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Let Us Now Praise Funny Men:
The Gentle Genius of National Lampoon
Founder Doug Kenney
By Mark Leffler "What this requires is a really stupid and futile gesture on someone's part." - Otter in National Lampoon's Animal House "Well, what the hail we spoze ta do, yah mo-ron?" - Stork (played by Doug Kenney) in Animal House When Robert Sam Anson's cover profile of recently deceased National Lampoon founder Doug Kenney hit the newsstands in the autumn of 1981, the general reaction was one of shock and dismay.
Many of Kenney's closest friends and
colleagues in the humor trade had opened up only to see their funny and
generous friend portrayed as one sick puppy whose tragic childhood and
excesses with recreational substances led to an apparent suicide.
It could almost have been a companion
piece to Albert Goldman's Elvis or Bob Woodward's book on John
Belushi, "Wired".
The doors slammed shut on any possible
biography of Kenney. Even long time Lampoon editor Sean Kelley
found no interest among Kenney's inner circle. Having been burned by the
Esquire piece, they had no interest in the possibility of their
loved one being laid out for public dissection and amateur
psychoanalysis like Seymour, the sainted dead older brother in J. D.
Salinger's Glass Family saga.
Apparently this would likely be the
greatest story never told in the annals of American comedy. As Kenney's
close friend and co-author on the Animal House screenplay Chris
Miller commented in a documentary on the making of the film, "Doug
is one of the great unsung heroes of comedy in this century."
Now the story has been told.
"A Futile and Stupid Gesture"
by Josh Karp (Chicago Review Press, 416 pages) tells a tale that
doesn't gloss over the dark side of Kenney's journey from Chagrin Falls,
Ohio to Harvard, New York City and finally Hollywood.
But most significantly it also focuses on
the love and laughter that emanated from this totally new mutation on
the evolutionary ladder of humor: a bawdy Bodhisattva with a Mensa level
IQ.
The average reader is probably unfamiliar with the name Doug Kenney. He and his Lampoon brethren (and it was largely a boy's club with a few significant female authors) are known among the society of professional comedians, but not to the average reader, let alone the average movie and TV viewer. Yet almost everyone can recite lines from the two movies he co-wrote, National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) and Caddyshack (1979).
Karp is a freelance magazine writer based
in Chicago, and it was his friendship with author David Standish
(whose Hollow Earth book was reviewed last issue) that led
him to Standish's friend Chris Miller who provided the modern equivalent
of letters of introduction. After the Anson article, it would take
someone with the comedy fraternity's Masonic handshake and secret
password to get people to open up about their funny and gentle pal.
Men who worked at the magazine have
penned most of the books covering the brief brilliance of the early
National Lampoon. Some of them have an ax to grind, like publisher
Matty Simmons, who never got over being financially outsmarted by
the Harvard kids (especially Kenney, who was like an adopted gentile son
to him).
Only Dennis Perrin's biography of
Lampoon and Saturday Night Live writer Michael O'Donoghue allowed
an outsider's perspective. While it acknowledged Kenney's genius and
complexity, it could only give his work a glancing look. Karp's book
combines a deep reverence for the subject with a detached view of the
sadness that sometimes lies underneath outrageous hilarity.
Karp also has a firm grasp of the significance of Kenney and the Lampoon in the growth of what former Lampoon editor and Spinal Tap actor Tony Hendra termed "Boomer Humor" in his memoir "Going Too Far" (1988).
The meat of the book spans roughly
fifteen years from Kenney's rise at the Harvard Lampoon in the late
1960's through the founding and rise of the early National Lampoon and
Kenney's relocation to Hollywood, where he penned Animal House and
Caddyshack before dying from a fall from a cliff in Hawaii in the late
summer of 1980.
One might ask how solemnly should we take
the cultural history of a giggle mag that stopped being relevant around
the beginning of the Reagan administration, let alone the tale of it's
goofy founding fathers?
Well, think of it this way: If you shake
the MAD magazine tree you get the forgettable movie "Up The
Academy" and MADTV. But the tentacles of the NatLampCo
organization touch onto virtually everything smart and funny that's
happened in the last 35 years - from Saturday Night Live and
SCTV to the ensemble absurdity of Christopher Guest's films,
the right wing punditry of P.J. O'Rourke and newspaper parody
The Onion.
And there would have been no National
Lampoon if not for the odd couple of Kenney and his partner
from Harvard Lampoon, Henry Beard. While Beard would not be
interviewed for the book, he's the only major figure who refused to
speak to the author.
The heart of this work chronicles the
soap opera that was life at the Lampoon offices at 635 Madison Avenue,
where blood feuds and interoffice romantic triangles and rhomboids were
the order of the day.
This was one of the first groups, like
that at the Harvard Lampoon in its better days, where people ate, slept,
breathed, smoked, drank, snorted, dropped, meditated, urinated,
levitated, fought, and lived humor and comedy, as the kids say,
twenty-four seven.
As it would take a poet with an
appreciation for Christian mysticism and Zen Buddhism to properly pen a
biography of J. D. Salinger, it takes a humor fan and aficionado like
Karp to tell the tale of the Mark Twain of the counterculture.
