Reviewing The Review

Mike is having trouble posting at his site, so for your enjoyment and edification, here's his take on a recent New York Times review of a new biography by Josh Karp of National Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney.

A friend of mine, Josh Karp, has recently written a biography of Doug Kenney, the co-founder of National Lampoon magazine. Maybe you know the name, maybe you don’t: Kenney has never really gotten his due in the mainstream media, partly because he died very young (at 33), and partly because Lorne Michaels didn’t.

Among comedy writers, there’s never been any question that Kenney is seminal—he founded things, gave birth to careers, created templates still in use today. With National Lampoon, he helped create the last great American magazine of the 20th Century. With “Animal House,” he helped create the modern Hollywood comedy. By going to Hollywood, he paved the way for the explosion of Harvard humorists that has given us everything from Letterman to Conan to “The Simpsons.” A lot of what’s good—and bad—about modern American comedy has some connection to Doug Kenney.

As much as I think Josh’s book is worth celebrating, I got a sinking feeling when he emailed me a link to a review of A Futile and Stupid Gesture in The New York Times Book Review. The type of comedy that Kenney practiced was subversive in the most threatening sense of that overused word: it didn’t destroy institutions, it repurposed them. It turned places like Harvard into Trojan Horses, spewing out startling new stuff. Maybe this method doesn’t really work; certainly after Kenney’s death, everything he did began to go to seed. But in its day it was thrilling—and antithetical to smug, tightassed institutions like The New York Times. They’d hate the book, right?

But maybe not. Today, Kenney’s cohort—the people who laughed so hard they made him rich—is running our vast machines, even the Times. Tom Shales genuflects in Lorne’s direction every fifth year. Kenney’s collaborators, people like Harold Ramis, come in for fawning, fat profiles. How would Doug be treated in the Paper of Record? Would his type of humor—the type of humor I write, the type of humor that dominates our culture, for good and ill—be given its due? And if it did, would that be a signal it was time for comedy to (please God) finally move on?

So I read it.

The Times’ first mistake was assigning its television critic, Virginia Heffernan, to write the review. Since TV was the only medium Kenney never worked in, I can only assume the thought process went something like this: TV is inconsequential low culture, Kenney’s work is inconsequential low culture—hey Virginia, can you squeeze this in?

We know where Heffernan’s head is at from the very first sentence, when she name-drops not only Milton but Henry Miller’s wife—you know, the one who got busy with Anais Nin—just so we know what she was doing while we were watching “Animal House.” Then she goes on to dismiss the people who revere Kenney: crass comedy nerds and money-mad Hollywood types, certainly not cultured folks like you and I, dear reader. (Just the people who create vast amounts of our national culture.) Heffernan then goes on to critique Josh’s prose style, which is fair game, but quickly grows tired of actually talking about the book. If we talked about it in too much detail, you might get the impression that it was worth our time. Which it’s not. Because it’s dirty stupid boy humor and who likes that? Certainly not Virginia Heffernan, and you shouldn’t either, not if you want to be taken seriously by people of intellect and substance.

When Heffernan wrote, “So what did Kenney and National Lampoon really change?” I perked up. Surely she’d compare “Laugh-In” to “SNL,” or the family-friendly comedy records of the 50s and 60s to “Lemmings” or “Radio Dinner,” or Shawn’s soporific New Yorker humor to Dave Barry. Surely she’d mention “American Pie,” or “South Park.” Surely she’d mention all the little-known people that Lampoon incubated, like John Hughes and Jeff Greenfield (!) and Christopher Guest.

She mentions none of this. According to Heffernan, Kenney and Lampoon’s current influence can be summed up in Kevin Smith movies and a show on MTV2. Nice touch, that—not even MTV, but MTV2. Either she’s stupid (and we know she’s not, because of the Milton reference), or she just doesn’t care, and if that’s the case, why didn’t her editor reassign it to someone who did?

I must admit I tuned out after that; Heffernan’s bizarre and strangely angry conclusions reminded me too much of an old girlfriend who looked down on anyone who didn’t like madrigals as much as she did. In the last, desperate thrashes of the review, Heffernan singles out two Lampooners—P.J. O’Rourke, and the “brilliant” (that’s Timese for “on my co-op board”) Bruce McCall—for special praise. In her distorted world, these two fellas are the real innovators while people like Kenney are ephemeral. The funny thing is that, before Doug Kenney, Bruce McCall worked in advertising; whatever your opinion of McCall’s chunks of Upper West Side whimsy, without NatLamp, he wouldn’t be writing them. And Doug Kenney taught P.J. O’Rourke everything—everything—he knows. P.J.’s smart enough to know that, and probably humble enough to admit it, too.

So anyway. Unlike most of the readers of this blog, I know very little about important things; I don’t know much about politics, or the Middle East, or the War in Iraq. What I do know about is prose comedy, and this review, though a trifle, brought something home for me, for the umpteenth time: I wish I lived in a world where the people held up as experts could be trusted to know what the hell they were talking about. Or, failing that, at least cared enough to educate themselves about their topic. It doesn’t seem like much to ask. Maybe that’s the big deal about Heaven.