSBD is a satiric cornucopia . . .You're gonna need a bigger stocking for this one!" -NationalEnquirer.com
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