Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon

Douglas Tirola’s doc does the era and National Lampoon justice. The tone is sharp and freewheeling, the craziness is infectious and the pace is cocaine-quick.

Douglas Tirola’s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead is a frenetic, rough-edged, unapologetic tribute to the Lampoon, featuring some amazing archival footage, nifty bits of animation and dozens of straightforward talking-head interviews that crackle and pop.

Energetic, laugh-stuffed and very colorful (it would be a feat to make a dull film about these people).

For the most part, though, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead spends its time celebrating an era in which the comedy frontier was distasteful, brutally honest, and innocent at the same time.

Satire, parody, racist skewerings of racism, sacred cows slaughtered, silly slides down the slippery slope into Anti-Semitism. And breasts. Lots and lots of breasts!

Douglas Tirola’s documentary is brisk and entertaining, if not especially thoughtful.

It mistakes touch-and-go navel-gazing for comprehension, as if speaking to as many subjects as possible produces an inherently compelling take.

A hilarious, fast-paced (sometimes a little too fast-paced) history of National Lampoon magazine and all of its spinoff projects in radio, theater, books and movies. This insightful, irreverent documentary effectively chronicles the rise of this comedic phenomenon and the impact it had on shaping the humor of myriad entertainment vehicles in the four decades since its birth. Tune in -- and try to keep up with it!

Drunk, stoned, brilliant, dead. Each of these adjectives applies to the staff of National Lampoon, the 1970s’ bawdiest shock humor magazine. Launched at the dawn of the decade, the Lampoon routinely tested the limits of good taste, pushing comedy (and pop culture) to the brink with coarse language, taboo subject matter, gratuitous nudity and a determined, offend-all-comers core philosophy. Even in a modern light, many of its wildest essays still hit like a loaded glove, dark and daring enough to startle the most seasoned off-color connoisseur, so I can’t even imagine what their reception must have been like half a century prior. Actually, I guess I don’t need to imagine. If those racy jokes hadn’t found their audience, I’d have never fallen in love with films like Vacation or Animal House: highly influential smash hits which bore the company name and featured many of its wittiest graduates. Indeed, the mag (and its broader media family) enjoyed countless moments of brilliance; shrewd, note-perfect ideas that moved a heavy needle and helped shape the character ****, cynical generation. Obscenely versatile, each volume could shift from inane visual puns to precise political satire and back again, while still leaving a few spare pages for photo essays and freak-out comics. The fuel for such daring fits of inspiration, however, also lay in those four opening words: the team was drunk or stoned roughly twenty-four hours a day. Again, bear in mind the era. Times were changing and heavy drug use was fashionable, particularly amongst the hip, young trend-setters of the day. In the mag's infancy, their excessive inebriation made these guys more relatable, more in-touch with their audience. It also left them increasingly burnt out as Nixon begat Ford, Carter and Reagan, and the national mood shifted. This documentary covers those bases, adding tasteful animation to liven a selection of comic strips and page layouts for the screen, but it lacks the furious energy and off-kilter showmanship that made its group subject such a unique entity. Maybe the interviewees are to blame. It’s been more than half a lifetime, after all, and no manic twenty-something has the same juice at seventy years of age. Not to mention the fourth word in our opening line: many key contributors, like co-founder Doug Kenney and breakout superstar John Belushi, are now long dead. Others declined to participate. That’s not really the film’s fault, but the collective absence greatly detracts from the whole. Many of the talking heads who *are* in attendance, parroting points in place of the missing and/or departed, were only bit players or famous (but uninvolved) fans, unable to add extra depth or tap into the old spirit. They’re just here to gush. Chevy Chase is the one exception, a famous alum who actually showed up and told new stories, but his interview segments always seem a hair too short. A disappointingly bland, listless, by-the-numbers history lesson regarding a studio, and an age, that was anything but.

Fascinating, but its this sort of degeneracy that has left the culture in such a mess.