Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon

Like many Gen Xers, I first heard the name "National Lampoon" when it prefaced the title of the 1978 smash hit ANIMAL HOUSE.  In those days as a pre-teen desperate to catch this most verboten of movies, I was unaware that behind that name was a long running magazine, which spawned a stage show, a radio show, and even Saturday Night Live.  A crew of bona fide geniuses who pushed boundaries farther than good sense (or even the very notion of deviancy itself) would tolerate.  Have you ever seen an issue of the Lampoon?  Much of it is jaw dropping in its beyond irreverent takes on politics, sex, religion, you name it.  The glory days of the mag were from the late 60s to '75, and any issue from that era would especially make twenty-first century eyes dilate in disbelief.

Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney met at Harvard University.   Quite dissimilar in their backgrounds and personalities, they shared a savage wit that spared no one.  They wrote for the infamous Harvard Lampoon, which had been around since 1876.  Beard and Kenney would also pen the Tolkien parody Bored of the Rings before co-founding National Lampoon magazine.  Beard is one of the original staff members to be interviewed in the 2015 documentary DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: THE STORY OF THE NATIONAL LAMPOON. Like Kenney, and many of the other original staffers, he was a complicated individual. Fastidious, reclusive, rarely opening his office door.  He's also described by other interviewees as someone so intelligent he could've followed any career path.  Beard himself, seen in latter day, comes off as amiable and cooperative, if not especially filled with saucy backstage tales.

That's left to folks like writer Ann Beatts, who, along with fellow Lampooner (and mercurial personality) Michael O'Donoghue, later joined SNL.  She's pretty candid in her recollections of being one of the few women on staff.  "I started on my back," she wryly reports.  The dark sensibility behind (yes) tasteless mock ads like this

is amusingly blunt.  She and the others describe O'Donoghue as quite the volatile artist, a reputation that would follow him his entire life.  Publisher Matty Simmons has plenty to say about him, as well as of later contributor John Hughes, whose "Vacation '58" would be the basis for his script to a similarly named Lampoon film in 1983.

Some of the talking heads criticize the mag for taking real advertising (mainly alcoholic beverages).  Mad Magazine never did, perhaps maintaining some sort of integrity in the process. Throughout this movie, I was waiting for someone to make a comparison with The Onion, which at the time of this writing does still possess some of the old caustic spirit.  Kevin Bacon, who had his debut role in ANIMAL HOUSE, does offer his bizarre impersonation of director John Landis.

But this doc is really about Kenney, a man greatly loved by collaborators like Tony Hendra and Chevy Chase, who breaks down during a recollection.  Everyone and everything else is ancillary to Doug, who exhibited his own manic behavior by leaving the magazine for a year to retreat to the woods to write a novel (deemed to be junk by Beard).  The later passages of DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD focus exclusively on the man after he exits the magazine a rich man, taking roles in ANIMAL HOUSE (who could forget "Stork"?) and producing CADDYSHACK.  It was the latter's poor critical reception and only moderately successful box office that many of the interviewees in this film believe plunged him into a serious depression, furthered by drug abuse. Douglas Kenney died on August 29, 1980 after falling off a cliff in Hawaii, an accident that some thought might've been otherwise.

DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD is a mostly adequate, sometimes inspiring portrait of a group of startlingly intelligent misfits who created something of an antidote to the stone faced nihilism of the '60s and '70s.  The early issues of the magazine skewer their targets so thoroughly and mercilessly you almost feel bad for them, especially as you see some version of yourself on the receiving end.  Mankind, really.  No one was safe.  As someone once said, comedy is not pretty.  Nor should it be.  When Donald Trump's young son was mocked in a tweet by an SNL writer, with a subsequent public outcry of  "He's too young! He's innocent! He didn't decide to be in that position! He's off limits!", I kept wondering how the Lampoon would've handled it.  With the mercy of a brick, I'd assume, though wrapped in a cocoon of eruditious wit.