Customer Reviews

"If You Don't Buy This Book, We'll Kill This Dog!": Life, Laughs, Love, and Death at the National Lampoon

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

National Lampoon virgins are th only ones I would recommend this book to. A superficial history of the institution that the lampoon became is all it amounts to. Again only read if you are new to the national lampoon.

I was so excited to read this book - I loved the National Lampoon and couldn't be a bigger fan of Doug Kinney, etc. This book isn't very good. Most of the time it seemed like some sort of rebuttal book for someone else's tell-all (which I need to find now, btw) and way too many financial details, which frankly are really boring. There is a good story here somewhere - hopefully someone else will tackle it someday and do the Lampoon justice.

This book actually will only score a "7" for die-hard National Lampoon fans. Author Simmons was more like an unfunny father figure with a lot of advertising knowledge than the person behind the driven and deranged staff that was responsible for the funniest magazine of all time.Matty Simmons keeps it all in the first person, and in a fascinating read, takes you through the history of the publication, from its squabbles with local Harvard Lampoon, to its fledgling stage shows with Chevy Chase and John Belushi, to its megastardom with its Vacation films to its final undoing from writer Tony Hendra and actor Timothy Hutton, who engineered a hostile take over in the late 80's

In its heyday, the National Lampoon was a wonderfully funny and irreverent magazine. If you remember that and are seeking to recapture something of that magic, don't bother reading this book, which is simply a hurriedly assembled memoir by a not-too-bright hanger-on.

There's a story to be told here, but Matty Simmons is incapable of telling it.

Ok, so Simmons isn't that much of a writer. And, ok, he isn't much of a storyteller, either. And he apparently doesn't have anything significant to say about what it was like to be the business person trying to manage a bunch of headstrong, brilliant, drug-addled prima donnas.

But what is particularly galling about this book is that Simmons assumes that something that John Hughes worked on in 1986 is as important and as interesting as the work that was being done by Christopher Guest, Doug Kenney, Tony Hendra, Chris Miller, John Belushi, Gahan Wilson, et al. in, say, 1974. Idiotic.

This is not to say that Simmons was an idiot. In fact, some of his contributions to *Animal House* show him to be perceptive and intuitve when it comes to comedy and the structure of plots. But precious little of that shows up in this book.

This book is important only as a record -- something that balances out the recollections collected in other books.