Everyone knows "Animal House" and the "Vacation" movies. You might remember that they carried the National Lampoon header. What you might not have known was that this header came from a cutting-edge magazine popular in the early '70s. "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon" looks at National Lampoon magazine, and how it influenced humor for the generation that came of age during the Vietnam War and Watergate. Not surprisingly, many of the people involved in the magazine starred on "Saturday Night Live".

The documentary features interviews with Chevy Chase, Michael O'Donoghue, and other people involved with the magazine. In the process, we learn a lot about Doug Kenney; he helped launch the magazine and appeared as Stork in "Animal House" (What the hell we s'posta do, ya mo-ron?). Unfortunately, he met an ignoble end in Hawaii in 1980.

Anyway, this is one documentary that you're sure to enjoy. The magazine's transgressive material was a real pleasure; those guys set out to offend everyone. Definitely check it out.

I just watched this documentary about the rise & fall of National Lampoon magazine, a periodical I wasn't really supposed to be looking at when I was 14 in 1973, yet I did anyway (when I could find one). Despite average to good reviews here on IMDb, I found it quite enjoyable.

I especially liked the parts where we caught video of a pre-fame Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, and of course John Belushi. Those guys WERE FUNNY! And it also allowed me to travel back in time to the mid-70's, a time when there was and actual "underground" comedy scene. And it seemed to poke fun of everybody (whites/blacks, Dems/Repubs, Jews/Gentiles) and you could laugh and not worry about "politically incorrect repercussions". Sadly, that time is long gone.

Also, I saw a sh*t-load of 1970's era natural breasts, in both black and white and color! Say what you will about that long-lost magazine, they sure did know how to make funny visual jokes around naked women.

I'm recommending this for anyone who'd like to take a nice 40+ year rewind.

I've given National Lampoon: Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead a 5 out of 10. It's entertaining to watch: I was happy to find it on the Sky Arts channel here in the UK. But while the film traces the history of the magazine and its creators, and richly describes how the success of the magazine led to its expansion into radio comedy, comedy albums, stage shows, and movies, its images and interviews fly past quickly without the film explaining what factors led to the creation of the magazine and how it was related to other magazines, newspapers, comics, and cultural products of its time.

As the documentary pointed out, the magazine grew from the Harvard Lampoon, a Harvard humour magazine that didn't reach a national audience. In the 1920s there were nationally published magazines that collected articles and cartoons from universities around the US: "College Humor" was probably the largest, and was published from 1920 to the 1940s. These college humor magazines were aimed at a young but mainstream audience.

It surprised me that Drunk Stone Brilliant Dead didn't mention Mad magazine. It was Mad. first published in 1952, that brought radical and subversive humour that poked fun at authority figures to a country wide audience. Without Mad, there probably wouldn't have been a National Lampoon. It also surprised me that the documentary made no mention of the Underground press and Underground comics of the 1960s. The art style of the first issues of the Lampoon looked very reminiscent of the style of Robert Crumb and other artists from Zap.

I didn't like National Lampoon very much in the 1970s. I read my older brother's issues. Even back then, I thought they were indulging in printing pictures of naked girls and making jokes about drugs and sex simply for the sake of it. They didn't have the force of the Underground comics, which were breaking ground in discussing subjects that before then couldn't be mentioned, and were using the archaic spirit of Mad to take apart the establishment and cultural heritage of the era. I remember the issue of National Lampoon that printed a spoof of Mad, taunting that Mad was stuffy, middle aged, and had long forgotten the meaning of satire. I thought that while Mad didn't print cartoons of naked women and guys smoking pot and snorting coke, it still featured strips that aptly commented on society: strips that have been reprinted and discussed in many studies about US history and the growth of graphic novels.

I thought while I was watching the documentary that National Lampoon branched out very quickly into other media and became a brand: while Saturday Night Live wasn't officially associated with National Lampoon the show clearly stole their talent and their style of satire. I think the magazine pulled its punches keeping an eye on their advertising revenue and growing empire. I'm not saying it wasn't funny- I thought the record albums and movies were funny- but I think the humour of the magazine was aimed at pleasing its creators and audience of liked minded readers, rather than exposing the darker aspects of its targets. The publisher of Mad, William M Gaines, didn't allow advertising in the magazine because he said a satire magazine couldn't make fun of an advertising campaign and then print an ad a few pages later for the same product or a similar product. He also saw it as a practical issue, saying that the magazine would then try to attract more advertisers, and if it started losing some of its advertisers and the advertising income, the readers would still expect the same fancy package, but without the advertising income to pay for the higher production costs, the magazine was sunk. Which it seems, along with loss of readership, was what ultimately happened to National Lampoon.