Rick Meyerowitz’s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made The National Lampoon Insanely Great (Abrams), is a comprehensive study of the writers and artists of the National Lampoon magazine, a young and gifted lot whose collective efforts from 1970 through 1975 seemingly came from out of nowhere and irrevocably rewrote the landscape of American humor.
Initially born from the minds of Harvard Lampoon prodigies Doug Kenney, Henry Beard and Rob Hoffman, the magazine was a caustically anarchic bit of post-hippie era fallout that reflected the cynicism that replaced the naïve “counter cultural” sensibility which preceded it. Fueled by a sense of the world’s perceived injustice—to say nothing of generous helpings of booze and “recreational pharmaceuticals” of an illicit nature—the assembled cadre of humorists set their sights upon all and sundry, operating from an unwritten point of view that “everyone is fair game.”
The talent that graced the pages of National Lampoon is legendary and after its creative peak (1970-1975) many of its contributors, including the likes of John Hughes (The Breakfast Club) and Michael O’Donoghue (Saturday Night Live) went on to celebrated careers in television and film. But throughout the magazine’s run, a plethora of illustrators familiar to comics fans contributed work that surprised and shocked because it allowed such known comics talent as Neal Adams, Frank Frazetta and Russ Heath to cut loose, free from the restraints placed upon them by the Comics Code self-censorship board. In addition, cartoonists like Bobby London and Shary Flenniken created original works that were among the best comics of the era.
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead’sauthor, Rick Meyerowitz, is a celebrated commercial illustrator, perhaps best known for his iconic poster for National Lampoon’s Animal House, and of the Lampoon’s still-living main contributors, there is perhaps no one more suited to curate a celebration of this specific landmark of American humor. Though never an actual staffer, Meyerowitz was there at the inception of the National Lampoon and helped define its visual identity by providing the painting of Mona Gorilla, which became the magazine’s mascot. His focus in crafting the book was not to dredge up the Lampoon as some patchouli-scented relic of the early-to-mid-1970’s, but rather to showcase the talent involved and see the material reproduced with the pristine quality achievable with today’s digital wizardry, in many cases reproducing the art from originals provided by their creators. Meyerowitz kindly took the time to talk about the Lampoon and his efforts to capture it in a book.
PW Comics Week: So, what was the deal with your unique position within the early National Lampoon hierarchy?
Rick Meyerowitz: I met co-founder Doug Kenney in 1969, seven months before the first issue came out, and become good friends with him and the others, and I dropped by about once or twice per week, seeing my friends for a beer or two and periodically dropping off work. I had a really busy career as an advertizing and magazine illustrator at the time, and I never had an official title, but I was always on the masthead as an official contributor.
PWCW: What was the magazine’s philosophy?
Meyerowitz: What those guys were doing was standing up to power in years of Republican government, so it was easy to see us as having a Democratic stance, but they all shared something in their humor and often what they were sharing was “Let’s get the bastards.” It was a major hypocrisy detector. Either Left or Right, it didn’t matter. Everyone and everything was fair game. There was also a high/low sense of taste to the material. Yes, they were smoking illegal substances, but what did you expect? They were twenty-two years old and they liked naked girls.
PWCW: How did veteran and up-and-coming comics artists respond when given the opportunity to work with the uncensored creative freedom the National Lampoon afforded them?
Meyerowitz: I’d say they had fun with it and rose to the occasion. Every idea [renowned Playboy cartoonist and longtime Lampoon contributor] Gahan Wilson had for his Playboy stuff had to be sent to Hugh Hefner for approval, while at the Lampoon they would say “The theme for this issue is ‘freedom’” or whatever, and just leave him to do whatever he came up with using the given theme. None of this “make the nose” bigger stuff; at the Lampoon, they trusted the artists. They recognized our creativity and considered us integral parts of the NatLamp machine. They said “Thank you” and were glad to have what we brought in. They, unlike any other magazine, really respected their artists. Gahan said he never had such freedom ever again.
PWCW: Considering how powerful and groundbreaking National Lampoon was for a five-year period, what led to the decline of the magazine?
Meyerowitz: Why did the Lampoon lose its relevance as a magazine? The decline was inevitable. Look at Rome. Look at Time magazine. Look at Newsweek. The artists and writers left for places where they were paid more. And what’s the reality of anything that’s unique? It gets co-opted. For the first five years, they had the field to themselves, but then Lorne Michaels hired Michael O’Donoghue and Anne Beatts for the writing staff and actors like John Belushi and Chevy Chase, who had worked on early projects spawned from the magazine (most notably the stage show Lemmings), for the then-in-development Saturday Night Live. After that, you could get the Lampoon sensibility in every other medium than just print. It was on TV with Saturday Night Live, and then came Animal House in ’78, the massive success of which led to a ton of ripoffs in movies and other media. The Lampoon lost its traction in the marketplace. The basic issue was that it was no longer exceptional and its audience was finding similar material all over the place.
PWCW: When approaching putting together the book, particularly in respect to the artwork you chose, what was on your mind?
Meyerowitz: As an artist writing on artists, focusing on the kind of work that the writers did that was more about the art was what I was thinking. I thought, “I’m going to honor the artists.” I wanted to do something good to celebrate them, so I chose a lot of pieces that were heavily illustrated, along with many examples of the comics we ran. In getting it all together, I reached out to the artists and not one of them said “no.” They all said, “You’re Rick Meyerowitz. You’re at the core of the Lampoon.” And they believed me when I said that I would make it all look as good as possible. The art was scanned at 600 DPI and cleaned up with Photoshop so that it looks better than when seen originally. Plus the book had the talents of Laura Lindgren, a wonderful designer, to make it look fantastic and new.
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead is not an exercise in nostalgia. I hate nostalgia. I don’t want to see any kind of “old stuff”, when I looked through the material I didn’t want it to be a wallow through the history of the Lampoon. One of my favorite things to do is to learn what not to do on old work, and in looking at other books I saw art scanned from yellowing original copies of the comics featured, and I felt it kept that stuff stuck in the past. This is a book for a contemporary audience and I wanted to show that this has a contemporary resonance.
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead is available via Amazon.com and can be found at comics shops and bookstores nationwide.
