is Chris Miller’s new book recounting his days in the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity at Dartmouth College in the early sixties. Several short stories about those experiences were published in National Lampoon in the early seventies and became, in part, the inspiration for the movie Animal House, one of the most popular comedy films of all time. The book is both less and more than the movie—they are really two separate stories with some common elements. One (the movie) is mostly fiction, and the other (Chris’s new book) mostly true. Chris’s book also goes far beyond what could be shown in a Hollywood movie. If you ever read any of the many short stories he wrote for National Lampoon, this will come as no surprise.

Yesterday, I spoke with Chris by phone:

Mark: Congratulations on the book. It seems to be doing pretty well. What’s been the reaction so far?

Chris: The reaction has been a real enthusiastic one because of the terrific review that was in The New York Times by Chris Buckley.

M: I read that. It was really very glowing.

C: I’ve hardly ever seen a review that was so one hundred percent positive on something. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

M: In the reviews I’ve seen, it seems like people either like it a lot or they don’t like it at all.

C: Maybe that’s just those speaking up, but that’s how people have always reacted to National Lampoon and to Animal House, and to that kind of humor. It got reviewed in the Dartmouth newspaper, and, oh boy, they panned it. Calling it shallow, and all it’s about is this that and the other thing and I don’t know. These people don’t get it. They’re too serious or something.

M: Yeah. There was a short review in Entertainment Weekly, and I wondered if the guy actually read the whole book.

C: I wondered that too and with the review from Kirkus. I had the strong feeling with the Kirkus review that they hadn’t read the whole thing.

M: Well, I would say that anyone who enjoys your short stories would enjoy the book.

C: Thank you. I think that anybody who enjoyed Animal House (the movie) would enjoy the book.

M: Definitely.

C: We got that great review and, immediately, you can see the reach of The New York Times because everybody starts buying it on Amazon. And by eight o’clock that night, we were number 26 on Amazon, five days after the book is released. So that was amazing. By now were down to 88 or something because I guess you have to keep doing publicity for these things. Tomorrow, in fact, I’m on Bill O’Reilly’s show, The O’Reilly Factor, of all things. [Note: Chris’s appearance on O’Reilly’s was postponed until Monday, Nov. 20.–MS]

M: Wow. Well, good luck with that.

C: Bill is an Animal House fan, I’m told. And he requested that I be on the show. Hopefully, he’s not planning to torpedo me with God-fearing, traditional American kinds of carps about my book, but you never know.

M: Why did you decide to write the book now? Is is something that’s been brewing a while?

C: Well, Mark, I actually started this thing in ’73. Writing short stories for National Lampoon was all very well, but I wanted to try something longer. But after writing three chapters, I kind of lost my forward motion on it and went back to writing my short stories. One month I couldn’t think of one. So I pulled one of those chapters out of the drawer. It was “The Night of the Seven Fires.” So it ran in the magazine and that triggered Animal House.

So, I kind of forgot about this book I was going to write. But, two things struck me.

The first was I had originally wanted to tell the story of a group of people in this elite school, people who, when they leave Dartmouth, they go out and run the world, basically. They’re your doctor, your judge, your congressman. What amazed me when it was happening in the early sixties was that, these people, who were gonna go out and be the upper crust of the world, were doing these incredible acts of depravity. By the way, it’s nice depravity, okay? But depravity. I was so mind-blown by it all that I felt that I wanted to share that information with the rest of the world. People just would be amazed. Animal House didn’t do that. Animal House told the story of a generic American college and the adventures there on of a crazy fraternity and their fascist antagonists. And that’s great, but that’s not story I was originally telling.

The other reason was that these events were forty, forty-five years in the past. Enough time had gone by that they could be viewed over that distance and start to be like myths, that I could consciously try to make a story of sort of mythic fraternity pranksters, and furthermore that most of the guys that were involved probably wouldn’t give a damn anymore if I put these things in the book.

So, all of those things came together. Plus I needed some dough. It was 2002 when I decided I was going to move ahead on it. So, I got an agent and we sold the book to Little Brown, and I wrote it for two years and here it is.

