National Lampoon
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National Lampoon was a humor magazine that began in 1970 as an offshoot of the Harvard Lampoon. It reached its height of popularity in the 1970's, but has had a far-reaching effect on American humor, spawning films, radio, live and television comedy shows.
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[edit] History
National Lampoon was started by Harvard graduates and Harvard Lampoon alumni Douglas Kenney, Henry Beard, and Robert Hoffman in 1970. They licensed the "Lampoon" name for a national publication.
After a shaky start, the magazine quickly grew in popularity during the 1970s, when it regularly skewered pop culture, the counterculture and politics with recklessness and gleeful bad taste. Notable cover images include:
- The court-martialed Vietnam War murderer William Calley affecting the guileless grin of Alfred E. Neuman, complete with the catch phrase, 'What, My Lai?" (August 1971) [1];
- The iconic image of Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara, being splattered with a cream pie (January 1972) [2];
- A dog looking worriedly at the revolver pressed to its temple, with the famous cover blurb "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Kill This Dog" (January 1973)[3];
- A replica of the starving child from the cover of George Harrison's charity album The Concert for Bangla Desh, rendered in chocolate and with a large bite taken out of its head (July 1974)[4].
Like the Harvard Lampoon, individual issues were devoted to a particular theme such as "The Future", "Back to School", "Death", "Self-Indulgence," or "Blight". The magazine also took a cue from Mad by regularly reprinting its material in a series of collections.
The magazine produced and fostered some notable writing and comic talents, including (but not limited to) Kenney, Chris Miller, P. J. O'Rourke, Michael O'Donoghue, Sean Kelly, and Tony Hendra. Other contributors who went on to fame or notoriety included Jeff Greenfield and John Hughes. Many important cartoonists and illustrators appeared in the magazine's pages, including Neal Adams, Vaughn Bode, M.K. Brown, Shary Flenniken, Edward Gorey, Jeff Jones, Bruce McCall, Rick Meyerowitz, Joe Orlando, Arnold Roth, Ed Subitzky and Gahan Wilson. Hendra's 1987 book on 1950s-1970s humor, Going Too Far, contains much information about the magazine's early days.
Most fans consider the glory days to have ended in 1975, when the three founders took advantage of a $7.5 million dollar buyout in their contracts. Also, some of the magazine's contributors left to join the NBC comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL) around the same time, notably O'Donoghue and Anne Beatts. Even so, the magazine still made money and continued to be produced on a monthly schedule until the early 1990s.
The magazine also spun off an off-Broadway hit (Lemmings), a series of popular record albums, a radio show (The National Lampoon Radio Hour), several hardcover books (the most successful of which was a faux high school yearbook), and a line of motion pictures, most famously Animal House in 1978. One National Lampoon movie, National Lampoon's Vacation (1983), spawned a series of several sequels, including National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985), National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989), Vegas Vacation (1997), and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure (2003).
Four of SNL's Not Ready For Primetime Players — John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner and Bill Murray — first gained attention as part of the Lampoon's stage and/or radio shows.
A snide parody of Les Crane's 1971 hit "Desiderata" was recorded and released as "Deteriorata," and stayed on the lower reaches of the Billboard magazine charts for a month in late 1972. The gallumphing theme to Animal House rose slightly higher and charted slightly longer in December 1978. Several comedy LPs were released throughout the 1970s. In the 1990s, a CD boxed set of recordings from The National Lampoon Radio Hour was released by Rhino Records.
[edit] Circulation peak
The Lampoon's commercial heyday was roughly 1973-75, with its national circulation peaking at 1,000,096 copies sold of a single October 1974 issue. The Lampoon's 1974 monthly average was 830,000. Former Lampoon editor Tony Hendra's book Going Too Far includes a series of precise circulation figures.
[edit] End of the magazine
Throughout the 1990's, the number of issues per year declined until the magazine was published only annually; the magazine's last print publication was November 1998. An online version of the magazine began after that, but since the closure of the magazine, National Lampoon exists as an entity that licenses its name and logo to a variety of material created by other companies. This included films, television, radio and other projects.
In 2002, National Lampoon's parent company purchased the assets of the financially troubled Burly Bear Network, a New York-based provider of television shows to campus cable channels. Renamed the National Lampoon Network, it currently provides a two hour weekly block of programming that is offered through a variety of cable systems nationally.
Though the magazine essentially exists today only as a logo and a trademark for licensing purposes, its comedic influence on a previous generation of writers and performers was seismic. As co-founder Henry Beard described the experience years later, "There was this big door that said, 'Thou shalt not.' We touched it, and it fell off its hinges."
[edit] National Lampoon movies
- Disco Beaver from Outer Space (1978) (TV)
- National Lampoon's Animal House (1978)
- National Lampoon's Class Reunion (1982)
- National Lampoon's Vacation (1983)
- National Lampoon Goes to the Movies (aka National Lampoon's Movie Madness) (1983)
- National Lampoon’s Joy of Sex (1984)
- National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985)
- National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989)
- National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 (1993)
- National Lampoon's Last Resort (aka National Lampoon's Scuba School) (1994)
- National Lampoon's Senior Trip (1995)
- National Lampoon’s Golf Punks (1998)
- National Lampoon’s Men in White (1998) (TV)
- National Lampoon's Van Wilder (2002)
- National Lampoon's Repli-Kate (2002)
- Blackball (2003)
- National Lampoon's Gold Diggers (aka National Lampoon’s Lady Killers) (2003)
- National Lampoon's Dorm Daze (2003)
- National Lampoon's Barely Legal (aka After School Special) (2003)
- National Lampoon's Thanksgiving Family Reunion (2003) (TV)
- National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure (2003) (TV)
- Going the Distance (2004)
- National Lampoon's Adam & Eve (2005)
- National Lampoon's Strip Poker (2005)
- Teed Off (2005)
- National Lampoon's Pucked (2006)
- National Lampoon's Pledge This! (2006)
- National Lampoon's Last Guy On Earth (2006)
- National Lampoon's Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj (2006)
- National Lampoon's Dorm Daze 2 (2006)
- National Lampoon's TV the movie (2006)
The Robert Altman film O.C. and Stiggs was based on two characters which made several appearances in National Lampoon, including an issue-long story from October 1982 called the "Utterly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O. C. and Stiggs." The film was completed in 1984, but not released until 1987 in a small number of theaters, without the National Lampoon name.
National Lampoon's Strip Poker, filmed at the Hedonism II nudist resort in Negril, Jamaica, was released on pay-per-view in 2005. The one-hour episodes featured various Playboy, WWE, and pin-up models competing in strip poker match-ups, and the company has announced plans to film more.
National Lampoon's Knucklehead Video, A video-sharing and social networking site featuring viral video content of extreme sports bloopers, "drunken debauchery" and the self-explanatory 'show us your butts'. September, 2006
National Lampoon Comedy Radio, a comedy network which has licensed the name from National Lampoon, Inc in a partnership arrangement, was added to XM Satellite Radio in October, 2006.
[edit] External links
- Official site
- Mark's Very Large National Lampoon website
- National Lampoon's Knucklehead Video
- National Lampoon's Strip Poker
- National Lampoon Comedy Radio
- National Lampoon's Former Creative Staff of Steve Brykman, Joe Oesterle, Sean Crespo, and Mason Brown sell themselves on Ebay after being laid off
- "National Lampoon Grows Up By Dumbing Down by Jake Tapper, The New York Times, July 3, 2005.
- List of National Lampoon movies
- Message board discussion of plans to revive the magazine
