About National Lampoon

National Lampoon

National Lampoon was an American humor magazine published in New York City from April 1970 to November 1998. It grew out of the Harvard Lampoon, the undergraduate humor magazine at Harvard University, and was founded by three of its alumni — Douglas Kenney, Henry Beard, and Robert Hoffman — together with publisher Matty Simmons and his company, Twenty First Century Communications. At its peak in the mid-1970s it sold around a million copies of its best issues and stood at the center of a revolution in American comedy whose effects reached Saturday Night Live, Hollywood film comedy, and generations of humor writers who followed.

The magazine's method was parody without reverence. Each monthly issue was organized around a theme and filled with long and short written pieces, cartoons and comic strips, photographic fumetti under the heading Foto Funnies, and a department of genuine but absurd news clippings called True Facts. Its writers attacked phoniness in politics, religion, education, advertising, and entertainment with a bleak, aggressive wit that contemporaries recognized as something new. The magazine declined through the 1980s, passed through ownership changes, and was published only sporadically in its final years before ending with its 246th issue in 1998.

From the Harvard Lampoon to a National Magazine

The National Lampoon began in 1969, when Kenney, Beard, and Hoffman licensed the Lampoon name for a monthly national publication. At Harvard in the late 1960s, Kenney and Beard had already remade the college magazine and produced a series of one-shot parodies of Playboy, Life, and Time, as well as the bestselling Tolkien parody Bored of the Rings in 1969. Those projects proved that their parody method could sell beyond campus and gave them the confidence — and the publisher relationship, through Simmons — to attempt a professional magazine.

The first issue, dated April 1970, went on sale on March 19, 1970. Kenney served as editor and Beard as executive editor, overseeing content, while Hoffman, as managing editor, handled legal and business negotiations. After a shaky start the magazine grew rapidly. Like its Harvard parent, it built each issue around a theme — subjects included the future, school, death, self-indulgence, and blight — and it quickly found both an audience of young readers and legal trouble: the September 1970 Show Biz issue drew a threatened lawsuit from the Walt Disney Company over a cover drawing of Minnie Mouse depicted topless and wearing pasties.

The Golden Years, 1971 to 1975

Magazine histories generally date National Lampoon's finest period from 1971 to 1975, when the founding team and its first great cohort of writers and artists were in place. Sales crested in 1973–75: the October 1974 Pubescence issue sold 1,000,096 copies, the magazine's all-time peak, and monthly circulation in 1974 averaged about 830,000. For a humor magazine with no mass-market patron, those were remarkable figures, and they funded an expanding empire of books, records, stage shows, and radio.

The content of those years defined a new comic sensibility. Contributors included Michael O'Donoghue, George W. S. Trow, Christopher Cerf, John Weidman, Tony Hendra, Anne Beatts, and artists such as Gahan Wilson and Arnold Roth. The magazine's celebrated fake Volkswagen advertisement, created by Phil Socci and published in its 1973 Encyclopedia of Humor, mocked Senator Edward Kennedy and the Chappaquiddick incident with a cruelty that announced how few subjects were off limits. Beard later summarized the discovery of that era by saying there had been a great door marked thou shalt not, and when they touched it, it fell off its hinges.

Covers and Art Direction

The Lampoon's covers were central to its fame. Its first art directors were Peter Bramley and Bill Skurski of New York's Cloud Studio; from the eighth issue, art direction passed to Michael C. Gross, who gave the magazine a unified, sophisticated look through 1974 and oversaw many of its most notorious covers. These included William Calley, the officer convicted for the My Lai massacre, grinning in parody of Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman; Che Guevara being hit with a cream pie; and a starving child from a charity album cover rendered in chocolate with a bite taken from its head.

The most famous cover of all appeared in January 1973, for the Death issue: a photograph of a dog with a revolver pressed to its head, captioned with a warning that the dog would be killed if readers did not buy the magazine. Conceived by writer Ed Bluestone, the image was later ranked by the American Society of Magazine Editors among the greatest magazine covers of the previous forty years, and the issue became the most collectible of the run. Successor art director Peter Kleinman produced further landmarks, including a portrait of an aged John F. Kennedy and a Fat Elvis cover published a year before Presley's death.

Writers, Features, and Comic Method

A typical issue mixed long-form parody — fake news reports, counterfeit advertisements, entire bogus documents — with short pieces, cartoons, and the front-of-book True Facts column of real news items stranger than invention, a feature Henry Beard started in 1972 on the model of a similar column in Britain's Private Eye. Rotating editorials at the front, written by whichever editor was responsible for that issue, were themselves parodies of editorial pomposity. Kenney's recurring Mrs. Agnew's Diary, written in the voice of Vice President Spiro Agnew's wife, exemplified the magazine's political satire at its most sustained.

