CS Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 11/22/06

The Man Who Built Animal House
(And a New World of Film Comedy)

By tom matthews

As a screenwriter, Doug Kenney cut a very narrow swath through Hollywood: only two shared credits on a couple of "dumb" comedies. The first was a certified masterpiece, not the least of which because it was a perfect distillation of Kenney's sense of humor and his fondly satiric grasp of a recent American past. The second movie—almost equally beloved in some quarters—may have literally killed him.

A Futile and Stupid Gesture:
How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon
Changed Comedy Forever

Josh Karp

As incisively revealed in Josh Karp's A Stupid and Futile Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever, Kenney grew up in the marvelously named Chagrin Falls, Ohio, a precocious, wildly imaginative kid with a distant father and a cherished older brother who would die young. Hardwired with all the insecurity and emotional scars of many of our most astute comic minds, Kenney arrived at Harvard in 1965 determined to breathe new life into the Harvard Lampoon, the revered humor paper which would survive—largely due to Kenney's influence—to later spawn Conan O'Brien and writers for The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Late Night with David Letterman, and countless other smart comedies.

Hitting it big with parodies of The Lord of the Rings and Life and Playboy magazines, the Lampoon was soon spun off into a national publication that debuted in April 1970. With Kenney and Henry Beard, another complicated comic wunderkind, at the helm, National Lampoon quickly became a leading light in the growing counterculture. Trading in fierce social satire, pitch black humor, and more than a little misogyny, the magazine gave a first home to such iconoclastic figures as the groundbreaking Saturday Night Live scribe Michael O'Donoghue, conservative author and essayist P.J. O'Rourke, author Tony Hendra (who also played band manager Ian Faith in This Is Spinal Tap) and—later, post-Kenney—beloved '80s writer/director John Hughes. (In fact, National Lampoon's Vacation began as a Hughes article in the mag.)

Just as significantly, the Lampoon's record albums, stage shows, and radio program nurtured the talents of Bill Murray, Ivan Reitman, Harold Ramis, John Belushi, Christopher Guest, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Joe Flaherty, to list just a few -- names which would define smart comedy for decades to come. In fact, it was the success of National Lampoon's legendary alumni that ultimately led Doug Kenney to despair. In October 1975, just a few months after the magazine made Kenney a millionaire, Saturday Night Live debuted with a cast and writing team thick with Lampoon talent. Very quickly, SNL became the new home for generation-defining comedy, causing no small amount of resentment in Kenney.

Toward the latter half of the '70s, Lampoon publisher Matty Simmons brilliantly thought to piggyback onto the success of SNL and the mood of the young audience by going Hollywood. Its very first feature film: Animal House, to be written by Kenney, Ramis, and Lampoon veteran Chris Miller. The movie's most important influence was the Lampoon's legendary 1964 High School Year Book Parody, which was written in 1974 almost entirely by Kenney and O'Rourke. An excruciatingly accurate send-up of all things dank and awful in high school, undercut by a nostalgia that was somehow both fond and cruel, the tone of the piece was easily transformed to a college setting, leading to the greatest campus comedy of all time.

Produced by Reitman and Simmons and directed by John Landis (Karp's detailed account of the making of the film reminds us how right Landis was for the job, and how expertly he guided the material), Animal House is thought to be Doug Kenney at his absolute best. A frustrated performer, hence his disgruntlement when Chase, Belushi, Murray, and the others became on-camera superstars, Kenney made sure he took a role as the geeky, mostly mute Stork who, in the grand finale, leads a marching band down a dead-end alley (given how off course much of the American comedy Kenney helped foster ended up, the symbolism here is keen). The film's commercial and critical success gave Kenney - increasingly unstable due to his fragile nature and a hearty cocaine habit -- the validation he was looking for.

It all came crashing down, though, with his next film, a little thing called Caddyshack, inspired by Brian Doyle-Murray's boyhood past as a golf caddy in Winnetka, Ill. (Doyle-Murray, long overshadowed by his brother Bill, was an essential part of the Lampoon's performance projects.) The script was to be written by Kenney, Doyle-Murray, and Ramis, with Kenney intent on making the film at least a somewhat smart satire of clashing cultures. Production was a train wreck, though, what with Ramis making his directorial debut on a shoestring budget, the complete befuddlement of Rodney Dangerfield trying (and failing) to learn movie acting, and most likely the cocaine which was rampant in 1979 and responsible for both the glory and the grating fuzzyheadedness of much of the popular entertainment of the era.

When it came time to edit, the mess of footage was first thought to be a lost cause, until producer Jon Peters -- portrayed in the unflattering light common to any story involving Jon Peters -- had a brainstorm. If Bill Murray was without question the runaway star of the movie as demented greenskeeper Carl Spackler, close behind was the gopher that was Spackler's adversary. Why not get the studio to cough up some more money, Peters asked, and recut the film around some additional gopher footage? Doug Kenney's smart satire was soon hijacked by a hand puppet, and his Hollywood adventure hit rock bottom. (The book's most poignant moment finds Kenney watching Airplane! during the Caddyshack meltdown, and mourning the fact that someone else was making the smart comedies instead of him.)

Caddyshack was a hit and remains to this day an influence for many of the industry's top comedy writers, but the experience broke Kenney. Shortly after its premiere, he and Chase flew to Hawaii to try and shake the cocaine and figure out what Kenney's next move should be. When Chase had to fly back to the States, an increasingly unpredictable Kenney was left alone. On August 29, 1980, he either jumped or fell to his death from a cliff in Kauai. The boy from Chagrin Falls fell, chagrined.

Karp (pictured bottom), who is based in Chicago, that critical nexus of American comedy -- the Murray brothers, Ramis, Belushi, and Hughes, along with the revered Second City troupe, have deep roots there -- can be guilty of being too enamored of his subject, and tries too strenuously in spots to imbue Kenney with a greatness that perhaps exceeds his body of work. But given the lasting subversive tone that Kenney and his cohorts imposed on American humor, and the comic empire which continues to flourish from its Lampoon origins, this ultimately sad tale offers a worthwhile glimpse into the harsh realities of the funny business.

A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever
Chicago Review Press
144 pages
$24.95

Buy it now

Tom Matthews wrote the Costa-Gavras film Mad City, starring Dustin Hoffman and John Travolta. His novel Like We Care is currently being adapted for the screen.

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