M: And you got Rick Meyerowitz, who did the movie poster illustration, to do the cover, too.

C: Yes, absolutely.

M: I think it’ll be good for the book.

C: I think it’s a great thing. (And, if you’re curious, Rick is doing just fine, thanks.)

M: Did the response to the Animal House movie surprise you? Did you expect it to be such a success?

C: It was a bigger hit than we expected. I was naive enough about the film business to think that I could predict it would be a hit, which of course is normally not possible. The three writers, Doug Kenney, Harold Ramis, and I, thought we had done a hell of a script and that we were gonna have a hit movie. But nobody thought it was gonna become an iconic movie that would become clasped to America’s bosom as some kind of quintessential American story. Nobody expected that. Not a day goes by when I don’t hear a line from Animal House used in some other context, or see an article in a newspaper where they’re referring to someone as an Animal House kind of guy, or referring to the Republicans as Omegas… Nobody could have predicted that. And I still am pretty amazed, to tell you the truth.

M: Getting back to the book, when I got to the end of it I had a weird thought. It made me think of the Harry Potter books.

C: How interesting.

M: Here’s this guy, he doesn’t fit in at home, he goes off to this school where he joins a legendary house, he learns how to do all sorts of tricks with his wand, and then has all kinds of exciting adventures with his new-found friends. Except there’s beer and sex instead of magic.

C: Yeah. That’s terribly interesting. I would never have thought of that. I’ve only read one of the books.

M: Well, each book covers a year at school. And I realized at the end that that’s what your book does also. They’re both kind of part of that “school book” tradition.

C: Yeah, you’re right.

M: It’s kind of tenuous connection but it just struck me.

C: Well I love hearing that. Have you heard of or read much of Jean Shepherd?

M: Yeah, a little bit.

C: My publisher, Michael Peach, says he thinks this is like Jean Shepherd. Which was very flattering to me because Shepherd was a hero of mine. One of my story-telling heroes. He could tell a story better than anyone.

M: Didn’t they have something of his in Lampoon once?

C: I don’t know…

M: Yeah, I think there was one story they ran of his. In the early years.

C: That’s possible. A lot of people showed up in the Lampoon. Terry Southern showed up there once or twice. I didn’t remember that Jean Shepherd did, but that’s cool.

M: One thing I noticed, too, in the book there are these essays that the pledges are required to write as part of getting into the Alpha Delta house. And it seemed to be kind of a precursor to your Lampoon short stories.

C: [laughs] Well, maybe that’s where the seed was planted.

M: I can see glimpses of some of your short stories throughout the book. Nuggets, maybe seeds of things to come.

C: Well, I certainly felt free to pirate characters and situations for some of the short stories, because they were always autobiographical anyway. [laughs] But, yeah, maybe it all started with “Three Good Ways to Cut off a Girl’s Nipple” that’s lead to my current position at the heights of the literary stratosphere. [laughs]

M: One of the pledges had to write a story about finger painting with shit.

C: Yeah, that I consciously took for one of my stories. [The Toilet Papers, September 1971]

M: You also write about how you read a lot of science fiction when you were a kid. And that shows up in your stories, too. In fact, those are some of my favorites.

C: Thanks. Yeah, one of my favorite moments was when I saw my name in the table of contents for the Lampoon‘s Science Fiction issue [June 1972] right next to the name of Theodore Sturgeon, another writer hero of mine. I thought that was cool as shit.

M: Yeah, those stories blew me away.

C: How about the one called “Practice Makes”? That was very science fiction. This guy is trying to make time with this girl at a party and he keeps blowing it and–oop!–he’s starting over and doing it again, and–oop!–he’s doing it again. Remember that one?

M: Oh, yeah.

C: And it winds up he’s in the future and he’s part of something called a “tri-therapy group” with these two chicks and everything. I took that structure from a Philip K. Dick novel.

M: Ah! I’m a big Philip Dick fan.

C: Oh! Are you? Oh, boy, I loved every book he wrote. That idea was from one of his called “A Maze of Death”.

