P.J. O'Rourke in The Onion...

The Onion recently ran this interview with P.J. O'Rourke, timed (I suppose) to the recent rerelease of the National Lampoon High School Yearbook Parody, which PJ co-edited with Doug Kenney back in 1974.



While we're on the subject, and sorry to fulfill everybody's expectations by saying so ("Ahh, nobody knows how to do print humor anymore..." gripe gripe gripe), but the Yearbook repackaging is a huge botch. The original is selling for $100 a pop on eBay; all you had to do was reprint it exactly, maybe with a little introduction, or a little behind-the-scenes, or whatever. Or, even better, put it in hardcover (the original was on magazine-type paper stocks, and perfect-bound) but make it look like a genuine hardcover yearbook. But instead, they put it in hardcover, and fucked around with the design. The original was a masterpiece of form following the joke; the reprint looks like your standard 'yuk-yuk-yuk' humor book, done by people who either don't care or aren't very smart. And while we're on the topic: It speaks volumes--about the timidity of publishers, and perhaps the oversensitiveness of readers--that you can't show a bare ass on a cover anymore. That was a great, punchy joke, and the cheerleader's bare ass was the punchline. A joke without a punchline is worthless and confusing--and that decision suggests that whoever was behind this clearly didn't understand what they were doing. So Wal-Mart won't stock it; that's publicity, Franken-style. The book could immediately raise the issue of how uptight the once rascally Baby Boomers have gotten--that's a bad thing?



The thing about National Lampoon after 1975 wasn't that it deteriorated. There was plenty of funny stuff in it for decades. It's that whoever was in charge lacked the intellectual rigor to do it right, or get people who would, and let them do their thing. Even the blurred and asinine Lampoon made some money, but they could've made so much more. It's like trading store coupons in for their cash value.



Not much to say about the interview; I found it interesting that PJ didn't mention Doug Kenney's name once--s'pose he's tired of all the "genius" talk, and after 25 years who could blame him? Whatever else one thinks of PJ's stuff, he survived where Doug didn't. There's no small value in that.



It seems that Michael O'Donoghue, and not Kenney, is the name that's remembered by young comedy writers today. That's somewhat predictable, since Kenney never entered the TV racket, and the current point of reference and coin of the realm; O'Donoghue benefits from the reflected glory of early SNL. And also his Dark Prince persona appeals to a certain callow type of aspirant--he's a simple character, or appears to be, while Kenney ain't. I've been told that O'Donoghue was creatively out of gas by the time he left Lampoon (mid-74); whether that's true or not, there was certainly a kind of calcification that had set in. Anyway...this is like looking at old baseball cards...