When I spied a copy of National Lampoon at my Uncle Bill’s house one evening in 1979, the bored, Mad magazine-loving, 8-year-old me snatched it up and started flipping through it. I’ll never forget the shock of seeing real women’s breasts staring back at me from the “Foto Funnies” page. I’ll never forget the comic strip of two boys making shadow puppets using not their hands, but their prepubescent genitals. I’ll certainly never forget, when I laughed aloud and bravely shared that strip’s crasser-than-crass “Abraham Leakin’” punch line, how fast my mom traversed the kitchen to confiscate the issue from my hands and far-too-young eyes.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my introduction to the Lampoon. The story has a happy ending, because a mere four years later, in 1983, Mom took me to see my first R-rated movie in theaters: National Lampoon’s Vacation. For fellow children of the ’70s and ’80s, I suspect exposure to the Lampoon brand arrived far more through its films than the actual publication. I’ve never read a complete issue, yet am fully aware of its enormous and ever-continuing influence on modern comedy — dangerous, politically incorrect and sacred cow-punching — perhaps most notably with the birth of Saturday Night Live. Regardless, Douglas Tirola’s feature-length documentary, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, is not to be missed.
In its opening minutes alone, the documentary does what Ellin Stein’s 2013 book on the topic could not achieve in 464 pages: Capture the anarchic energy and unrestrained creativity of the mag at its mid-’70s’ peak. Its success was not immediate, and that it was successful at all is something of a right-place/right-time fluke. Outside of the magazine eventually sucking from the mid-’80s to its 1998 death, Tirola and his talking heads (Chevy Chase, Matty Simmons, Kevin Bacon, P.J. O’Rourke, John Landis and Tim Matheson among them) skip over the Lampoon’s many misfires beyond the stapled pages; Class Reunion and Movie Madness are completely MIA, while Disco Beaver from Outer Space gets a cursory mention without even explaining what it was (an HBO special). I would call this the only fault to be found in Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, but instead I choose to flip it into a positive and say I wish the doc had kept going to share even more.
Not all of the humor has aged well — far from it (especially the live Woodstock parody Lemmings, the appeal of which escapes me based upon the footage shown here) — yet that doesn’t make this retrospective any less fascinating, particularly with so many caustic, drug-fueled egos at play, more than one of whom met tragic ends. Even with those secondary routes into weightier matters, the movie zips by us with immeasurable verve, often so fast that my thumb happily leapt between the rewind and pause buttons so much to get a closer look at the art. In doing so, I inadvertently added nearly 45 minutes to the running time. (The last time I did that, I seem to recall Christie Brinkley stripping for a motel-pool skinny dip, just to bring this review full-circle.) —Rod Lott