FUNNY AND DEAD

National Lampoon was born in April 1970 and promptly metastasized in the gaseous belly of Vietnam-Watergate America, a not-sobenign humor tumor feeding off counter-cultural and over-the-counter-cultural idiocy. Fifty issues later it was selling a million copies a month, and through an early-Pleistocene form of file sharing called "passalong" it reached 8 to 10 times that many readers. Its lingua franca was parody, but playful mockery was never its aim. A saccharine send-up of a dime-store baby book became a Swiftian memorial to a Vietnamese infant machine-gunned at My Lai; a goofy midwestern yearbook (above) became an epically hilarious carpetbombing of the American high-school experience.

Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead (Abrams), out this month, is the first Lampoon book that celebrates the wild, eyeintoxicating diversity of its illustrations, photography, cartoons, comic strips, graphics—parodies of everything from matchbooks to Marvel Comics to modern art. In toto this volume is a testament to the dazzling design expertise of its formative art directors, Michael Gross and David Kaestle. Rick Meyerowitz, a charter member of the Lampoon crew (full disclosure: yours truly was also in that charmed circle), has in effect edited a magnificent 320-page issue of the magazine that reprints much of its finest work. And in brief, funny, and for once malice-free memoirs from its principals, the collection evokes the sparkling camaraderie that drove it. If you grew up with the Lampoon, this book is a trip down memory lane like no other; if not, it will demonstrate that the much-maligned 70s could produce humor that has never been surpassed.

TONY HENDRA