A new National Lampoon magazine?

In something scientifically designed to drive me insane, the New York Observer has an article about Rugged Land publishing's recent attempts to resurrect National Lampoon as a print magazine. (Previous to this, they were planning to do everything BUT a magazine.) I'm dubious that Harvard Lampoon (which forced the 1998 shuttering of J2's dreadful version, bless them) will allow it to happen, but best of luck to Rugged Land. Anybody who knows them, feel free to give them my number; I'll talk their ear off.



I guffawed when I read what former Lampoon contributor Bruce McCall had to say about, as the article puts it, "whether there is room" in our present culture for a new Lampoon: "No. Emphatically no. You can’t get good people to bother with the laborious process of reading humor. It’s a really doomed cause. I can’t imagine anybody who would think this culture would want that. It’s doomed. It’s stupid." Now, there are several rather acid things I could say about this, but I'm sure Bruce is a lovely man, so I won't. However I will point out that this is a puzzling and worrisome thing for The New Yorker's most frequent contributor of humor to say. Not only does it suggest that "the people who read my stuff are not 'good people,'" whatever those are, imagine Roz Chast slagging cartooning the same way--it's bizarre.



While the total market for a national print humor magazine might be smaller for the reasons that McCall, Michael Gross, and Tony Hendra give--primarily because the rascally type of humor that the Lampoon did has percolated throughout our culture--it certainly exists. Reading humor is only laborious if you do it the way The New Yorker does, and pace Bruce McCall, that was never what the Lampoon was about. The opposite, in fact: Lampoon was graphic and hip and sexual and dark, nothing like Shawn's New Yorker (or Remnick's, for that matter). The New Yorker is "timid"--Spiegelman said it, not me--and the Lampoon's only reason for existence was and should be to defy timidity. Much of what the Lampoon published in 1970-75 would not only immediately rocket around the Internet today, it would do so without a word being changed. And anyway, I suspect the question McCall, Gross and Hendra are really answering is, "Would you be interested in running Lampoon?" to which "Christ, no!" is their only reasonable response. Or perhaps, "Are 55 year old men interested in reading a humor magazine along the lines of the old Lampoon?" to which "Double Christ, no!" is also acceptable.



Let's remember that the National Lampoon proceeded organically from the print parodies that were distributed on newsstands by the Harvard Lampoon in 1967, 68 and 69, plus the success of Bored of the Rings. I can personally assure anybody that print humor--and especially parody--does still sell, and if the Harvard boys and girls won't do it (and I can understand why; the time/money equation doesn't make sense), somebody should. To assert "parody news is the only form of print humor with a mass audience" is absurd. The same knuckleheads were telling me in 1996 that parody news wouldn't sell to a mass audience. The Onion has also demonstrated one publishing model that works--any new Lampoon would have to be more timely, and not rely on newsstand sales. Maybe it's on cheap stock. Maybe it's internet-driven. But until they got that right, it could support itself--as the old Lampoon did after 1980--very nicely with its forays into other media, with the magazine acting as a sort of "school." In other words, essentially mimicking what happened organically. I believe that if you can be funny on the page, you can be even funnier in other, more lucrative media. Yes, more people saw "Animal House" than read the January 1973 issue of NatLamp (or even the Yearbook parody), but let's remember that BOTH forms made money--and that the big money movies proceeded from the smaller money magazines.



The Rugged Land guys are right to say that there's a whole generation that can't get their stuff published--why do you think McSweeney's started? Because Eggers and Zev Borow and a bunch of other friends couldn't bust into Tina Brown's New Yorker. Over 200,000 copies in print, ever more foreign editions, and 15 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list later, I still can't believe I had to self-publish a parody of Harry Potter. If you relaunched Lampoon, and gave it the right environment, there would be plenty of good writers in it. (The situation with cartoonists is even more dire. It's basically The New Yorker, or nothing.) The difficult trick would be duplicating the "inmates-running-the-asylum" freedom of the original; Kenney, Beard, et al had absolute freedom to run whatever they wanted, and essentially couldn't be fired. What's changed in America ain't the need for a national humor magazine, nor the market for one; it's that corporations are much, much more nervous now--whether it's Harvard Lampoon trying to protect its brand, or the CEO of a resurrected National Lampoon worried about pissing off Time Warner because they've got a movie deal in the hopper, "so let's not run that article, okay?" Spy was only exhiliarating because it didn't give a fuck about pissing off the rich and powerful New York elite--whatever money it made or prominence it got or fond memories it generated, are because of that. But the founders couldn't sell it in the early 90's, and it nobody ever got a huge payday from it. You can't flip humor magazines like you can regular companies--and the original Lampooners only made money because their magazine sold like a mother--not because Conde Nast or Wenner bought them out.



So if NatLamp is to rise again, it will face an immediate battle for its soul--and unless these guys love comedy more than money, it will crash and burn no matter what the details are. Nothing good ever gets created if you sell out before you even start. But if they choose right, and love comedy more than money, not only might they get the money eventually anyway, that attitude just might spread. And that would be one hell of a legacy, wouldn't it?



Whew! Thanks for listening.