M: Maybe the reason I got into Philip Dick was from reading your stories.

C: Yeah, maybe. No room for science fiction in a fraternity house, unfortunately.

M: It didn’t sound like it.

C: I couldn’t find a way to work in a time trip or anything.

M: I read somewhere that the people who did Back to the Future got the idea for that from one of your stories.

C: Sure, “Remembering Mama.” It was a situation in which a guy, in order to protect his own continuing existence, has to force his father to continue fucking his mother, to make sure he gets conceived. And they did do that in Back to the Future. My jaw kind of dropped when I saw the movie. Then later, I was talking to a screenwriter friend, who was friends with the guys who wrote that movie, and told me that they had told him at some point that they dug my writing, and that they were big fans. So I went Uh-Oh-Ooh-Ah! [laughs] I even looked into things like legal action once or twice. But out here in Hollywood, what seems to boil down to is, you can do it, but if you do it, you’ll never work in this town again. So, I just didn’t do it.

You know, Duke Ellington had a good approach to this stuff. Around 1948 or so, some R&B guy took one of his melodies. Song goes out and it’s Duke’s tune, but turned it into an R&B instrumental. And people said, “Duke! Aren’t you pissed off? Aren’t you gonna slap him down?” Duke said, “Nah, nah, we all borrow from each other all the time. What’s the big deal, man?” Brushed it off. I thought that was a pretty good attitude, and I try to take that attitude when things crop up like that.

M: Yeah, I would agree with that. I noticed that there were a lot of musical references in the book. I especially enjoyed your description of the John Coltrane show.

C: Oh, thank you.

M: It sounded like the place to be at that moment in time.

C: I was talking to somebody last night about how lucky my generation is musically to have come along just when we did. We got to hear rock and roll from the beginning, from ’54. We got to hear a period in Jazz which was just unparalleled, with giants like Coltrane and Miles Davis and Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk. We didn’t know how lucky we were. We just thought, there’s always great music because the whole time we’d been around there was great music. Only later did we discover that that was a time of enormous musical energy, and it’s not always like that.

M: How did you start writing for National Lampoon?

C: I had been at an ad agency, and I left. And with the money I got when I left, I spent some time not working, hitchhiking around. I went to Mexico and stuff. And when all that was done, I came home and looked at my bank account and said, oh my god. I’ve got maybe six months left of rent here. I’d better do something. I was too naive to know that if you need money, you don’t try to write short stories to make a living. Once upon a time, you could make a living off of those things, and your literary agent would sell them to magazines for you.

M: Like to Colliers, or all those magazines back in the thirties…

C: Right, Saturday Evening Post, all those magazines. And science fiction–my god. In the 1950s–especially in the early to mid 1950s–there must have been twenty science fiction magazines a month. And they were mainly short stories or novelettes. But their time had gone. I didn’t know that. So I sat down and started writing short stories and mailing them off and got rejected everywhere. I’d even sent them to Lampoon, who hadn’t even bothered to get in touch with me to reject them.

I was getting real close to having to crawl back to my old advertising agency and beg for a job when a phone call occurred during which a bunch of editors at the Lampoon and a bunch of editors at Playboy just sort of had a long chat one day on a group call. Somebody from Playboy mentioned me. It turned out that at Playboy my stories had made a huge impact. The editors there had loved them and wanted them to be in the magazine. But Hefner said no. They weren’t to Hefner’s taste. For him, they weren’t funny. So they were saying, but you guys at the Lampoon, these would be right up your alley. And the Lampoon guys were going, Miller… Miller… who was that? And they went to the filing cabinets where they dumped all the unsolicited manuscripts without reading them. Somebody remembered my name for some reason and they found it in there and the brought it out and read it. The next thing I got a call from Doug Kenney saying, please come up to the magazine. And I came up and he welcomed me like a long lost brother. And that’s what happened. I started putting something in as often as I could crack one out.

M: Wow, that’s great. I’ve never heard the whole story before. For a while it seemed like you had something in every other issue at least.

