Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (10 page)

Do you ever wonder if future generations will have either the interest or the talent to concentrate solely on humor for print?

Print is a totally different beast. It requires, without patting myself on the back too hard, some discipline. Television comedy is very tight, very carefully written and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten. But it’s not quite the same. And you know you’ve got the backup; you’ve got funny people to make faces when a line doesn’t work. It’s different. I suppose some writers will still keep writing humor for print, but it doesn’t seem quite as natural as when I was coming along.

And to be fair to comedy writers just starting out, there really isn’t much money in it.

No, there isn’t. There never really was, but there’s a whole lot less now. It’s just not a viable thing. It really isn’t.
The New Yorker
, to its credit, is still viable, but often they’ll just publish an unfunny piece by somebody you’ve heard of instead of a very funny piece by someone you’ve never heard of.

It’s just so difficult to write humor for print. I tried to figure this out recently. When I was at the
National Lampoon
, I think I wrote a million words. God help me, most of them were supposed to be funny. I can’t imagine anyone doing that again. I can’t imagine
myself
doing it again. Send the guys in the white jackets and nets. Looking back, you just can’t believe it.

You once said that it was Doug Kenney, the co-writer of
Animal House
and
Caddyshack
, who—more than any other
National Lampoon
writer—was able to get things done in Hollywood. Why was that?

The real beginning for
National Lampoon
in Hollywood was Doug Kenney. Doug was a naturally funny writer of print. In retrospect, and I didn’t realize it at the time, he was also a gifted writer of movie comedy. Doug just had a great, natural comic instinct, which could be applied to anything. When he got the opportunity to do
Animal House
[in the mid-seventies], it was clear that that was what he was really meant to do.

It was mostly because Doug had a fundamentally cinematic sort of sensibility and he was quite relentless in his pursuit of projects he cared about. It takes a profound sort of focus and determination to get anything done in the movie world, and he had both. He was also a very, very good collaborator with everyone he worked with.

Over the years, there’s been much discussion about Kenney’s death in Hawaii in 1980 at the age of thirty-three. According to some, he jumped off a cliff. According to others, he slipped or was pushed off a cliff. What do you think happened?

I don’t know. Honestly, I just don’t know. I think it’s possible that he killed himself. The whole thing is so murky. Doug had his ups and downs; there’s no question about it. I guess it comes with the territory. Years before, Doug had gone to visit friends in the Caribbean, and he was caught with marijuana in his luggage. It wasn’t very serious. He knew people who had good political connections, and he got off. But he would never travel with drugs again. So I think he was out in Hawaii and he may have tried to score some drugs. This might have been a drug deal gone bad, and he might have been killed. But I honestly don’t know.

There are stories about Doug being unhappy with the way
Caddyshack
turned out. Do you think he was unhappy with the movie or unhappy with his life?

I think a little of both. When
Caddyshack
was released [in 1980], he was kind of depressed. He said, “Oh, well. It wasn’t another
Animal House
.” And I said to him, “Man, give it time.” It was one of the funniest movies I think I’d ever seen. But he was comparing it to the great success that
Animal House
achieved, and that wasn’t fair.

You collaborated with Doug on
Bored of the Rings
. Can you tell me how that came about?

I convinced Doug, who had not read
Lord of the Rings
, and who had correctly thought it was kind of a stupid thing, that we should write a parody of it. We were able to sell the idea to Ballantine, the publisher that originally put out the paperback edition of
The
Lord of the Rings
. And again being careful, we sent a letter to J. R. R. Tolkien saying, “We’re thinking of parodying your books. What do you think?” And he sent back this sweet, very quirky letter that said, in essence, “Well, I don’t really know why you’d want to bother, but if you’re silly enough to want to do it then that’s okay with me. Go ahead.”

