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Writer Brian McConnachie Sells Two Tickets to Paradise with "Big
Ship Radio"
That's right. Radio comedy variety - like the kind you grew up listening
to when you were a kid. Or rather, like the kind you grew up listening
to if you were a kid during World War II, since television essentially
killed that art form in the 1950's when they found there was more money
having Groucho Marx host "You Bet Your Life" on TV rather than
radio.
Radio comedy/variety's Golden Age was brief and beautiful, like the
blooming of a cherry blossom. Masters of the medium like Fred Allen,
Jack Benny and Groucho Marx starred in some of the most
popular shows of the day.
Non-musical radio entertainment flourished again briefly in the 1970s
with the CBS Radio Mystery Playhouse, which featured some top
stars, and syndicated programs like The National Lampoon Radio Hour.
Since that was one of the last times anyone put much time and energy
into radio comedy/variety, it is worth noting that one of the major
writer/performers on the Lampoon Radio Hour was, you guessed it,
Brian McConnachie.
After leaving National Lampoon magazine in the 1977 to write for
Saturday Night Live, McConnachie later migrated to SCTV,
appeared in several Woody Allen movies, wrote for public
television children's shows, and authored several books.
While gardening recently, he began getting ideas for a radio show.
He started hearing certain voices of friends (many who he worked with at
the Lampoon Radio Hour) as the characters. Sketch ideas came. Radio was
perfect. It didn't have the production costs of a magazine or a
television show or movie. It would take some time and effort to produce
well, but with the computer audio production capabilities of today, it
would be relatively inexpensive to produce.
McConnachie had once attempted to start a magazine of his own, The
American Bystander, which never got off the ground mostly because of
the formidable start up costs and always rising cost of paper. Plus,
most young aspiring professional wiseasses these days go straight to
television rather than write for the relative pauper's pay of magazine
work.
They are drawn to lucrative writing gigs on Fox comedies like The
Simpsons and Family Guy or they prefer more permissive
environment of cable, where savage topical satire and bathroom humor can
co-exist on a show like South Park, working in a form rarely
seen, well, since the heyday of the Lampoon, which just happened to
correspond with McConnachie's editorial tenure.
Magazine humor in the Lampoon vein doesn't exist today, with all the
really young funny writers migrating to The Onion, which is a
single form parody, similar to but more limited in many ways than the
Lampoon at it's peak, or television and movie work.
Lampoon Days
Born in December 1942 in Forrest Hill, New York, former site of the
tennis championships, McConnachie is in the long tradition of urban and
urbane New York humorists like James Thurber, Robert Benchley, S. J.
Perelman, George S. Kauffman, George Plimpton, and Woody Allen.
He could have easily ended up writing for The New Yorker, had it been a
hipper and funnier magazine in the 1970's. But at that time it was, as
his Lampoon colleague P.J. O'Rourke once observed "like a trade
magazine for the porcelain industry". Stuffy and a bit snobbish.
That work led to a job in advertising, which is where he found himself
languishing unsuccessfully when he discovered the new National Lampoon
magazine in 1970, and knew he had to be a part of it. There was a bitter
generational divide at the agency. "It broke down by age and over
Vietnam. We had the Jeep account. There were enough old guys to make the
young guys scared."
McConnachie was an odd fit in the world of "Mad Men".
He was given the task of reviewing television shows the agency's clients
advertised on. He initially disliked forced viewing of the mostly bland
world of 1960's sitcoms. Then he scared his co-workers with the
increasing detail and lavish praise for the comedic brilliance of shows
like "The Andy Griffith Show" and "The Beverly Hillbillies".
"They were just so sweet and nice and funny and dry. The one I thought
was really brilliant was The Beverly Hillbillies. They had wonderful
little gags. They'd come back from the country club and say, "those
little lockers were so hard to change your clothes in."
"There was another which was just like the old Warner Brothers Bugs
Bunny cartoon. Ellie May brings home a boxing kangaroo and Granny thinks
it's a jackrabbit. When they box the jackrabbit is just kicking the shit
out of her."
The reports led to McConnachie being sent to the Floor of Lost Men,
given a desk and a chair but no work to do. It was considered rude to
fire anyone. Eventually they would leave, having nothing to do.
McConnachie saw the Lampoon as his parachute.
"I had to be there. I was like some kid from Kansas going to New York to
get the part in the show, but I did it from New York. I started going
there with cartoons. Seeing Henry Beard, co-founder and editor).
McConnachie wasn't writing yet for the magazine. He approached them
with cartoons, which Beard bought; continuing to encourage the obviously
brilliant but also obviously bent and skewed McConnachie.