C: Yeah, maybe eight or nine times a year. By the way, Mark, my next book is going to be a collection of what I think are the best of my short stories.

M: Really? I was going to ask about that.

C: Right, I have a two book deal with Little Brown and the second book is to be a collection of short stories. The only question is when it’s going to come out. I’m thinking, now that the Reall Animal House book is doing well, that it’s going to come out sooner rather than later. Particularly because I cleverly left out that story that was once in the Lampoon called “Good Sport”–do you remember the one? It’s the one in which the boys have a beat-off contest in the fraternity house. I was originally going to put it in the book. And then I said, well, wait a minute. Let me hold this back as a short story. Then the people who loved the Real Animal House book will be interested in this book of short stories, and then they’ll get to read my other short stories. So, that’s what we’re gonna do. That chapter will be featured in the book.

M: Well, that’s great because that’s one of the questions I had for you–to ask if you ever considered publishing a collection of your short stories. The question comes up pretty regularly from people who read my site.

C: It seems to have eluded me for years and years. In order to get it to happen, I needed to write something new. So I finally got around to doing that, and it seems to have done the trick. I’m thrilled because I too have wanted my short stories to be published as a collection for a long long time.

M: Well, that’s great news. I’m sure a lot of people will be happy to hear about it.

C: Not as happy as I am.

M: Because, really, there’s nothing. People ask and I tell them, well there are a couple paperbacks that have, like, four or six of them in there, you know?

C: Yeah, there was one thing called “A Dirty Book”, which had a bunch of them.

M: But that’s about it.

C: I’m thinking about writing a little page and a half intro to each thing, about what was going on, maybe an anecdote or something up at the Lampoon, or what the story turned out ultimately to mean to me.

M: Sure, yeah. Definitely.

C: Because when I wrote a story, my mind would be on the surface events of the story and I had no idea what it was truly about underneath. To give you an example, that story, “Boxed In.” I wrote that whole story, finished it, and three days later realized it was about the relationship I was in, that I was feeling trapped and needed to get the hell out of it. So I did [laughs].

M: I think it would be a good idea. Especially now, it’s been so long since those stories were written, people will need some context anyway.

C: Yeah. You’re right. For instance, for “Telejester” I might need to say a couple of things about Watergate. The glee of the satirists at Lampoon at the time.

M: I think that was the first story of yours I read. It was the first issue I bought and you had a story in it. And that was it. I always liked that story.

C: That’s nice to hear, man. I’ve had very little contact with my fans over the years. I now have a website—chrismillerwriter.com.

M: Great. Let’s talk about the Real Animal House book some more.

C: I think the thing about the book is this. As unlikely as it may often seem, most of the stuff in it is true. You couldn’t make that stuff up. Maybe details have been changed. Or I’ve given a story a different ending because it would be funnier that way. The actual thing itself, whether we’re talking about brains in a glass or taking a shit in the mouth of a snow statue, that’s real stuff. [laughs] And Animal House, for all its rowdiness, is a Hollywood movie. There was stuff that just couldn’t be in there. Luckily, the literary world is more tolerant.

M: I definitely got the sense that it was stuff that couldn’t have been made up. [laughs]

C: [laughs] “The Night of the Seven Fires” by itself was quite a story. Did you like the longer version?

M: Yeah. I was going to ask you, it seems like there were some differences between the story in the magazine and the chapter in the book.

C: Sure. Stew the Jew disappeared because I found out he hated being called that. So, I just eliminated him. Yeah, I don’t know what all changed. After a while it all runs together in your head. Otter was still the same way, pretty much. I didn’t have the hot dog fly out of the guy’s ass and knocking the character out, because that’s not believable. A cartoon moment.

M: [laughs] Right. That was in the original story.

C: Right. So I went to something in the book that was much, much closer to what really happened. Seemed like a good idea in 1974 to write it with the hot dog flying out his ass.

M: Yeah. When I read the story back then, it didn’t even occur to me that any of it was true, it was so crazy. I didn’t know at the time that it was based on something that actually happened. Then, after the movie was made, I read somewhere that those stories really happened. And it’s not the same story you see in the movie, either.

