Sean Kelly (writer)

Sean Kelly (born July 1940) is a Canadian author, writer, humorist, voice actor and teacher originally from Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Sean was an editor of the National Lampoon magazine from 1971 to 1977. He and Fred Graver served as co-Editors in Chief of National Lampoon under the pseudonym L. Dennis Plunkett. Kelly currently teaches in the Humanities and Media Studies department of the Pratt Institute, an art college in Brooklyn, New York City.

National Lampoon work

Kelly's most memorable National Lampoon work may be "Son-O'-God Comics", created with Michel Choquette and illustrated by the well-known comics artist Neal Adams.

In 1973, Kelly co-wrote and co-directed National Lampoon's mock-rock musical Lemmings, which was subsequently issued as a soundtrack music album. The songs were also made available in the National Lampoon Songbook in 1976. In 1989, Stephen Holden of The New York Times commented:

“Pop debunking perhaps reached its zenith in the early '70s with albums like Goodbye Pop ... and National Lampoon's Lemmings in which Christopher Guest, Sean Kelly, Tony Hendra and others gleefully desanctified hallowed touchstones of the rock counterculture.”

At National Lampoon, Kelly often worked with other Lampoon writers, including Michel Choquette, Anne Beatts, Fred Graver and Tony Hendra.

There is a chapter (pages 136–147) about Sean Kelly in the 2010 book Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great by Rick Meyerowitz. On page 320 of the book, Meyerowitz calls Kelly, "the sharpest tack in Brooklyn".

Other periodicals

In 1975 Kelly was the founding editor of Heavy Metal, an American science fiction and fantasy comics magazine. Kelly's work has also appeared in Interview, The Village Voice, The Old Farmer's Almanac, Playboy and Spy.

Television work

Kelly has done a considerable amount of writing for children's television. He wrote for The Magic School Bus, the live action/computer animated series Ace Lightning, CBS Young People's Concerts, the FOX series Goosebumps and the PBS series Shining Time Station. In 2004 he received an Emmy Award for the PBS early literacy series, Between the Lions.

Books

Kelly has authored and coauthored numerous books. Most (but not all) of the books are humorous, and many of them were coauthored with other writers who had been associated with National Lampoon.

Of the 1993 book Boom Baby Moon, Gahan Wilson wrote in the New York Times Book Review on December 5, 1993:

"Boom Baby Moon is unlikely – despite the lulling rhythm of Sean Kelly's poetizing and the innocent-looking illustrations of Ron Hauge – to con the densest of grown-ups into thinking it's a simple children's book. I suspect it will be banned shortly after it appears in our nation's bookstores, that it will never have a chance of making the libraries, and that its creators will be speedily investigated by a Senate committee."

List of books

References