As P.J. O'Rourke, who collaborated
with Kenney on their masterful 1964 High School Yearbook parody
(which sold a million copies in 1974), pointed out in an essay on Kenney
that appeared in a 1985 tribute issue, "Doug wasn't primarily funny.
Doug was primarily smart. And there's such a thing as being too
intelligent. In order to make sense out of life it's necessary to be
oblivious to a lot of things or ignore them or twist them around so they
fit with everything else. Doug was unable to do this. He saw and
understood everything that happened around him, everything that happened
to him and everything that he caused to happen besides."
One review half-jokingly remarked that
this book is the story of the nicest guy in the world, referring to the
fact that almost everyone in the book comments on Kenney's kindness,
compassion, and gentle spirit.
Bill Murray, who met Kenney when
he left Second City in Chicago to work on the Lampoon stage show
and radio program, credits Kenney with teaching him to be generous.
O'Rourke notes, "What I remember about Doug mostly is the kind things he
did for people."
Karp mentioned in an email to
Review, that one of the actors on Caddyshack had gotten
drunk and made an ass of himself one day. "Doug found him the next day,
anticipated his discomfort and said, "Whatever you did, just remember
that everyone here has done the same many, many times and much worse -
me more than anyone."
It was this sense of empathy that goes to
the core of what made Kenney more than the run of the mill comedic
genius.
Several of the Lampoon writers, such as
O'Donoghue, Kelley and O'Rourke, were known for they savageness of their
satire and comedy. Kenney could be just as incisive, but his humor was
usually tempered with a sense of empathy for his subjects/victims.
When he had the chance to create and play
any part he wanted for Animal House, it was the oddball reject
nerd Stork he chose to play.
Kenney would ask reporters to refer to
him in print as "the handsomest man in comedy" and joked to a friend
that he was thinking of changing his name to "Charleton Hepburn". He was
like John Lennon, who once told an interviewer that part of him thought
he was God almighty and another part thought he was a piece of crap.
Karp lays his story out chronologically,
leading off each New Year with a paragraph noting the significant
national and international stories of the day. This is helpful for
younger readers who may not understand the references of "Mrs. Agnew's
Diary".
He touches on the best of the hundreds of
funny pieces Kenney penned for the Lampoon, such as "Nancy Reagan's
Guide to Dating Do's and Don'ts" "First High Comics", "First Lay Comics"
and "Che Guevara's Bolivian Diary" (the latter of which was also
parodied in a similar but distinctive style around the same time by
Woody Allen in the New Yorker).
In essence, this long awaited biography
of the greatest comedic mind of the 20th century is anything but a
futile and stupid gesture.
There are limits to biography, and with
the main character having long since left the stage, none of us will
ever get to know this gentle genius from Chagrin Falls, Ohio. However,
if this is as close as we'll get, it's good enough for this reader.
About Doug By Chris Miller (reprinted by permission from the author) It is a little-known fact about Doug Kenney that he liked sticking his dick in girls' ears. Not in bed, as an element of some daft demented love play, but out in the world, when it was least expected. You'd be a secretary at your desk, say, working hard, minding your own business, when abruptly you'd find the Kenney prod probing your lobe. Or a coed, studying for midterms, when Dougie's drumstick would thrust toward your tympanic membrane.
He liked it best when the girl screamed,
or jumped to her feet aghast, or squeezed her eyes shut, saying, "Eeeeeeyewwwwwwww!!!"
If the girl was cool, Doug would respect
her but wouldn't enjoy the experience as much. Once, for instance, he
stuck his dick in a girl's ear, saying, "Hey, Debbie, you know what this
is?" and she replied, "It looks like a penis, Doug, only smaller."
Sometimes, after a hard day's work at the
National Lampoon, Doug would confide in me. He wanted very much to
stick his dick in the ear of Eleanor Roosevelt, and fell into a black
depression that lasted weeks when I told him she'd died in 1962. He also
longed to effect
auricular penetration of Barbra Streisand, Margaret Thatcher, and, in a break with his usual gender preference, the Pillsbury Doughboy.
As the seventies progressed, he became
more and more proficient, practicing for hours at a time before the
mirror in his office. Asking Henry (Beard) or Brian (McConnachie) or P.J.
(O'Rourke) to put the stopwatch on him, he'd whip it out, penetrate a
shivery sort of rubber ear target he'd made, and get it back in his
pants so fast it was a blur. Ultimately, he became a master, a sort of
samurai swordsman of the groin.
The expression that really used to crack
Doug up was "cocking an ear."
Whether the dick needed to be erect was a
question that would keep us up until the wee hours, drinking cheap wine,
arguing the soft/hard dichotomy like passionate young revolutionaries
disputing fine points of Marxism-Leninism.
I tended toward the view that a soft dick
could not be said to be "stuck" in an ear, that other verbs such as
"pressed" or "bumped against" would have to be used. But Doug claimed
that the time spent raising an erection robbed the process of that
all-important speed and spontaneity. The dispute was never settled, and
now, tragically, never will be.
