Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great [Hardcover]

Rick Meyerowitz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2010

From its first issue in April, 1970, the National Lampoon blazed like a comet, defining comedy as we know it today. To create Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, former Lampoon illustrator Rick Meyerowitz selected the funniest material from the magazine and sought out the survivors of its first electrifying decade to gather their most revealing and outrageous stories. The result is a mind-boggling tour through the early days of an institution whose alumni left their fingerprints all over popular culture: Animal House, Caddyshack, Saturday Night Live, Ghostbusters, SCTV, Spinal Tap, In Living Color, Ren & Stimpy, The Simpsons—even Sesame Street counts a few Lampooners among its ranks. Long before there was The Onion and Comedy Central news shows, there was the National Lampoon, setting the bar in comedy impossibly high!

Praise for Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead:

"The other night I started laughing so hard I had to leave the room . . . And then I realized that I hadn't laughed so hard in 35 years, since I was a teenager, reading National Lampoon." --The Wall Street Journal 

"If you grew up with the Lampoon, this book is a trip down memory lane like no other; if not, it will demonstrate that the much maligned 70s could produce humor that has never been surpassed." --Vanity Fair 

"Meyerowitz delivers more than he promises [in his introduction]. The alumni reminiscences he commissioned, taken together, paint a vivid picture of a tight-knit family of twentysomething humorists at the dawn of their careers." 
-Newsweek 

"Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead is a coffee-table book-big, colorful, and fun to flip through. But it also serves as an important reminder: Where would American humor be without the National Lampoon?" 
-The New Yorker

"With page after page of exquisitely reproduced articles and illustrations, DSBD is a satiric cornucopia . . .You're gonna need a bigger stocking for this one!" 
-NationalEnquirer.com

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Rick Meyerowitz was a prolific contributor to the National Lampoon for 15 years, during which time he created the iconic Animal House movie poster. With Maira Kalman, he made the “New Yorkistan” cover of the New Yorker, the bestselling cover in that magazine’s history. He lives in New York City.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Abrams; 1 edition (September 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810988488
• ISBN-13: 978-0810988484
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 1.1 x 12 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #428,334 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

72 of 73 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Unequalled Pinnacle of Artistic-Comedic Genius Finally Gets its Due September 13, 2010

By T. I. Farmer VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

There was a time, kids, when popular humor meant more than LOLcats and people getting hit in the crotch on America's Funniest Home Videos. It gave us deft, subversive parodies of Titus Andronicus, da Vinci's notebooks, Kafka, and the Code of Hammurabi and dared the audience to keep up.

The National Lampoon was a pure flash of genius in 1970s America due in no small part to its corps of genius artists, who finally get the celebration they deserve in Rick Meyerowitz's wonderful book.

For a kid like me discovering the scathing power of satire at the intersection of Vietnam and Watergate, 1972-73, the National Lampoon was a gust of visual and verbal nitrous oxide in an oleo world; nothing in my life has made me laugh harder. NatLamp boldly ran long, texty pieces that would likely be spiked today over lack of faith in readers' attention spans; one high point was a perversely intricate 12,000-word overview of the "law of the jungle" (literally, an invented legal system for animals) complete with demented Latinate citations, lovingly reprinted here.

But it was the art direction that genuinely made your jaw drop, and a lot of the best of it is in here. You'll find astonishing, gorgeous, dark-side takes on Herge's Tintin books, the Yellow Pages, SAT tests, Nazi zeppelin tourism brochures, insane niche mag titles they made up like Brave Dog magazine... from artists like Gahan Wilson, Charles Rodrigues, Bruce McCall, Brian McConnachie, and so many more... this was genius, fearless, hysterical and important stuff of a type wholly AWOL from today's scene. People who forward Onion or Colbert links to each other today would probably be struck dead silent by NatLamp's Vietnamese Baby Book parody or fake - and hilarious - Dutch hate campaign.... The Onion is pretty thin soup in comparison.

But what gets you about this excellent collection of Lampoon high points is how the artists and writers trusted their audience to get it - catch the allusions, make the connections, and dig the bravery of the thing no matter how far it went. We got it. Today, on the other hand, big swaths of Onion and Colbert fans have to have it explained to them that these are jokes they're enjoying.

So I wish it were possible to call the Lampoon "seminal" -- there's a word that gets trotted out a lot for important old work -- but that would mean we'd see its descendants all around us today. I don't. The mag dried up in the 1980s, SNL grew cautious and corporate, and today our culture has grown sour and ultra-sensitive; we shall not see the like of this work again.

