That`s Not Funny, That`s Sick – The National Lampoon and the Comedy Insurgents Who Captured the Mainstream - Softcover

Stein, Ellin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 039335024X ISBN 13: 9780393350241

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014

Synopsis

Labor Day, 1969. Two recent college graduates move to New York to edit a new magazine called The National Lampoon. Over the next decade, Henry Beard and Doug Kenney, along with a loose amalgamation of fellow satirists including Michael O Donoghue and P. J. O Rourke, popularized a smart, caustic, ironic brand of humor that has become the dominant voice of American comedy. Ranging from sophisticated political satire to broad raunchy jokes, the National Lampoon introduced iconoclasm to the mainstream, selling millions of copies to an audience both large and devoted. Its excursions into live shows, records, and radio helped shape the anarchic earthiness of John Belushi, the suave slapstick of Chevy Chase, and the deadpan wit of Bill Murray, and brought them together with other talents such as Harold Ramis, Christopher Guest, and Gilda Radner. A new generation of humorists emerged from the crucible of the Lampoon to help create Saturday Night Live and the influential film Animal House, among many other notable comedy landmarks. Journalist Ellin Stein, an observer of the scene since the early 1970s, draws on a wealth of revealing, firsthand interviews with the architects and impresarios of this comedy explosion to offer crucial insight into a cultural transformation that still echoes today. Brimming with insider stories and set against the roiling political and cultural landscape of the 1970s, That s Not Funny, That s Sick goes behind the jokes to witness the fights, the parties, the collaborations and the competition among this fraternity of the self-consciously disenchanted. Decades later, their brand of subversive humor that provokes, offends, and often illuminates is as relevant and necessary as ever."

About this title

Review:

Stein's description...is dazzling.

It's not much of stretch to call this exceedingly thorough and wildly entertaining history of modern American comedy a bible on the subject. Ellin Stein goes deep and dirty on the topic.... A book that will serve as a cultural reference work for the ages. And a blast from the past to read.

A worthy addition to the comedy library.--Michael Precker

Stein offer detailed portraits of the people behind the magazine's success in a seminal time when politics and comedy intertwined with incendiary results.... A serious treatment of a funny topic.

Stein leaves no tangent unexplained and no petty grievance unaired as she traces the magazine's evolution and growing fame.

Stein understands not only the value of engaging reportage, but the importance of story. Setting the stage socially and historically, she...follows the Lampoon's many tributaries and side projects without getting too bogged down explicating jokes.--Matthew Love

About the Author:

Ellin Stein has contributed arts features and criticism to publications including the New York Times, The Times (of London), the Guardian, the London Telegraph, and Variety and is a former reporter for People and InStyle magazines. She currently lives in London, where she teaches screenwriting at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 039335024X
• ISBN 13: 9780393350241
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464