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A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever By Josh Karp ( Chicago Review Press )
Release Date: 2008-04-01
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List Price: $16.95
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Product Description
The ultimate biography of National Lampoon and its cofounder Doug Kenney, this book offers the first complete history of the immensely popular magazine and its brilliant and eccentric characters. With wonderful stories of the comedy scene in New York City in the 1970s and National Lampoon's place at the center of it, this chronicle shares how the magazine spawned a popular radio show and two long-running theatrical productions that helped launch the careers of John Belushi, Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, and Gilda Radner and went on to inspire Saturday Night Live. More than 130 interviews were conducted with people connected to Kenney and the magazine, including Chevy Chase, John Hughes, P. J. O'Rourke, Tony Hendra, Sean Kelly, Chris Miller, and Bruce McCall. These interviews and behind-the-scene stories about the making of both Animal House and Caddyshack help to capture the nostalgia, humor, and popular culture that National Lampoon inspires.
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 The Life & Death of a Comic Genius ( y2jk )
"The Life & Death of a Comic Genius"...so said the October 1981 cover of Esquire magazine about its story about Doug Kenney. As a huge fan of National Lampoon, "Saturday Night Live," and NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE, I was just starting my freshman year of college and looking forward to living my own Toga Party.
Doug Kenney died in August of 1981. Then John Belushi died of an overdose in March 1982. The party was quickly racking up a death toll.
But American humor would never be the same.
If you were a fan of anything I've mentioned, you should enjoy this book. As sad as Kenney's story ultimately is, I still found myself laughing at the memories of Lampoon stories. The 1964 NATIONAL LAMPOON YEARBOOK parody is one of the funniest things I've ever seen (fortunately, a reprint is available and I definitely recommend it).
I really didn't get too much more than I did from this book that I already got from the Esquire article. Kenney's novel "Teenage Commies from Outer Space" didn't survive and he obviously spent a lot of time alone so there are a lot of pages chronicling the bickering and backstabbing at the Lampoon offices while Kenney ran off to live in a tent or make millions of dollars in Hollywood.
There have been millions of laughs in the years since Lampoon and ANIMAL HOUSE...it's just too bad Bluto and the Stork weren't here to hear them.
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 Great History, Great Fun, Not a Great Book ( old_bone_books )
I'm incredibly happy that I read this book, but I found it a ragged read.
Karp's research appears to be fabulously comprehensive. Cobbling together all these recollections and many years of social and cultural history into a unified whole must have been quite a job. The result is a book that never quite decides if it is biography of Kenney or of the magazine.
Karp is at his weakest when moves away from reportage he enters into analysis of Kenney. He lacks the insight and the prose of a sophisticated biographer and for every insightful chunk of prose, there is a clunky deposit of pop psychology.
Still, the book is an utter success at creating much of the present-at-the-creation of the magazine and its many children (radio projects, theatre projects, films, tv...)
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 An Intelligent and Meaningful Biography ( blancobm )
Josh Karp's biography of Doug Kenney is as meaningful as it is engaging. He ressurects the memory of the almost forgotten humorist Doug Kenney. Mr. Kenney, perhaps most easily recognized for playing Stork in ANIMAL HOUSE, was also one of the principle authors of said film and a comedic giant in his own right. Karp's biography chronicles the many ways in which Kenney shaped American comedy in the late 20th century and then thoroughly recounts the mysterious circumstance surrounding his untimely death in 1980. The book is a must read for any student or devotee of THE HARVARD LAMPOON, THE NATIONAL LAMPOON, SECOND CITY, SNL and of course ANIMAL HOUSE.
Thank you for this long overdue story of this brilliant and complicated man who brought us so much joy in the form of unbridled laughter.
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This Is Where Modern American Humor Begins ( tlseigl )
Say the name "Doug Kenney", and you're likely to draw blank stares and numerous "who"s from the average comedy fan. But say "Animal House", "Caddyshack" or "National Lampoon", and they'll likely know what you're talking about. That's the time to tell them why the first name is so important.
Doug Kenney was a shadow figure in the history of comedy, a magazine writer and co-founder of the Lampoon's national version who managed to write some great articles, the scripts for two legendary comedy classics, and numerous other artifacts of his time all before his death in 1980, of an apparent suicide or accidential fall from a cliff in Hawaii. The fact that he died so young and so unheralded outside the insular world of comedy is a shame, especially considering what a legacy he left.
In Josh Karp's book, Kenney is even a minor character in his own life story, as whole portions of the book focus on the hangers-on at the Lampoon (various writers and other talents whose lights shined more brightly than that of Kenney or his co-founder, Henry Beard). But this is not a fault of the biographer: Kenney's own story is inevitably tied to the magazine and entertainment empire he helped found, and which owes him more than the current crop of "direct to DVD" releases and smarmy Paris Hilton cash-ins currently under the banner of "The National Lampoon".
Kenney's gift and his curse was his talent, one which produced masterpieces like "Animal House" and Nancy Reagan's "dating tips" but also let him down when it came to writing his "great American novel" of TACOS (Teenage Commies From Outer Space). Karp gives us a peek inside the mind of this elusive character and reveals a man of deep contradictions whose short, happy-sometimes-sad-othertimes life was offset by the impact he and his cohorts made on the world of American humor in the Seventies.
If you're an admirer of the Lampoon's golden era, or simply curious thanks to Animal House or Caddyshack, do yourself a favor and get this book. Whereas Tony Hendra's memoir of his time at the magazine (Going Too Far) is grandiose and self-congratulatory, this book offers a great history of one of the leading lights of American humor, and a man who arguably should be listed with the greats.
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A Futile and Stupid Gesture
The first book I have read straight through in a LONG time, and I read lot of books. Very acute social history of the period--having myself been a bright Midwestie (from Dacron, Ohio) in a an elite east coast college circa 1962-6, I could fully understand Kenny's insider/outsider conundrum and Beard's drive to succeed on his own terms. The mix of types and personalities on the the creative side was well deliniated, and their continual tension with the business end--but for whom they would not have had careers--was the heart of the story. The book appears to be thoroughly researched and clips along nicely. The "what happened in the year" intros to each segment were seriously useful. Anyone who watched SNL when it was funny or looked at the parody yearbook and mistook it for his or her own MUST read this book.
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