Response to my NatLamp screed...

My ramble on National Lampoon brought the following response from friend Garry Goodrow. As a member of The Committee in the late 60s, Garry was "present at the Creation" of Baby Boomer humor, so his thoughts on such stuff are always particularly interesting. Anyway, here's what Garry said:

"Matty Simmons, who was the owner and publisher of NatLamp in its glory years, had no idea what his youngsters were doing. He was mystified by their living arrangements and their attitudes, and all he knew was that the magazine was selling. Slowly, he came to believe that he had, somehow, something to do -- creatively! -- with its success.



After "Lemmings" [NatLamp's stage show, put together by Tony Hendra in 1973--MG] paid back his investment, and several stars from the magazine and the show had become famous, he moved to LA and became a movie producer. His first step was to buy a cowboy belt to go with his suit. That's what producers do: they put in money and then imagine that they did the work. In a way, they're right, because you can't do a magazine (or a movie) without money. But those of us who toil in the back room, where the "product" is actually produced, are very often satisfied with enough dough to pay the rent, while producers are typically aiming for world domination.



So: any new magazine (or any other theatrical venture) needs a backer with at least enough taste to trust the impulses of his "creative" staff. Entrepreneurs of that mettle are rare."



Now, me again. Matty comes in for a lot of crap from the old Lampooners--Beard famously called him "a stripper's agent," summing up the culture clash nicely--but one thing is for sure: at the beginning, he was the guy who believed in the venture and spent considerable money betting on the talents of Beard, Kenney, et al. And for that, Lampoon fans should be eternally grateful. Readers interested in the backstory of this are gleefully pointed to Tony Hendra's Going Too Far, as well as Simmons' own autobiography, Buy This Book Or We'll Shoot This Dog.