Sometimes, when I miss him, I console
myself with the notion that as evolved a soul as Doug must have made it
through the Pearly Gates, and that maybe, even now, with that enormous
Doug Kenney grin on his face, he's finally sticking it in the ear of
Eleanor Roosevelt.
Interview with Doug Kenney biographer Josh Karp Review: What was your introduction to Doug Kenney and the Lampoon? JK: I was a little young to have read National Lampoon during its heyday. But I saw Animal House when I was 12 in 1978 and had seen copies that my friends' older brothers had laying around.
Then, in the summer of 1981, my Dad got
me a job as a messenger in the mailroom of a Chicago law firm that
represented our family business. I think since I liked to write he
thought I'd be a terrific lawyer. And I did go to and graduate from law
school in the early and mid 1990's. I was pretty aimless.
But the guy who ran the mailroom had
every copy of the Lampoon ever published. And since you really just
delivered mail about two hours a day and drank coffee and listened to
the radio the rest, I read every Lampoon between 1970-81 that summer. I
loved it. It just completely reflected my worldview.
At the time, I began making the
connection between Doug, the writer, and Doug as Stork from Animal
House, which is kind of how I knew of him previously. That fall I want
off to boarding school in Boston and somehow ran across the
Esquire with Doug on the cover.
I think I must have known that he was
dead already from the newspaper and, being a pop culture geek from early
on, had likely just thought, 'wow, Stork died?" but I remember reading
the article and it affecting me greatly. Doug's story. It's one of
maybe ten or fifteen things that just kind of resided in the back of my
brain and I'd think about it maybe once or twice a year.
Review: How did you come to write the book? JK: I knew I wanted to do a book. And when I thought of topics, I just kept coming back to Doug, as something or someone that interested me for a long time and that nobody had ever really written a book about. I think I wound up writing a book that I wanted to read myself, which I think isn't all that uncommon. Review: Was it hard to find a publisher? JK: Yes and no. It went through several rounds of being shopped to publishers. A few times there were these near misses where it seemed like someone from a large house might make an offer, then at the last minute it'd fall though.
But in the end, Cynthia Sherry at
Chicago Review Press was the one person who got it right from the
start and it couldn't have worked out better. They gave me tons of
freedom to do what I wanted, time to undertake several rewrites and
edits of my own and ultimately have treated it like a really meaningful
book, where it might have gotten lost in the shuffle elsewhere.
Review: Was it difficult to get people to speak? I know many of them felt burned after the Robert Sam Anson piece appeared in Esquire in 1981. JK: Yes, some people were thrilled to talk about Doug or National Lampoon and were endlessly entertaining and helpful. But many people were still upset about Anson's piece. Several cited it as the specific reason they wouldn't talk.
At first a lot of people refused to speak
to me and I really needed to be enormously persistent with them. Finally
I won over 90% of the people I wanted who were refusing to talk, but in
the end I never did speak to Henry Beard (Doug's partner) or his sister
Vicky, who is really the only living member of his immediate family.
Some refused to speak to me and exhibited
a great deal of anger in doing so. When that happened, I'd keep my cool
and just try to find any way in.
But in the end, I did want to set the
record straight. There was a lot about Doug, particularly his complexity
and the things that I think really made him brilliant, charismatic and
worth writing about, which never made it into that Anson piece.
Review: How do you think he got the tag of Mr. Ambivalence? It seems that everyone comments on a) his kindness and b) his ambivalence about, well, virtually everything. JK: Both are pretty common themes for him. It almost became like The Manchurian Candidate where everyone said of the Lawrence Harvey character "He's the kindest, most honorable, bravest man I've ever met."
Chris Miller said he was like Type
O blood, compatible with everyone. And he really meant it. He was just a
very kind hearted person who expected the best of others.
As for the ambivalence, I think that is
what made him such a brilliant writer. He was so smart, that I think he
never could decide how things truly felt or internalize things in the
way that others could. He thought everything to death and he was also
supremely sensitive. Whereas most people at the Lampoon were cynics. One
writer said of Doug "he had the mind of a cynic, but the heard of a nice
boy."
His writing is so generous and warm, that
even though Dean Wormer is the bad guy, everyone is left with some sense
of kind of loving him too. That doesn't come through in the writing of
anyone else at the Lampoon or involved in the comedy revolution of the
70's. That's why Doug was transcendent. His ambivalence was his gift as
a writer and his burden as a human being.
Review: Which interviews were most helpful in getting to know and understand Doug and his life? JK: I'm not quite sure how to answer this. After working on the book for quite a while, I concluded that Doug was like a leaf who floats though the book and - I hope this doesn't sound too pretentious here - every time he appears, he catches a different bit of sunlight that illuminates an aspect of who he was.
So in doing all this work, you'd get 80%
of the same stuff about Doug from each person. Then there was 20% that
was just completely new and added to his complexity.
He was consistent in so many things, but
also so off the wall, that nearly every person illuminated a new aspect
of who Doug was. In the end, that's how I tried to put it together -
telling his story in little bits and pieces along the way and letting it
all add up at the end.
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