C: Yeah. Some of those cranky reviews have said, well, there’s no Dean Wormer here. They don’t have any rivals or antagonists. Well, yeah, we didn’t. It’s supposed to be a memoir about what really happened, pretty much. I guess you probably read in the preface, I found a way to give these guys credible deniability if somebody tracks them down. I heard about how in a firing squad they leave one rifle with a blank in it so that any one of the guys might have been the one that didn’t shoot the guy. So, all of my fraternity brothers might have been in the two stories that were made up. [laughs] We’ll see if that gets anybody off any hooks or if I’m just being too careful. But I didn’t want anybody’s real names to go in there. Just nicknames.

M: And your stories were not the only ones used in the movie. There’s also Doug Kenney’s stuff, like form his “First Lay Comics,” “First High Comics,” ….

C: Plus the High School Yearbook Parody.

In Tony Hendra’s book, Going Too Far, I was fascinated by what he wrote about Animal House. He did like sixteen pages on it and called it the absolute culmination of Lampoon humor, as opposed to Saturday Night Live, which he thought of as sell-out humor. Of course, I enjoyed reading that and totally agreed with him. But I found it to be a fascinating analysis of the movie. That most people are just too busy talking about all the crazy stuff in it, and maybe a couple mention that it’s a subversive anti-authority kind of movie.

M: I think he made a point about how there was this spate of imitation Animal House movies, like Porky’s, that had all the gross-out humor, but without the satire.

C: Right, and the anti-fascist subtext. [laughs]

M: “Hey, look! A movie about partying! Cool. Let’s do a party movie!”

C: We had to figure that out, too. I remember when Doug Kenney and I were out there on the first day of shooting, and some rather serious looking reporter said, “What’s the theme of your movie?” Doug and I looked at each other. We shrugged and said, “Fun is good.” And that was what we were thinking the movie was about then. But now, I think it’s about the battle in every human heart between the forces of the super-ego and the forces of the id. That’s why everybody can relate to it, because we, all of us, have that battle that we see between the Delta ids and the Omega/Dean Wormer super-ego characters. Every human soul has to deal with that. And for once, the id wins!

You know, most movies have to be responsible, and say, well, in the end the id had it’s little time in the sun, but now we’re going to back to a sensible and super-ego-directed bla bla bla. And, in Animal House, we let the id win. I think people just adore that. It goes beyond being about the politics of the sixties, even though it was to some extent about that. And that’s why, thirty years later, people are still loving it the way they do. It’s not about the sixties any more.

M: Right.

C: Of course, with the government we’ve had recently, there’s been some similarities.

M: Yeah. Maybe good timing for your book, then.

C: I hope so, Mark.

M: Great. Well, thanks, Chris.

C: Okay, man. You’re welcome.

The Real Animal House is available at Amazon and other fine book retailers.

Chris Miller’s book, The Real Animal House, is out now and seems to be doing well. Two things: First, Chris is going to appear tonight on The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News. Update: Chris’s interview on The O’Reilly Factor was bumped for another story and may appear later this week. Stay tuned or check Chris’s website. Second, I conducted a phone interview with Chris yesterday about the book and other stuff. I will post the transcribed interview here as soon as I can (within the next day or so, I hope).

It looks like Chris Miller has written a book, which will be out in November, called The Real Animal House. It appears to be about the real frat house that the movie and his “Adelphian Lodge” stories were based on.

Rob Hoffman, who with Henry Beard and Doug Kenney founded National Lampoon in 1970, died on August 19 of lukemia at the age of 59. I will post links to obits when I am able to find them. If you know of any, let me know.

Update: “Hoffman shaped Dallas’ future with vision, wit, intellect” from DallasNews.com. (Thanks, Michael.)

Josh Karp, author of “A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever,” graciously agreed to an interview. This is somewhat of a departure from my usual news items, which lately have been short and infrequent. So this is a pretty big deal. But then, I think this book is a pretty big deal. If you have any interest in Doug Kenney or National Lampoon, you will love this book. In my opinion, this is one of the best, if not the best, books on National Lampoon written yet. As promised, here is the interview.