After we managed to get a small advance from a publisher, Doug speed-read
Lord of the Rings
in one day and ended up writing probably three-quarters of the parody. I remember sitting across from him at a sort of double desk in a Harvard library, each of us with a portable typewriter, and I sat there fussing over a paragraph, and he was writing
pages
as fast as he could type. It was unbelievable. He wrote thirty-five or forty words per minute. And it was hysterical. I mean, it was just unbelievable. That was Doug—that was pure Doug.

When we turned it in, the head of Ballantine, Ian Ballantine [who published
The Lord of the Rings
], basically picked up the manuscript with a pair of fireplace tongs. It was noxious to him. He wasn’t thrilled about it. Meanwhile, over the years, that book [published in 1969 by Signet] has helped support the
Harvard Lampoon
. Simon & Schuster published yet another edition in the fall of 2012.

The
National Lampoon
’s style of print humor was very dense, and not wedded to one cookie-cutter premise. There were many different types of genres that were parodied, from comic books to game instructions to yearbooks to magazines. It must have been an exhausting publication to put out month after month.

Absolutely, and going back to Doug, he had a great gift for the visual. He was the one who more than anyone said, “Listen, the material in the magazine can’t just be words on a page. We should do absolutely strict and accurate parodies.” Doug completely and instinctively knew that this was a great opportunity to do funny work. It was just in his blood. Once we all caught on to how it was being done, it became very clear that this was the direction to take.

In the very early issues of
National Lampoon
, the art direction appeared looser. It wasn’t necessarily very accurate to what it was parodying.

It was clumsy in the beginning. Until [art director] Michael Gross came in around the sixth or seventh issue, it was not working. To his great credit, Michael called up our publisher, even before he was hired, and he said, “You know, this is a funny magazine, but it looks like crap. I’m an art director. Hire me. I’ll fix it.” And we did, and he did. He saved us, really. Total accuracy for what was being parodied. It was easy to confuse the real with our version.

This very talented comedian named Ed Bluestone came to the office in 1972 with the line, “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog.” The next day Michael found a dog who would turn its eyes away from a pistol, with a little prodding. The photo was shot for the January 1973 issue. I saw this picture and simply couldn’t believe it. And it was, like, with a wave of his left hand. Magic. So that’s the type of thing that made all the success possible.

How often was the magazine sued for depicting
too accurate
a parody?

We were continually sued. In one [1973] issue we published a Miracle Monopoly Cheating Kit. We printed out $1,000 and $5,000 pieces of Monopoly money to be slipped among the game’s $5 and $10 pieces of Monopoly money. The only reason we didn’t get sued is because
Lampoon
writer Christopher Cerf had gone to college with the son of one of the Parker Brothers, who called off the dogs. People were always suing us. Oftentimes, we had to settle out of court and just tell them, “We’re sorry. We won’t do that again.”

Do you think the magazine could work as well today as it did in its prime? So much of this type of humor depends on the audience’s knowledge of what’s being parodied, and a lot of the print formats you dealt with aren’t as popular as they used to be.

That’s absolutely right. It was a moment of shared experience. With the visualization of a lot of print and the introduction of television after World War II—and this was for my generation—you had this attic stuffed with shared experience and memories. Everybody had read
The
Saturday Evening Post
, everybody had read the stupid comic books, and we connected. It was just an entire world of visual references, and we ran through them at the speed of light. The amount of material we consumed in a few years at
National Lampoon
was shocking. We just used it up.

Most of the humor in
National Lampoon
—and it’s now more than forty years old—remains fresh. This even includes material that, in lesser hands, would feel very dated, such as Watergate or the Vietnam War.

It’s very lasting. It was very difficult to produce, but I do think most of it has lasted. Some of those parodies I can still look back at and laugh out loud. I reread the
1964 High School Yearbook
parody recently. That was unbelievable; I mean, just great.

A lot of comedy fans feel that the
1964 Yearbook
, published as a book in 1973 and edited by Doug Kenney and P. J. O’Rourke, invented nostalgia. At least a certain type of nostalgia—looking to the past, but with the knowledge of what we know now.

