Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon

Growing up I remember "National Lampoon Magazine" I would from time to time look at a copy at the drugstore counter or see a copy that a friend would bring to school, as my parents would not let me buy them they felt the content was to dirty! Yet I thought it was special the way that it blended funny stuff with society all blending in world events, famous people, politics, and movies and television as it even took a spin on race, sex, gender and many social topics.

Yet from watching this documentary I learned a lot about National Lampoon's and that was it got it's start from educated college guys and in fact it use to be a "Harvard" university magazine! Along the way after it branched out to a magazine it expanded to the radio airwaves, then even began Lampoon plays and stand up routines. Many of the stories written in the magazine would later become hit movies most notable was 1983's "Vacation" and the Lampoon industry would launch the creation of "NBC's" "Saturday Night Live".

And this documentary provided many good interviews from stars who got their start from the Lampoon franchise like Chevy Chase and Kevin Bacon and even John Goodman. And this picture told of the company history showing great highlights and drawings and covers of the magazine and news clips and commentary on how National Lampoon really did cause a stir with American society. Really this was a well done and good documentary to watch.

From the early 1970s to the late 90s, National Lampoon magazine was one of the biggest successes of satirical parody literature. By being a magazine where nearly everyone behind it could push the boundaries without caring about going too far, it has earned its place amongst some of the most innovative shock content out there. So naturally, its long lasting impact on comedy and humour were necessary for the subject of a documentary, entitled Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead. Released in 2015, on the 70th birth year of co-founder Henry Beard, the film is quite the revelation of the rise and fall of such an iconic magazine.

The film itself details new interviews with National Lampoon staff members and other famous people who were fans of the magazine itself. On top of these interviews detailing a lot of context into how founders and Harvard alumni Douglas Kenney, Henry Beard and Robert Hoffman approached producer Matty Simmons to make their own inspired rendition off of the Harvard Lampoon, there are also never-before seen archival material from former late players including John Belushi, Gilda Radner and Michael O'Donoghue. As a magazine done to comment on society and the world in the mosto outlandish ways, the documentary breathes so much life into the material through the photos, animated recreations of already existing Lampoon work and even some transitional parodies from their radio show. At its core, National Lampoon was about saying what no one else had the guts to talk about, and while they were the subject of possible racism and sexism, anyone who understood raw comedy and anger through laughter kept the magazine afloat for so long.

However, like most documentaries, it is also a chronicle of the biggest downfalls in the magazine's history, specifically related to Doug Kenney himself. Known for being as manic as he was brilliant, Kenney was known for unannounced AWOLs and frequent substance abuse which turned off some of his closest collaborators, not at all helped by his other experiments such as book and script writing being hit or miss. There are also talks of creative differences and bad behavior mentioned by Tony Hendra, Anne Beatts and Michael Gross. In spite of those, the main focus of the documentary is chronicling how a lot of the magazine took a downward spiral following Kenney's sudden death and newcomers being forced to go in directions that negatively affected the humor. Where National Lampoon was meant to say something absurd and shocking about a subject, its later years made it all shock without the substance. From numerous crazy additions, to film spin offs to different voices being heard, it's no wonder the magazine would stumble as much as it would triumph.

Through a lot of dedication to the most far out magazine of its time and arguably today, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead might be the best retelling of the National Lampoon the world will ever get. Despite the creative shortcomings the magazine would face later on, its impact on parody and satire will forever remain a staple of pop culture for years to come. If you're curious to check out the documentary, by all means give it a go, for you don't even need to be all that familiar with the original source material to get invested. As far as documentaries on controversial comedy go, this one is up there among the greats.

It's notable that none of the truly successful / funny people who got their start via Lampoon- related ventures (Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, etc.) are in this movie, vouching for the quality of the Lampoon. Why is this? Because they owe their start to Second City, not to the Lampoon. Just as the Lampoon blames Lorne Michaels for taking "their" talent wholesale, they took this talent from Second City - people like John Belushi, Gilda Radner etc. ever wrote for or even had anything to do with the Lampoon. Animal House had a few laughs and, as noted in the movie, created a genre, but a realistic viewer will suspect the laughs are the result of (non-Lampoon) Harold Ramis. Caddyshack was crap. P. J. O'Rourke is (still) a pompous, unfunny drunk / conservative. Chevy Chase is here, promoting the Lampoon because the Lampoon is affiliated with his glory years 3 decades ago. The National Lampoon may have been considered shocking, new, or different, but it simply wasn't as funny as this movie makes it out to be. A truly timeless work will stand on its own. What is the legacy of the Lampoon? Quite a few people spell it out in this movie: "tits". Pictures of breasts and juvenile cartoons. Breasts are great, but (generally) not funny. If the Lampoon had classic, funny articles, people would still be referencing them (people still reference the Marx Brothers or Shakespeare). But they don't - why do you think that is?

The edgy, twisted, often outrageously funny Lampoon died years ago, although I recall it continued as the walking dead for a few years. This documentary follows the magazine from its pre-creation with the Harvard Lampoon through its early success and then just the tip of its long, slow, painful decline. It is a talking heads documentary, but the talking heads are witty and illustrated with pages from the magazine that work as a Greek chorus and are often cleverly animated.

I probably started reading the Lampoon in the mid-70s - my favorite writers were Ellis Weiner and P.J. O'Rourke - but the documentary is most concerned with what it considers the magazine's glory days in the early 70s. Truthfully, the little bits of Lampoon stuff I've read by the early writers like Beard and O'Donoghue haven't really appealed to me, but the movie tells me they were amazing geniuses and perhaps they were.

The story the movie tells is a fairly superficial one. It gets into some of the drama and gives some nice background, but it sticks very closely to the geniuses-working-hard-and-having-fun. The decline is portrayed as the loss of geniuses to SNL and the movies, which seems simplistic, and there's not really much attempt to put the Lampoon into a larger societal context.

Which is fine, because it's an entertaining documentary, but for me it means people giving this 10 stars just have lower standards for a great documentary than I do. This is just a nice little history that fans of the magazine will enjoy. And it's probably pretty fun even if you don't know the magazine.

Fairly conventional documentary of the very unconventional National Lampoon comedy machine through the decades. Footage and photos of the times interspersed with recollections by the remaining survivors today, talkin' bout the glory days, which, at their height, had the magazine #1 in the college readership and second only to Cosmo in national circulation. Out of that grew cabaret acts, SNL, and "Animal House" et al. Always known for their subversive humor of dubious taste, it's quite shocking to see what was considered progressive in the 60's, 70's, and '80's viewed from the pc world of today.