It's wonderful to wax nostalgic and indulgent about the early days of Saturday Night Live and The National Lampoon, the magazine that spawned the TV show. The skits were just so wonderful, and John Belushi so terrific. Well, the skits were only wonderful some of the time; they always ran too long, and Belushi was only funny sporadically. This kind of raw humor probably has to be hit or miss, but the reality is that with both the show and the magazine, you had to endure plenty of misses before they'd hit the bull's-eye.
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of The National Lampoon shows how a rarified college humor magazine first grew into a national magazine and then to a television show that really did change the game. The story deserves a film, but maybe not this one.
The saga begins with The Harvard Lampoon, which was mostly a bunch of young men who were smart, rebellious, creative – and privileged. The Harvard Lampoon published the humor of entitlement, of people – young men – who knew they could get away with it because they had always gotten away with it. They brought that sense of personal certainty into The National Lampoon as well.
When the gang that made the magazine began to think about film and television, they joined up with The Second City comedy troupe from Chicago – a place very different from New York or Cambridge. The Second City was not all Harvard types; it was more working class or middle class, and they were performers, not just writers, so two different sensibilities collided, and sometimes the result was magnificently, outrageously, funny and brilliant.
As you'd expect from a documentary about events in the past, the movie shows headlines and pictures from the magazine, and clips from the TV show as well as from films like Caddyshack and Animal House which emerged from the same group. When the dull bits are edited out, the magazines come off as consistently funny and nervy. A headline about Richard Nixon getting the Nobel War Prize and some of the sex jokes are simultaneously unsettling and hilarious.
Mostly though, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead offers up more than an hour-and-a-half of self-congratulation. A horde of witnesses – Judd Apatow, Kevin Bacon, Chevy Chase, Beverly D'Angelo, P.J. O'Rourke, John Landis, Janis Hirsch, Christopher Guest – testify to the greatness and the exciting weirdness of these enterprises. But the drone of praise sounds like aging fraternity boys chortling over tales of wild parties and epic hangovers.
It's 30 years later; the stories ring hollow and the old boys ought to know better.
Most of the witnesses in the film look pretty comfortable in their elder-statesmen years. They live in nice places or have well-appointed offices. They've done well in life. Like old generals in their exclusive men's clubs, they put a shine on their careers, and they don't want to dig too deeply into things like how they came out of it all OK, but others didn't. John Belushi overdosed; Doug Kenny, one of the genuine comic geniuses from the beginning, obviously suffered from serious depression.
This would be a far better film if it dealt with the history instead of the nostalgia, and if these mostly men confronted themselves about how much of the humor was boy stuff about naked girls.
When these folks were younger they would have been appalled by this demure, conventional movie. It does recount wild magazine stories – far more daring than what Saturday Night Live could do on mainstream television. But the movie packs that past into a container that has no spunk at all.
The poet Allen Ginsberg once wrote about throwing marshmallows at men giving lectures on Dada at universities. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead needs to rediscover both its Dada and its marshmallows.