I wouldn’t argue with that. Well, I’m not sure we invented nostalgia. We did package it well and gave it momentum. But as a symbol of it, yes. The format of a high school yearbook is the one complete true universal, at least in this country. That’s gone. I mean, are we going to now have people sharing their first experience via Twitter? No. So everybody lived through high school. And the high school yearbook was the distillation of this experience.

This is a very specific type of nostalgia. When you have references to high school girls “out sick a lot” and “crying in Home Ec,” really a euphemism for being pregnant during a time when such a thing was not accepted, that’s a different type of nostalgia than looking back fondly on concerts held in the town square, musicians playing oompah music.

Right, it’s completely different. There’s a depth to the nostalgia, or a width or a breadth, or whatever geometrical metric you want to use. I think that partly had to do with us growing up in a time, the sixties, when it was unbelievably straightlaced and tight-assed. Things started to loosen up a bit after Kennedy’s election, but the first time I ever heard of anybody using drugs was in 1965. It was marijuana. I remember someone saying, “My God, if they ever catch that guy, he’s going to federal prison for life!” Can you imagine? Two years later, you couldn’t walk through Harvard Square without getting a contact high. It just all fell apart. So the
National Lampoon
’s timing in that sense couldn’t have been better. We got a chance to draw on this shared, weird background of the boomers at a time when everything was coming loose. I think the
National Lampoon
was the first printed magazine that published every single four-letter word.

I remember early on the publisher telling us, “I’ve got some bad news. I got a call from the printing plant. They won’t print a particular cartoon.” I think the cartoon’s punch line was, “Oh well, go fuck yourself,” or something like that. Within six months, though, they were printing everything. They just gave up.

This was before even
Playboy
began publishing four-letter words.

Absolutely. To their credit,
Playboy
was more careful, because they were smart. They were printing bad pictures and they didn’t want to get involved with bad words. Hugh Hefner wanted a clean-dirty magazine. We were very content to have a dirty-dirty magazine. Hefner was a very smart man. When I was on the
Harvard Lampoon
, we wanted to do a
Playboy
parody. We cold-called Hefner to ask his permission. His secretary said, “Just a minute.” Hefner came on the phone practically immediately. Not only did he say he’d love to have it parodied, but he said, “I’ll arrange for you to use my printing plant. I will tell them that you’re solid citizens. And all you guys have to do is make sure you get signatures from some of your rich graduates on the bill to make sure we don’t get stiffed.” We printed around 635,000 copies in September 1966, and we sold them in eleven days.

That was really the beginning of me thinking, My God, I don’t have to go to law school.

That was the first inclination that there was something big out there?

That was the first really big one. We realized that not only could we do something that was going to be on newsstands all across the country, not just on the East Coast, but we realized that certain production values could be achieved, which was a necessity for accurate parody.

The material from the
Lampoon
, both
Harvard
and
National
, is very much druggy-based. Was there ever any drug use for you?

No. And not because of any sort of moral rectitude. I guess, like Bill Clinton, I didn’t inhale, because when a friend offered me a puff on a joint, I took a deep drag and almost choked to death. The perfect negative reinforcement. No one ever offered me anything stronger—they probably figured like that classic Woody Allen gag, I would sneeze in midsnort and blow all the high-priced coke away.

Do you feel that comedy writers can improve their humor—and reach areas they wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise—if they are drunk or stoned?

No.

It must be strange to talk about some of your college classmates who later become such comedic icons. Is it all surreal?

Totally surreal. Everything seems completely accidental. It’s that philosophy that if you cross Sixth Avenue at Forty-second Street instead of at Forty-third Street, you’ll end up alive instead of being hit by a car. I mean, it was all so completely, unbelievably accidental. I went to Harvard. My father went to Yale in the class of 1913. I went to Harvard to piss off my father. It was youthful rebellion. That was the only reason. If I had gone to Yale, none of this would have happened. No way. I have no idea where I would have ended up. All so trivial.