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Out of such tasteless license can come some of the best comic writing in the country. Four years ago, O'Rourke and Kenney edited the Lampoon's most successful publishing project to date (1.6 million copies sold): the 1964 High School Yearbook Parody. A precursor of Animal House (also co-written by Kenney), this work was a replica of a second-rate school annual, right down to the pushy ads for local merchants and the classmates' autographed cliches in the margins. The book is so rich in social detail that it brings a whole fictional town, Dacron, Ohio, to life. The new Sunday Newspaper Parody is the Dacron Republican-Democrat (slogan: One of America's Newspapers). The two parodies take aim at small-town American life in the '70's with the same spirit, and occasionally some of the pathos, of Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson in the '20's.
If one man deserves particular credit for the growth of the Lampoon's diverse enterprises, it is Matty Simmons, 51, the man whom Hoffman, Kenney and Beard approached in 1970. A co-founder of the Diners' Club, Simmons quickly saw the need for the Lampoon. "Even the Soviets had adult humor magazines," he recalls, "but we hadn't had one for 30 or 40 years. Once the Lampoon came out, it was the fastest-growing magazine in the country."
It was Simmons who raided Chicago's satirical Second City troupe to bring Belushi to New York for the 1973 revue National Lampoon's Lemmings. He in turn eventually brought along Radner and Harold Ramis (another Animal House co-screenwriter). Then counter-raiding began. For Saturday Night Live, TV Producer Lome Michaels hired away half the cast of Lemmings' sequel, The National Lampoon Show. When Belushi departed, Simmons replaced him with Meat Loaf, then an obscure rock singer.
These days Simmons races around in yellow aviator-shape glasses and flashy shirts, hopping between Manhattan and Hollywood. He has a twelve-movie deal at Universal, and will follow Animal House with a film version of Lemmings. Veteran Lampoon writers, in various combinations, are at work on film scripts for Simmons and themselves.
Those writers, now in their 30's, remain an elite and clubby group: bright children of the '60's who have put their angst to work for fun and profit. Explains Kenney, 31 and a Lampoon-made millionaire: "The Harvard Lampoon was my 'animal house.' I didn't want it to end, so I got Matty to make it a national magazine. Now, as I look back at the past decade, I see a group of about 30 people that I have worked with again and again. I expect to work with them for the next ten years. We were the generation that discovered that alienation is funny. We found that if you take an existentialist, add a hot Camaro, a skateboard and a lot of dope, you have a working, vital existentialist who can get a job at the National Lampoon."