Critics struggled to place the humor politically. The magazine professed no party line and attacked targets across the spectrum, though its writers held strong individual views. P. J. O'Rourke, who became editor-in-chief in 1978, described the house style as oppressor comedy: where older comedians played the lovable loser, the Lampoon's pose was that of the insider who had chosen to stand in the doorway and mock the organization. Later commentators traced the influence of that stance through Spy magazine, The Onion, and the work of figures such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Beyond the Magazine: Radio, Stage, and Records

The magazine's success in print quickly generated other media. The National Lampoon Radio Hour, launched in 1973, assembled a cast that included John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, and Harold Ramis, many of whom moved in 1975 to the new Saturday Night Live, carrying the Lampoon sensibility directly into television. Stage revues, most famously Lemmings, comedy albums, calendars, songbooks, and a shelf of books and special editions extended the brand, while reprint anthologies kept the best magazine material in circulation.

This expansion had a cost. The founding generation began to leave: Beard, Hoffman, and many original creators departed around 1975, Kenney moved toward Hollywood, and O'Donoghue and Beatts left for Saturday Night Live. The magazine remained popular and profitable under editors including O'Rourke and under writers such as John Hughes, who contributed some of his earliest published work to its pages, but the center of American comedy was shifting to screens, and the Lampoon increasingly supplied talent to its own offspring rather than defining the field itself.

Animal House and the Hollywood Inheritance

The magazine's largest cultural footprint may be cinematic. National Lampoon's Animal House (1978), co-written by Doug Kenney, Harold Ramis, and Chris Miller from material rooted in magazine pieces, became one of the most successful comedies ever made and established a template for anarchic youth films. Kenney went on to co-write Caddyshack (1980). The National Lampoon's Vacation series, drawn from a John Hughes magazine story, followed in the 1980s, and alumni of the magazine and its radio and stage companies populated Ghostbusters, SCTV, The Simpsons, and much of American screen comedy for two decades.

Kenney's own story ended early: he died in 1980 in Hawaii, at thirty-three, after the release of Caddyshack. His life and the magazine's rise were later chronicled in Josh Karp's biography A Futile and Stupid Gesture, which drew on some 150 interviews to reconstruct the magazine's creative brilliance and its chaos of feuds, excess, and commercial improvisation. For many readers, Kenney's trajectory — from Harvard parodist to the defining comic editor of his generation — remained inseparable from the magazine he founded.

Decline in the 1980s

A serious decline set in around the mid-1980s. A New York Times profile in August 1984 reported circulation down from 638,000 to about 450,000, and publishing revenues fallen from $12.5 million in 1981 to $9 million in 1983. In 1985 Matty Simmons took over as editor-in-chief, dismissed the editorial staff, and installed his sons Michael and Andy Simmons as editors, with Larry Sloman as executive editor and Peter Kleinman returning as creative director. Each issue that year was devoted to a single topic, but the revival did not restore the magazine's standing, and in November 1986 it dropped from monthly to bimonthly publication, issuing six numbers a year.

The slide reflected larger changes as much as internal ones. The audience for transgressive print humor had fragmented; cable television and home video offered stronger sensations; and the magazine's brand increasingly earned its money in films and licensing rather than on newsstands. The Lampoon name still had value, but the monthly magazine that had created that value was becoming, within its own company, a secondary asset.

The J2 Years and the End

In 1990 J2 Communications bought the magazine and its properties. A return to monthly publication was attempted in 1991, producing nine issues, and comics editor Drew Friedman brought work by Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware before a wider audience. Thereafter J2 concentrated on licensing the National Lampoon name and published the magazine only as often as its rights obligations required — by some years a single issue annually. Two issues appeared in 1992, one in 1993, five in 1994, three in 1995, and thereafter one a year until the final issue, number 246, in November 1998.

The brand outlived the magazine: films and products under the National Lampoon name continued under successor companies, generally without the involvement of the original creators. In 2007 the complete run of 246 issues was issued in digital form, its packaging recreating the famous 1973 dog cover with the caption adapted to threaten the animal unless buyers purchased the disc. For the magazine's fiftieth anniversary in 2020, the magazine was issued digitally by Solaris Entertainment Studio, a commemoration of a print institution that had, by then, been gone for more than twenty years.

Legacy

National Lampoon's historical importance is difficult to overstate. It demonstrated that a humor magazine could be simultaneously literary, scatological, commercially successful, and culturally central, and it trained or launched a disproportionate share of the writers and performers who remade American comedy between 1975 and 2000. Its alumni created or shaped Saturday Night Live, and its sensibility — parodic, media-saturated, disrespectful of every institution including itself — became the default register of American satire.

The magazine also documented its era unflinchingly. Its treatments of Vietnam, Watergate-era politics, celebrity, sex, and death were often savage and sometimes indefensible, which was rather the point of the experiment Beard described: testing which prohibitions were real. Complete runs are preserved and collected, individual issues such as the January 1973 Death number remain prized, and histories of American humor consistently place the magazine's 1971–75 peak among the medium's highest achievements. The door it pushed open never closed again.