The Irishman was fascinated and amused the staff of the nascent
magazine, most of who engaged in blood feuds and casual slander as
hobbies. Finally Beard asked him for some print copy, being none too
impressed with the genial humorists cartoon skills, but recognizing the
unique voice evident in cartoons like the one with lady telling the frog
"I'm a nun. I can't change you into anything."
McConnachie's first piece was a parody, standard fare for the Lampoon.
He produced a parody of the best seller "Papillion" which he'd
read recently. After that he notes, "I began contributing to every
issue."
The National Lampoon
has just been made available in DVD-ROM format, with every regular issue
of the magazine from it's debut 1970 until it's demise in the late
1990's reduced to a shabbily produced collection of reprints and
vulgarity masquerading as hard hitting satire, only published as a legal
requirement to retain the Lampoon name as a property, to be whored out
to an endless procession of direct to DVD sewage.
Still, big props to the people who produced the DVD-ROM, available
through Amazon.com for under forty bucks. The collection has made it
possible to access every piece
McConnachie wrote for the magazine from the first 1972 Escape
issue, which featured a cover with an Adolf Hitler look-alike sitting in
a tropical setting, in a whicker chair with a fruity cocktail in his
hand. McConnachie left the magazine after about five years, partly due
to tensions with Publisher Matty Simmons over missed deadlines on
"The Naked and the Nude" a special edition about Hollywood, a favorite
subject of McConnachie's.
"Everyone was doing special editions. It was my turn to go off and do
one." McConnachie says. He points out that like a utility player in
baseball, Lampoon writers were encouraged to "play all the positions on
the team."
The regular monthly publication demanded a variety of humor, and a
steady supply of it. McConnachie wrote comics, book parodies, magazine
parodies, songs, and sketches for the Radio Hour. Gossip columns.
Letters to the Editor. News features. Essays. Photo essay captions.
Special editions such as O'Donoghue's Encyclopedia of Humor and Kenney
and O'Rourke's 1964 High School Yearbook parody had been successful and
promoted the brand. McConnachie wrote and edited paperbacks, producing
several anthologies and an especially brilliant parody of the
bestselling liberal bible "The Joy of Sex."
The Lampoon edition McConnachie edited was titled "The Job of Sex".
Streiber had moved into the apartment vacated by McConnachie and a
friend. He remembers Streiber always had outrageous stories he appeared
to be auditioning, filled with fantastic detail and ever increasing
embellishments. He once told McConnachie how Steiber's father had
planned the Kennedy assassination in their home.
Theatre of the Air
Peter Bochan,
it should be noted, handled the production chores with a deft hand and a
sharp ear. McConnachie wrote the pilot and assembled the cast. The
genial lanky 6'5" Irishman plays the ship's genial, lanky 6'5" Irish
captain, "Brian".
What it appears McConnachie and his crew are aiming at is at once a
parody of 40's radio as a genre, and also creating an ongoing Screwball
Romantic Comedy On The High Seas like Fred Astaire or Alice
Faye would have starred in for MGM with cameos by Caesar Romero
and Carmen Miranda.
When National Lampoon editor Michael O'Donoghue created the
National Lampoon Radio Hour in 1973, he noted in an interview that "you
can have 10,000 Etruscans charging on horseback into Troy, or wherever
the hell they charged into," Having grown up with the medium, he
realized that creativity and some technical skills could create what
would take a cast of thousands and a budget of millions. Want to have
elephants dancing on the wings of an airplane? No problem. Nuns playing
ice hockey in front of the Intergalactic Council of Elders on Pluto?
Piece of cake.
McConnachie says hours were spent editing some pieces, but is clearly
happy with the results. Theatre of the air has rarely delivered so well,
and the results are as meticulously produced and deftly written as
during the first episodes of the densely written and produced Radio Hour
in the Seventies.
Recently McConnachie appeared at a Chicago event with Lampoon writers
Anne Beatts and Chris Miller where he entertained the
audience with a tape of Belushi singing The Unhappiest Man in the
Sea, lamenting his crew forgetting his birthday, among other
complaints.
McConnachie's blend of nostalgic fondness and quirky absurdity seen in
"The Naked and the Nude" is on display in the crew of Big Ship Radio,
from Margot Campion, ship Social Director and former Miss
Delaware runner-up to Mrs. Chin (played by former soap opera actress and
Lampoon contributor Emily Prager, her part recorded via satellite
from Shanghai where she lives and teaches English), the tiny yet
domineering owner of the ship.
The show is also filled with whacky Hollywood antics like the live
rounds stuck in the ships gun barrels, which means children have to be
kept away. The gun lobbyists Mrs. Chin has booked get drunk on whiskey
and start shooting the ships dinner plates as skeet. Through it all
McConnachie's Captain remains blissfully calm, like The Love Boat's
Captain Stubbing on mushrooms.