I loved this magazine for its literacy, intelligence, and fearlessness and this book captures the very essence of National Lampoon in its high-water years, 1970-77 or so. If you're old enough to remember and love that era but failed to save your back issues, this book will delight you. If you're not, and you think you know what far-out subversive humor is, this book will educate you. Read more ›

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars It still makes me laugh September 12, 2010

By Chris Landsberg

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I spent a good portion of the 1970s in my room listening to music and reading National Lampoon. During its prime years it was probably the funniest magazine that ever existed - at least to my teenage mind. I still have a pile of them in storage, including the 1964 Yearbook, the 199th Birthday Book, and The Very Large Book of Comical Funnies. Pure gold! This book is great. Rick Meyerowitz gives us a generous selection of the magazine's greatest work. He also includes reminiscences about the writers and artists who made it all possible. In 1976 I thought these guys had the greatest job on earth. I was probably right.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Brings back old memories September 21, 2010

By T. Hensgens

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Loved the book. Well done by the author. Explained just enough too not too much of what it was like to work at NL with the crew.
I did not realize there were so many personalities in one office. A hell of a clash.
If this book brought back memories as a reader, I can only imagine what it was like to have lived it.
I guess the title of the book says it all.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Live from The 1970s, It's The National Lampoon! December 14, 2010

By BlogOnBooks

Format:Hardcover

Illustrator Rick Meyerowitz - best known for the National Lampoon's "Mona Gorilla" cover and the poster for "Animal House" - looks at what made the Lampoon a 1970's comedy institution in "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead." Of course, it was the contributors who made the magazine "insanely great," as the book's subtitle puts it.
If you read the Lampoon back then, chances are you first picked it up because there were naked women inside (a few) or maybe because top Batman artist Neal Adams was drawing the adventures of someone called Son-O-God. Those obvious lures aside, the Lampoon held so much more to amuse readers that it would go on to become one of the great magazines of the decade.

Meyerowitz presents this rogues gallery of contributors according to when they began working for the Lampoon. Along with personal recollections from Meyerowitz, who seems to have known everyone, the book reprints - in glorious color, sometimes better than the original printings - key articles that capture these creators at their best.

There are intellectual writers like Doug Kenney, Henry Beard, Michael O'Donoghue, Christopher Cerf, Tony Hendra and Gerry Sussman, responsible for articles from "Law of the Jungle," a densely written code of law for animals to a shockingly funny parody of the Yellow Pages. There are deranged cartoonists like Charles Rodrigues, the mind behind "The Aesop Brothers," talky miminalist Ed Subitsky, Sam Gross, whose gag panels lived up to his last name, and Gahan Wilson, whose comic "Nuts" made "Peanuts" seem positively upbeat.... Along with them, there are deadpan illustrator/conceptualists like Michel Choquette, Bruce McCall and Wayne McLoughlin, who imagined Adolf Hitler vacationing in the Caribbean and a world where zeppelins still dominated air travel and trains were raced like stock cars. There are storytellers like Shari Flenniken creator of the sexually precocious "Trots and Bonnie," and M.K. Brown, whose characters seems happily trapped in a bygone era. And, of course, there are the designers, who pulled everything together in a polished, slick package.

The Lampoon's heyday ended too soon; by the late 1970s it was eclipsed by Saturday Night Live, which gobbled up several key Lampooners, and then replaced by Spy Magazine, Airplane!, The Simpsons, The Onion and even Family Guy, each turning on different pieces of the Lampoon's sensibility. "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead" stands as a delightful, dark reminder of where our comedy revolution, our culture of snark, was invented and perfected. Read more ›

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The chums of NatLampCo October 3, 2010

By Robin Benson

Format:Hardcover

A wonderful and very welcome book about the Lampoon. The thirty-six writers and artists who are featured made it an essential monthly read before it evaporated into blandness in the late eighties only to close in the nineties.

I remember coming across the Lampoon for the first time with issue ten and I just loved the format, especially the comic and magazine parodies finely crafted by Design Director Michael Gross and Art Director David Kaestle. I attribute a lot of the circulation success to these two. Gross, rightly, dismissed the design of the first few issues by Cloud Studios as inadequate because they lacked the vision that the writing clearly deserved.

Issue after issue through the seventies and the early eighties delivered some of the funniest writing around and the look of the material was just so perfect. Odd in a way because according to comments from some of the book's contributors the Lampoon offices were a bit like the frat joint in Animal House.

I thought the material for each contributor was a well-rounded selection, whether it was for a writer, cartoonist or illustrator. No doubt those who were regular readers will remember their favorite page that is not here. I would have preferred a page or two more to show the wonderful graphic work of Bruce McCall and a real omission, in my view, is the stunning sixteen page Mad parody from October 1971, written by John Boni, Sean Kelley and Henry Beard.

All this wonderful material is presented in a large page sized book and beautifully printed on decent paper as one would expect from Abrams. I was though, rather disappointed with some of the layouts. This is a book about a highly visual magazine and I would have expected all the material to be reproduced as it appeared in the Lampoon.... There are several pages where this has happened but lots of other pages have taken the original photos or graphics and presented them as new page layouts. Michael Choquette's excellent March 1972 photo story about Hitler living on a Pacific island is a different layout using photos not in the magazine and leaving out others in the original pages. As a publication designer I would have used a light color panel for the page shape with a drop shadow on two sides and then printed the original page on it. The Lampoon pages looked great so why alter their look for this book?

Despite the design comment above (I'll knock off half a star)this book is a worthwhile celebration of a unique American humor magazine.

***LOOK AT SOME SPREADS FROM THE BOOK by clicking 'customer images' under the cover. Read more ›