Customer Reviews

1964 H.S. Yearbook Re-Issue

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Go on. Admit it. You spent four glorious beer and church filled years imagining that you would be the first space-going president to win the super-bowl. Makes that oily stench of axel grease and lube on your hands reek just a little more, doesn't it.

See, vicious humor isn't all "Children's Letters to the Gestapo". Not at all. Doug Kenney(the actual author of this book, PJ was his assistant) founded the National Lampoon and with it a school of humor that traded the pies and doctor jokes of Georgie Jessel for what Michael O'Donoghue called "900 ice picks in the brain pan". This is his finest hour.

The look, the feel, the people, the words, all of them seem exactly like they fell out of one of those Sandusky, Ohio cookie-cutter yearbooks with names like "The WildCat" or "Let's Pretend We All Have Bright Futures". Everything is so perfect that you lose yourself in the moment until you realize that your high-school principal probably didn't sneak around campus leaving excrement bombs to be commented on in the student newspaper.

For those of you who think National Lampoon began with Animal House and ended with Senior Trip, this book is what the former was based on. Larry Kroger and Flounder can be seen here, staring at the reader with dead white eyes and waiting for college to get them the hell out.

Kenney shows us the comedy of America by imitating it perfectly. After all, What the hell could be funnier that what is already here?

This book will be republished in fall 2003 with an addendum - where are they now? I can't wait...

You all know Larry, from his term at Faber College. This is his HS yearbook. I'll bet you never knew that Fawn Liebowitz, the coed tragically martyred in a kiln explosion, went to Kefauver High with Larry. This must be reprinted. This is my favorite NatLamp offshoot, along with their Bicentennial Calendar, except this is good every year, year around, while my Bicentennial Calendar only seems to work about every 12 years or so. How strange.

I've had at least a half-dozen copies of this Yearbook over the years and they've all been swiped. Thankfully, it looks like we'll soon have it in print again!

This is easily one of the funniest books I've ever seen in my life. Meticulously fashioned after a real yearbook (right down to the ads and classmate autographs), the National Lampoon yearbook is a comic masterpiece to be enjoyed over and over again.
I'd read that it was so successful that Hollywood wanted to make a film of it, but the Lampoon humor was a little risque for a high school setting. So they moved it to a college setting and that's how we got ANIMAL HOUSE.
Fans of ANIMAL HOUSE will spot familiar names in the yearbook: Larry Kroger, Coach Vernon Wormer, etc.

I can't wait until I get another copy--and I'm hanging on to this one!
Definitely CHECK THIS OUT!

The only copy I have is now nearly falling apart from years of wear and tear. I pick it up and read it whenever I get the chance, and I still laugh myself to tears. PLEASE, somebody somewhere bring this back into print so I can have some backup. It's the best thing to ever come from the National Lampoon, including Animal House, and it's a crime for this to be out of print.

its the funniest thing that i ever read. it is the best thing next to monica

I purchased a copy of this book when it was first published and laughed myself silly over and over again...what makes it so funny? It perfectly captures the absurdity of yearbooks of an era long gone by: group class pictures taken at such a distance as to render the faces tiny specks with names like "Lotta Zits"; pictures of teachers in their classroom situations: the shop teacher smiling widely at the camera next to a student whose face wears a very surprised look because lower down in the picture his fingers have been separated from his hand by the band saw they are ignoring while the picture is taken! The fun goes on and on--a description of the class trip to D.C. wherein the author takes every opportunity to use the adjectives and adverbs based on the school's mascot the kangaroo. And who could forget the mottoes accompanying the Senior Pictures: the leering face of the school "bad girl" over the phrase "I guess I missed that period!" I haven't seen this book since I loaned it to a friend in the early 1980's yet the material is fresh in my mind. Please, please bring the book back into print so that we fans can share it with a new generation.

If you have any knowledge of the sixties then this book will have you crying and your sides will ache from all of the laughter. I have shown my old copy to a half dozen people and everyone of them had the same reaction. You can read this book for weeks and still discover something new each time.

Will the world listen to the plea of thousands and reprint this masterpiece of 60's parody!!! I cannot face the future without seeing Ms. Armbruster one more time! Also, I need to see the Dacron, Ohio newspaper parody too! Please, dear lord, to see the joy in my teenage children's eyes as they read these wonders for the first time would hearten my soul forever!!!

the names of the students alone is worth bringing this parody out of out of print - money no object!