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In its day, the Lampoon was genuinely boundary-pushing, for better and for worse, a killer of sacred cows in an era when there still sacred cows to kill. Their bits include "Canada—the Retarded Giant at your Doorstep"; a radio spot about torturing Ed Sullivan; a True Boys' Life magazine cover with a group of Boy Scouts happily circle-jerking around a campfire; a photo-narrative of an alt-history Hitler lookalike living happily on a tropical island in the Caribbean; a 69-cent stamp for feminine hygiene sprays; Eloise scrawling her name in trademark pink across the mirror of a seedy downtown bathroom; and a child's letter to Heinrich Himmler ("How do you get all those people in your oven? We can hardly get a roast pork in ours")."We analyzed it as the shift from Jewish humor, which is essentially defensive and a shield against the world, to Irish humor, which is a weapon and a sword. Our actual term for it back then was we have gone from 'Fuck me' to 'Fuck you.'"
—P. J. O'Rourke
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"Really good humor is saying the thing which is true which you would do anything to deny is true," says a young P. J. O'Rourke in Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, who joined the magazine in 1971 before becoming editor-in-chief in the late 70s. That feels right, and was certainly a major part of the magazine's philosophical non-agenda. An effective parody tastes authentic, and even at its nastiest the Lampoon was grounded in a sensibility that was as human as it was perverted. It's about finding the shared experiences that make up human connection, and the best of that today— The Onion, Clickhole, Key & Peele, John Oliver—are more polished continuations of the work that the Lampoon was doing 40 years ago."National Lampoon came out of a vein of American humor that hadn't been in the ascendant in 50 some years, which was the vicious vein," said O'Rourke, when I spoke to him last week over the phone. "We analyzed it as the shift from Jewish humor, which is essentially defensive and a shield against the world, to Irish humor, which is a weapon and a sword—not that we were all Irish, and none of us were Jewish. Our actual term for it back then was we have gone from 'Fuck me' to 'Fuck you.'"Although the driving forces behind that middle finger were founders Beard (who left the magazine shortly before he turned 30, taking a $2.8 million buyout in 1975), and Kenney, the head editors during the magazine's most critically and financially successful period, it's Kenney's narrative arc that frames the documentary and lends heft to the titular claims. He was notoriously troubled, and his excesses were as well noted as his brilliancies. He contributed larger swathes of the magazine than any other writer and co-wrote Animal House and Caddyshack. He also loved cocaine and dropped acid, once abruptly fleeing Manhattan and the Lampoon to Martha's Vineyard, where he spent months tripping and writing an unpublished novel called Teenage Commies from Outer Space.On MUNCHIES: Action Bronson's Baklava Milkshake Is True Romance
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