Mark: Where did you get the idea to do this book? Why did you want to do it?

Josh: When I was 14, my dad got me a job in the mailroom of the law firm that represented his company. The guy who ran the mailroom had every Lampoon ever published and brought them to work. This was 1980, right around the time Doug died and somehow I read the Esquire article about him dying [Death of a Comic Genius, by Robert Sam Anson, August 1981], and it always stuck with me. So, 23 years later, when I was looking for my first book project, I thought, I can’t believe nobody did a book about this guy, or really about Lampoon, which was really the cornerstone of much of my worldview in many ways. Or at least my sense of humor.

M: So, you weren’t reading National Lampoon back when Kenney was at the magazine?

J: Some of my friend’s older brothers read it, so I’d seen it. But when I was 12, I saw Animal House, and then when I was 14, I spent the summer in the law firm mailroom, reading every single issue of the magazine. So, no, I wasn’t a regular reader during the 1970s. In fact, my single favorite Lampoon piece at that time (other than the High School Yearbook Parody) Was Ted Mann and Tod Carroll’s “O.C. and Stiggs.” which I thought was the funniest thing in the world when I was 20.

M: I was amazed at the shear number of people you interviewed for the book. Were people reluctant or eager to talk to you?

J: Both. Lots of the people who were being interviewed only about Doug were reluctant. Many of them felt really burned by the Esquire piece and it’s depiction of Doug, so that was hard to crack. And others, for varying reasons, were not interested in talking. But many, many were really excited to talk and helped me crack some of those who didn’t want to talk. Some who initially didn’t want to talk—like Brian McConnachie—wound up being some of my favorite people and interviews.

M: I bet he was pretty interesting.

J: Brian is one of my favorite people I met from working on the book and re-reading his work in National Lampoon is so much fun. He is so brilliantly original. Nobody else thinks like him. We sat on his porch one summer day and he told me about things he’d worked on that were so insanely funny that I was exhausted when I got back in my car to leave.

M: One of my favorites of his is “Pamplemouse.”

J: I think that was his first. My favorite has to be Guns and Sandwiches, his parody magazine which is a merger between two failing magazines—one focused on the gun industry and the other about sandwiches. His concept was that they were both very bad magazines and they merged out of necessity. To reflect how poorly run they are, he has a letter to the editor that reads something like: “In your article about the sandwiches Charles Whitman brought with him to the tower in Texas [for his shooting spree] you show a picture of the actor James Whitmore. What does he have to do with this?” That, to me, is one of the funniest things ever in the magazine. Though I’m sure my retelling doesn’t do it justice.

M: I’ll have to re-read that one. That was from a time when I wasn’t reading the magazine as thoroughly.

J: Brian is just completely original. Nobody else sees the world or humor the way he does. He’s also, I believe, the only person to ever write for the Lampoon, Saturday Night Live and SCTV.

M: What was your favorite part of writing the book? Least favorite?

J: My absolute favorite thing was meeting and talking to people who’d worked at Lampoon. They were all just so smart and funny. Sean Kelly and Brian stand out, but there are others. Chris Miller, he was the first person that I’d met who worked there. And I thought “Jesus, the guy who wrote Night of the Seven Fires” and was one third of the Animal House writing team.

I also just loved learning about the inner workings of the magazine and about Doug’s life. Which also was the hard part. I truly liked everyone I spoke with and then had to write about them with complete honesty—which as time wore on became a big deal and very hard, because they weren’t all saints. Though, I’m not sure any of them view themselves as such.

So, it was tough to have to be the biographer and journalist after developing relationships with the people I was writing about. but, I think the book is a really honest reflection of who they were and what it was like to be at National Lampoon in the 1970s.

M: Yeah, I get a very vivid sense of what it was like to be there—more so than other books that have been written about people at the
magazine.

J: Thanks. I think that’s because I didn’t actually work there, so I had to do the research and create a mental image for myself, which somebody who was there doesn’t have to do. Strangely, I think it’s easier to paint the picture if you haven’t actually physically seen the image of something.

