A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever [Paperback]

Josh Karp (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2008

The ultimate biography of National Lampoon and its cofounder Doug Kenney, this book offers the first complete history of the immensely popular magazine and its brilliant and eccentric characters. With wonderful stories of the comedy scene in New York City in the 1970s and National Lampoon's place at the center of it, this chronicle shares how the magazine spawned a popular radio show and two long-running theatrical productions that helped launch the careers of John Belushi, Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, and Gilda Radner and went on to inspire Saturday Night Live. More than 130 interviews were conducted with people connected to Kenney and the magazine, including Chevy Chase, John Hughes, P. J. O'Rourke, Tony Hendra, Sean Kelly, Chris Miller, and Bruce McCall. These interviews and behind-the-scene stories about the making of both Animal House and Caddyshack help to capture the nostalgia, humor, and popular culture that National Lampoon inspires.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Screenwriter Kenney (Animal House; Caddyshack), co-founder of National Lampoon, was one of the gifted gagsters who ignited the 1970s revolution in American humor. Journalist Karp (Playboy; Premiere) delivers an iridescent, polychromatic portrait of the humorist, framed within an amusing anecdotal history of National Lampoon. To chart the magazine's rise and fall, Karp conducted 150 interviews, mapping every avenue of business decisions, feuds, romances, cocaine use and bizarre pranks. It all began at Harvard, where wild wit Kenney and misanthropic Henry Beard became "symbiotic creative forces," revitalizing the Harvard Lampoon. When they teamed with publisher Matty Simmons, National Lampoon was born in 1970, filling the "gigantic void" between the New Yorker and Mad. Success led to heightened hilarity as the brand expanded with posters, products, theatrical productions and recordings. The 1973 National Lampoon Radio Hour cast resurfaced in 1975 on Saturday Night Live, but the anarchic Animal House in 1978 catapulted Kenney to Hollywood—as Karp writes, "He had transformed himself from nerd to preppy to hippie and now to unassuming millionaire artiste." 16-page b&w photo insert not seen by PW. (Sept. 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

When Doug Kenney, Henry Beard, and a handful of other Harvard Lampoonalums launched National Lampoon, one of their dreams was to create a long-lived American humor magazine to match Britain's venerable Punch. But for a few ill-advised business and creative decisions, they might have succeeded. Instead NL first transformed early-1970s anti-authoritarianism into lively, intelligent humor, then devolved into a formulaic, low-brow, mildly reactionary rag with a predilection for T&A and body--function jokes. Kenney shepherded NL through its first years, writing first-rate satire, before stumbling through a series of personal crises ended by a mysterious, perhaps suicidal, fall to his death in Hawaii in 1980. Both Karp's well-researched analysis of why NL succeeded, shuddered, and ultimately crashed and his biography of Kenney are compelling, and the latter is also mysterious. Early success in the magazine world and later in Hollywood (Kenney had a hand in Animal House and Caddyshack) only seemed to make Kenney more miserable. Karp's account of Kenney's death is as moving as the excerpts from excellent NL articles are hilarious. Jack Helbig
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556527624
• ISBN-13: 978-1556527623
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #315,108 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Cultural History (And It's Funny, Too), October 10, 2006

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R. W. Rasband (Heber City, UT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever (Hardcover)

The title "A Futile and Stupid Gesture" is, of course a quote from "National Lampoon's Animal House", one of the most beloved, successful, and influential films of the past 30 years. Doug Kenney helped write that movie and played the role of "Stork", as well as writing the almost-as-adored "Caddyshack", along with being one of the first and most powerful editors of the legendary magazine "National Lampoon". Josh Karp's book is both a biography of Kenney and a history of the whole "Lampoon" scene, which because of the sway of the quasi-spinoff "Saturday Night Live", becomes a social history of American comedy during the 1970's. And that decade was to comedy like the 1960's was to rock--a time which transformed show business and culture not just in the U.S. but in the whole Western world. The irony is that, as a woman who worked with the almost all-male writers of that scene said of them, "they were the most miserable bunch of guys I've ever known."

Karp's book is astoundingly thorough. He has interviewed pretty much everyone involved with the epic story and read encyclopedic amounts of social history so he can present the whole Lampoon cultural revolution in its widest context. Kenney was like the Forrest Gump of comedy in that he met almost everyone during that time, so you get sharply etched portraits of the SNL gang, Michael O' Donoghue, Harold Ramis, P.J. O'Rourke, Tony Hendra, Anne Beatts, and a whole constellation of stars that came into contact with the Hollywood-Lampoon axis. Karp is a smooth, novelistic storyteller so the book is as fun to read as the old magazine itself. And there are large chunks of the Lampoon excerpted, so you get a rich taste of what the publication was like at its best.

Karp is also a competent historian, so you also get a suprisingly objective and rationally considered picture, especially about the above-mentioned personal misery of Kenney and his crew. Karp is unsparing in writing about the drug abuse which may have eventually wrecked Kenney's life, and about the misogyny and darkness of much of the comedy produced at the time. At this late date it's still hard to know whether Kenney's death was an accident or suicide, but his demise was a signature event of the era, not unlike the more famous passing of John Belushi 18 months later. It was a signal to "come inside and join the adults at the table", as O'Rourke would put it. Anyone who wants to have a fuller understanding of American cultural history in the twilight of the 20th century should consult Karp's excellent book.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent biography of a man and a magazine, August 14, 2006

By 

Dean Monti - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever (Hardcover)

Ever since Esquire published their cover story on Doug Kenney, "Life and Death of a Comic Genius," many years ago, I've been hoping for a book like this to appear. Mention the name Doug Kenney to your co-workers and see what sort of reaction you get until you start talking about National Lampoon and Animal House.

As a comic novelist who was deeply inspired by the take-no-prisoners attitude of the Lampoon, I feel indebted to Kenney (as many other writers and comedians should) and hope this book brings wider attention to his comic genius and important contributions to the history of modern comedy.

Josh Karp does a wonderful job of weaving the interesting life of a magazine, with the interesting and tragic life of Kenney. This could have easily been an on-the-fly trash bio, but Karp approaches his subjects with intelligence and obviously did a lot of homework, interviewing key people related to Kenney and the Lampoon.

I have some misgiving about the cover. I understand the choice, given that Rick Meyerowitz was a key artist in the development of National Lampoon, but it makes the book seem just a bit slighter than what it is, which is a really thoughtful, intelligent biography. That said, I hope I'm wrong and the book get all the attention it deserves.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great History, Great Fun, Not a Great Book, March 18, 2008

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Theseus "theseus" (US of A) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever (Hardcover)

I'm incredibly happy that I read this book, but I found it a ragged read.

Karp's research appears to be fabulously comprehensive. Cobbling together all these recollections and many years of social and cultural history into a unified whole must have been quite a job. The result is a book that never quite decides if it is biography of Kenney or of the magazine.

Karp is at his weakest when moves away from reportage he enters into analysis of Kenney. He lacks the insight and the prose of a sophisticated biographer and for every insightful chunk of prose, there is a clunky deposit of pop psychology.

Still, the book is an utter success at creating much of the present-at-the-creation of the magazine and its many children (radio projects, theatre projects, films, tv...)