Author(s): Rick Meyerowitz

Jokes

From the vast depths of National Lampoon's first (and best) two decades, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead collects the greatest hits of the most famous American humour publication ever made. The book is stuffed to the gills with cartoons, parody advertisements, comics, standalone stories, recurring features, and photographs, many of which are reproduced from original art never before seen at this quality. Each section devoted to an individual artist or writer includes tributes written by colleagues and peers. Former Lampoon illustrator Rick Meyerowitz has curated a mind-boggling tour through the early days of a magazine whose alumni left their fingerprints all over the last half-century of 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. The pieces included here are remarkable for the prodigious wit, consideration, and (occasional) cruelty that went into their creation, but even more for their freshness and relevance some forty or fifty years later.
Send-ups of Vietnam, the healthcare system, terrorism, political correctness, and the oil business take on a new tenor, alongside timeless standbys like sex, death, cancer, and toilet humour. Within the pages of this book, you will find: selections from Henry Beard's News of the MonthA" column, arguably the direct ancestor of The Onion; Mrs. Agnew's LSD trip, as transcribed in her diary (by Doug Kenney); Michael O'Donoghue's handy guide to the 21 Danger Signs of Cancer; Meyerowitz's famous Mona Gorilla; a photographic essay on Hitler's retirement years in tropical paradise, by Michel Choquette; Sean Kelly's brutal takedown of Babar and His Friends; Charlie Rodrigues's Aesop Twins; the Foto Funnies, featuring a three-year winner of the Miss New York City Big Breasts Contest; Gerry Sussman's jaded New York cabbie, Bernie X; Ed Subitzky's Come Too Soon ComicsA", one of which graces the front endpaper; M.K. Brown's Dr. Ngodatu, which later became a cartoon short on The Tracey Ullman Show; and many, many more.