A good example of that is with Doug. Other than a few bits on the radio hour and his work as stork and a tiny, tiny scene in Caddyshack, there is
absolutely no video or audio of him. I really didn’t even know what his voice sounded like. I had to get it all from other people and put it together myself. That was a big challenge.

M: One of the things that’s unusual in the way you paint a picture of life at the Lampoon is that you talked to people who are not so well known—the “little” people, like copy editors and
assistants, etc.

J: Yeah, that was both by design and at points out of desperation and fear. I wanted to make sure I got it as completely and correctly as possible (the fear angle). At first I was worried about who would and wouldn’t speak to me so I tried to find everyone listed in the Tenth Anniversary Anthology (on the masthead) and finally, I’ve worked a lot of places and knew that the people behind the scenes are the ones who really know what’s happening.

M: Right.

J: They’re the people who get the front row seat to what people are like. It’s like interviewing the bat boys and locker room attendants for the Yankees of the late 1970s. They could tell you all about what Reggie Jackson or Billy Martin was really like. That was a huge help in fleshing out a lot of people like P.J. and Doug.

M: What surprised you most to learn about Doug Kenney?

J: This may sound boring, but the depth of his work and his talent is what really surprised me. As a person, I learned so much about him—some of it surprising. But what amazed me was his work. Of all the people there, he was the greatest talent and had the most uncanny ability to write really funny things that had a strong viewpoint, but carried so many elements, hidden jokes and depth, that I was just blown away.

M: Here’s a question that one of my readers wanted me to ask (he has read an advanced copy of the book already): Did you hear of any ideas that Doug Kenney had for issues, articles, movies or whatever that you think might have changed the course of National Lampoon?

J: Not that I can recall at the moment. I think that by the time Animal House was in the theaters, he was pretty much done with National Lampoon, at least as far as being an employee. So, at that point, for whatever reason, he was not still doing stuff there. But, I can think about it and see if I can recall anything else.

M: What do you think Kenney would be doing now if he were still alive?

J: A lot of people like to say stuff like, “he’d own Hollywood” and would be some huge producer or screenwriter. That might be the truth, but I suspect that somehow, he’d have gotten out of there. I’m not sure what he’d have done, but I think he really needed to find himself. I don’t think he’d have become the next Woody Allen or something like that. I think he’d have soured on the business and figured out something else to do with his talents. What, I’m not sure.

M: What has been the reaction to the book from people who knew and worked with him, some of whom no doubt have seen the book by now?

J: Michael Simmons is the only person who worked there or was around whose read it so far. Everyone else is getting their copies in late August when I get them from my publisher. And Michael loved it. He’s been very kind. He said that some parts made him cry and that I’d captured doug and the entire scene just as he remembered it, which was very nice of him. I hope others feel that way as well.

M: Do you think we will ever know what really happened on
that cliff in Hawaii?

J: I’m not sure what else there would be to find out. The police concluded it was an accident. And there are people with such varying views of what might have happened. But, in the end, the only person who knows is Doug. Though, I think the fact that there is so much question as to the nature of his death is very in keeping with his personality—kind of leaving so many possibilities open.

M: Well, that’s about all I have. One more thing: How did you get Rick Meyerwitz to do the cover?

J: Rick is a great, great guy and we became friendly during my work on the book. When it came time to find a cover artist, I thought he or Bruce McCall would be perfect. But, rick was really the person whose work was more identifiably Lampoon-ish and he very graciously agreed to do it.

M: All right. Thanks, Josh, and good luck with the book.

J: Thanks, Mark.

“A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever,” by Josh Karp, will be out in September. The book has been in the works for over three years. I am planning to do an interview with Josh about the book in the near future and will post it here. P.S.: You can pre-order the book from Amazon.com.

