Show Business: The Lampoon Goes Hollywood

America’s only adult humor magazine is now a comedy empire

Eight years ago, three newly graduated Harvard Lampoon editors had a wild and crazy idea: Why not start the first modern national humor magazine for American adults? They took the idea to a middle-aged entrepreneur—the publisher of Weight Watchers magazine, no less—and National Lampoon was born. The rest is history, or if not history, then at least hilarity.

Today National Lampoon, the brainchild of Douglas Kenney, Henry Beard and Robert Hoffman, is a show-biz empire of comedy. Not only has the magazine been a huge success (circ. 600,000), but it has also launched popular spinoffs: books, records (three Grammy Award nominations), stage revues, a radio show. Better still, the Lampoon has nurtured a new generation of comic talent. Many of the creators of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, including Michael O’Donoghue, the Chief Writer, are Lampoon alumni. That show’s Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time-Players Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gilda Radner and Bill Murray first hit the big time in Lampoon revues.

This summer is the Lampoon’s balmiest yet. Last month the magazine published its Sunday Newspaper Parody, an eight-section, $4.95 send-up of Middle American journalism that is starting to hit trade-paperback bestseller lists. This week the magazine’s first film venture, a college satire titled National Lampoon’s Animal House, opens in 600 theaters nationwide. Bolstered by good reviews and Star, John Belushi, the movie is already playing to smash business in New York City and should return a hefty profit on its modest $2.7 million production cost.

Though the Lampoon has become big and rich, it has never lowered its scathing comic voice. “What we do is oppressor comedy,” is the proud claim of Lampoon Editor in Chief PJ. O’Rourke, 30. “Woody Allen says, I’m just a regular shmuck like you.’ Our kind of comedy says, ‘I’m O.K.; you’re an asshole.’ We are ruling class. We are the insiders who have chosen to stand in the doorway and criticize the organization. Our comic pose is superior. It says, ‘I’m better than you and I’m going to destroy you.’ It’s an offensive, very aggressive form of humor.”

Every Lampoon fan has his own favorite outrageous moment. One occurred in January 1973, when the magazine’s cover photo of a puppy with a gun to its head was accompanied by the headline, IF YOU DON’T BUY THIS MAGAZINE, WE’LL KILL THIS DOG. Off-Broadway audiences recall The National Lampoon Show of 1975, in which Gilda Radner playing Patty Hearst machine-gunned Steven Weed. Lampoon writers routinely savage Kennedys, Nixons, Third World peasants and American capitalists. No one, alive or dead, is sacred. The Lampoon’s last issue included a fictional letter to the editor in which “Larry Flynt” referred to himself as “the George Wallace of porn.” With this kind of animus, it is no wonder that the Lampoon’s first movie has a richly deserved R rating.

Out of such tasteless license can come some of the best comic writing in the country. Four years ago, O’Rourke and Kenney edited the Lampoon’s most successful publishing project to date (1.6 million copies sold): the 1964 High School Yearbook Parody. A precursor of Animal House (also co-written by Kenney), this work was a replica of a second-rate school annual, right down to the pushy ads for local merchants and the classmates’ autographed cliches in the margins. The book is so rich in social detail that it brings a whole fictional town, Dacron, Ohio, to life. The new Sunday Newspaper Parody is the Dacron Republican-Democrat (slogan: One of America’s Newspapers). The two parodies take aim at small-town American life in the ’70’s with the same spirit, and occasionally some of the pathos, of Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson in the ’20’s.

If one man deserves particular credit for the growth of the Lampoon’s diverse enterprises, it is Matty Simmons, 51, the man whom Hoffman, Kenney and Beard approached in 1970. A co-founder of the Diners’ Club, Simmons quickly saw the need for the Lampoon. “Even the Soviets had adult humor magazines,” he recalls, “but we hadn’t had one for 30 or 40 years. Once the Lampoon came out, it was the fastest-growing magazine in the country.”

It was Simmons who raided Chicago’s satirical Second City troupe to bring Belushi to New York for the 1973 revue National Lampoon’s Lemmings. He in turn eventually brought along Radner and Harold Ramis (another Animal House co-screenwriter). Then counter-raiding began. For Saturday Night Live, TV Producer Lome Michaels hired away half the cast of Lemmings’ sequel, The National Lampoon Show. When Belushi departed, Simmons replaced him with Meat Loaf, then an obscure rock singer.

These days Simmons races around in yellow aviator-shape glasses and flashy shirts, hopping between Manhattan and Hollywood. He has a twelve-movie deal at Universal, and will follow Animal House with a film version of Lemmings. Veteran Lampoon writers, in various combinations, are at work on film scripts for Simmons and themselves.

Those writers, now in their 30’s, remain an elite and clubby group: bright children of the ’60’s who have put their angst to work for fun and profit. Explains Kenney, 31 and a Lampoon-made millionaire: “The Harvard Lampoon was my ‘animal house.’ I didn’t want it to end, so I got Matty to make it a national magazine. Now, as I look back at the past decade, I see a group of about 30 people that I have worked with again and again. I expect to work with them for the next ten years. We were the generation that discovered that alienation is funny. We found that if you take an existentialist, add a hot Camaro, a skateboard and a lot of dope, you have a working, vital existentialist who can get a job at the National Lampoon.”