McConnachie's odd view of the world is unique and his influence on
younger writers can be seen in the popularity of fellow SNL writer Jack
Handy's "Deep Thoughts", which is a first cousin of McConnachie pieces
like the Public Disservice Messages and his wicked advice column parody
"Tell Debby" where the columnist responds to each cry of personal misery
with "How terribly sad." or "You've certainly seen more than your share
of rainy days, haven't you."
The writers of The Simpsons have acknowledged his influence in
one of the shows most enduring and brilliant elements.
Another significant McConnachie creation at the Lampoon was the comic "Kit
and Kaboodle" which featured the graphically violent battles of a
cartoon cat and mouse. Published in the 1973, it was given a special
double copyright by editor Michael O'Donoghue at the time. O'Donoghue
obviously recognized that McConnachie's original take on the absurd
violence in Tom and Jerry could be ripped off commercially.
The comic, widely seen by millions of magazine readers of the Lampoon,
which had legendary pass-along readership, obviously was the model for "Itchy
and Scratchy" on The Simpsons.
While imitation is the sincerest form of flattery to some, it is the
sincerest form of theft to others (as fellow Lampoon writer and master
parodist Ellis Weiner observed). McConnachie seems to care (to the
extent he could be noticed to care at all) only that the right people
know.
Which is a definite reflection of the kind, polite, well-mannered
persona McConnachie is so well known for that he was featured in a
series of Lampoon magazine promotional ads and has been seen in over a
dozen major motion pictures, including "Caddyshack" and a couple of
Woody Allen films.
McConnachie recalls one Allen role where he played the husband of Blythe
Danner and the father of Juliette Lewis. He notes that he went from
playing the husband of one of the sexiest actresses on the planet in a
lavish New York apartment that would cost the GNP of a small Indonesian
nation to buy, in a major motion picture directed by one of the greatest
living directors and a little while later he was taking the garbage out
at home. Sic Trasit Gloria Vanderbilt.
McConnachie's subtle and almost other worldly wit led some at the
Lampoon like Doug Kenney to theorize that he was not human at
all, but actually an alien from another planet sent to observe and
report back.
One feels after speaking with McConnachie that the idea doesn't at all
displease him. Like Andy Kaufman, Kenney, and other humor
surrealists, McConnachie builds and lives in his own worlds with
limitless possibilities where ballerinas can have trading cards and sell
alcohol ("Drink Budweiser, the beer of ballerinas!") in his Lampoon
piece "The Wide World of Ballet", and a gun magazine merges with a food
magazine resulting in "Guns and Sandwiches Magazine" a parody he did in
1975.
One of his favorite sketches that made it to broadcast was "Name That
Bat" which featured Gilda Radner and Belushi, both friends of
McConnachie's from the Radio Hour.
"And it can't be something simple like Bob" he laughs.
His relentlessly applied reasoning is on display in something he wrote
for the Radio Hour, which appears on "Gold Turkey" the greatest hits
collection culled from the series, still available on CD.
After collecting three Emmy awards for his television comedy writing, he
landed on Public Television's children's shows like "Shining Time
Station" and "Noddy".
While McConnachie was certainly dismayed by the drug use at SNL, he
wasn't shocked and outraged. He was an affable drinker, had certainly
enjoyed the usual set of recreational substances that made the rounds in
the Hunter S. Thompson era, and even observed the private
celebration dance his friend O'Donoghue used to do when his cocaine
dealer showed up.
Kenney died almost certainly in part because of his excesses.
Belushi, a close friend and collaborator, died more publicly but
certainly no less tragically than Kenney. Chevy became a depressed and
pain pill addicted mess with a mean streak. Some snorted, some shot up,
some ended up face down in the pool at the end of the party. McConnachie
often disapproved of some of his friend's behaviors and the generally
mean atmosphere at SNL made it easy to leave, largely due to the urging
of Dave Thomas of SCTV.
McConnachie performed in Caddyshack, but avoided most of the
rest, save for his appearances in the Allen films and a few others. He
appears to have no interest in living in Los Angeles and writing
screenplays that languish unproduced with unpredictable paydays at best.
He remained in residence in New York, working for the children's
television shows produced there. He eventually left the city, which he
and his wife loved, for a more rural setting, more suited perhaps to a
character in
a Salinger short story.
McConnachie's second published prose piece for the Lampoon was Next
Year's Best Science Fiction, which deserves an award just for the title.
The piece is a parody of several well-known SF and other writers,
including a SF parody of Salinger's classic "A Perfect Day for
Bananafish."
In McConnachie's version, the main character meets a little girl and
tells her the story of the banana fish and when she says she doesn't see
them he goes back to his hotel room, retrieves a Martian blaster gun and
points it at the little girl's head. "Now do you see them."
She does.
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