That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick: The National Lampoon and the Comedy Insurgents Who Captured the Mainstream

The story of the National Lampoon begins with a group of disaffected Harvard boys in the late 1960s who decide to produce a satire magazine. Journalist Stein leaves no tangent unexplored and no petty grievance unaired as she traces the magazine’s evolution and growing fame; forays into radio, stage, television, and movies; and its inevitable decay. The tumultuous 1970s provided innumerable subjects for mockery on both sides of the political spectrum, though the Lampoon didn’t pretend to have a loftier social goal than to garner some crude laughs—and some paychecks. Despite Stein’s detailed chronicles of the writing and business evolution of the magazine, the book itself isn’t particularly funny. Jokes that worked 40 years ago have been removed both from the immediate context of the magazine and from the social context of the period. Stein’s explanations of visual gags are even more problematic. She takes her subject seriously, when any of the people interviewed would be the first to point out how absurd it was. Though the book succeeds as journalism, and Stein shapes the magazine’s uneven history into a coherent narrative, readers shouldn’t expect many laughs. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernet Company. (June)