Two gals from down under have managed to pull off an amazing feat: A pitch-perfect parody of vintage 1970s-era National Lampoon. POX is a comic book published “intermittently” by Susan Butcher and Carol Wood out of somewhere in the middle of Australia. It’s funny, clever, and quirky (and drawn by hand). Carol says she discovered the ‘Poon in the mid-1970s as a 16-year-old living in Perth, Western Australia. It was a mind-blowing experience and Lampoon magazine and books became her only contact with the outside world.

Which explains the fabulous job she and Susan did on “National Poltroon,” a 16-page parody of National Lampoon featured in POX Number Six. Given their limited resources, it’s not as lavishly produced as the original (black and white on newsprint), but it perfectly captures the tone and style of the magazine at its peak. In a jam-packed 16 pages they manage to have a little fun with practically every artist and writer of the era–P.J. O’Rourke, Chris Miller, Henry Beard, Vaughn Bodé, Michael Gross, Rick Meyerowitz, Bruce McCall(!), and more. There are spoofs of cartoons—Cheech Wizard, Politenessman, Verman, B. Kliban, Edward Gorey, Gahan Wilson, Charles Rodriguez, Roz Chast, Bob Mankoff, Sam Gross, Shary Flenniken, Ed Subitzky, M.K. Brown, Randy Enos, Jeff Jones, Bruce Cochrane, Foto Funnies, etc., etc. Some of these are very brief, but all of them lovingly mimick each cartoonist’s style to a T. Did I mention the subscription cards? The Surprise Poster? The Son ‘o God comics parody? The contents page? The Off-Broadway show? The obligatory “hip” liquor/tobacco/hi-fi ad? It’s hard to believe how much they managed to squeeze into this little parody. It’s clearly a labor of love—as much a tribute as a spoof.

Unfortunately, POX is not distributed outside of Australia (yet). However, Susan and Carol are willing to send copies to readers in America for five US dollars each. Send well-concealed cash to: Butcher and Wood, 17 King St, Daylesford VIC 3460, Australia.

Interesting discussion about National Lampoon over at The Comics Journal discussion board last month, spurred by a job posting by National Lampoon Press. Update: Unfortunately, that link has gone dead.

Jesse Thorn, host and producer of The Sound of Young America radio show, dropped me a line to say that his recent interview with Judith Belushi Pisano and Tanner Colby, authors of the recently released biography of John Belushi (see the previous item below), can be heard over the internet (link). It’s nearly an hour long and features John Belushi performances from National Lampoon Radio Hour and Saturday Night Live. (Note: You don’t need an iPod to listen to a podcast. It should play right from your web browser when you click on the link.) Update: The linked material has vanished from the ether.

Every so often I hear from someone who was affiliated with National Lampoon in one way or another. The most recent is Andy Moses, an erstwhile comic actor who appeared in the stage production of That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick! Andy is alive and well and living in New York City with his wife and cats. After getting out of the acting business, he became a bartender, a diamond salesman, a chef, and a partner in a comic book store. He still hangs out with some of the old NatLamp players, including the talented Paul Jacobs.

Andy notes that he and Sarah Durkee (another light of the NatLamp stage) wrote and performed CBS Radio’s Almost Comedy Hour. It aired in June of 1983 and also featured Louise Gikow as a writer (who also played organ as part of a kiddie show parody). Guest host was Don Novello (a.k.a., Father Guido Sarducci) with guests Franken and Davis, Firesign Theatre, and (surprisingly) Milton Berle, who appeared in a Nick Danger sketch with Firesign Theatre.

Andy also appeared in the magazine several times. In the March 1978 (Crime and Punishment) issue, he appeared in a mug shot in the John Hughes piece “Random, Pointless, Senseless Crimes” as Cousins Molockney, wanted for mailing dog feces. In the December 1978 (Food & Festivity) issue, he is featured in a Foto Funny about a guy who gives a quarter to a bum who turns out to be the Postal Fairy, and gives him a job at the post office for Christmas. He appeared in the February 1979 (Heterosexuality) issue cavorting with other nude people (including Rodger Bumpass and Oui model Margie Beck) in “A Visit to Nero’s Pleasure Palace.” (He made a few more appearances in the magazine, but I haven’t tracked them all down.)

Thanks for the update, Andy!