Book Review: 'A Stupid and Futile Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever'
by Josh Karp
This trade paperback version (402 pp.) of ‘A Stupid and Futile Gesture’ was published by the Chicago Review Press in 2006. It was the first book published by Josh Karp, a journalist and humorist.
In June, 1969, three young men, all recent graduates of Harvard University, sat down in a room in a Manhattan office building with Matty Simmons, the president of magazine publisher 21st Century Communications. Henry Beard, Doug Kenney, and Rob Hoffman all had worked on the Harvard Lampoon and were excited by the prospect of publishing a monthly magazine derived from the Lampoon’s approach to humor.
For his part, Simmons, who with co-founder Leonard Mogel had earned success with Weight Watcher’s magazine, was intent on building a portfolio of magazines. For Simmons and Mogel, if any or all such magazines were hipper than Weight Watchers, so much the better.
From the June meeting emerged the magazine National Lampoon, with Beard, Kenney, and Hoffman serving as editors. Of the three, it would be Kenney who stuck around the longest, from the inaugural issue in April 1970, until late in 1978, at which time the triumph of the movie Animal House launched him into a career as a producer and writer of comedy films.
‘A Stupid and Futile Gesture’ is both a biography of Doug Kenney (1946 - 1980) and a history of the National Lampoon during the abovementioned interval. Along with relating the life and times of Kenney, author Karp provides plentiful anecdotes and observations about the other people who worked at the Lampoon, and the Hollywood players who collaborated with Kenney on the films ‘Animal House’ and ‘Caddyshack’.
‘Stupid’ is a three-star book. I knew before sitting down to read it that it is a hagiography, rather than a biography; the author’s admiration for Kenney is apparent in almost every paragraph. But I was less prepared for the pop psychologizing that Karp too-frequently invokes:
At twenty-four, he’d [i.e., Kenney] perfected the role that everyone wanted him to play. He was the sensitive child with extrasensory perception for what everyone was feeling at all times, always trying to smooth things over with a laugh. At Harvard he’d shed the nerdy kid persona and become a star. And with that came expectations – the expectation that he’d always be perfect. So as his professional life began to soar and his personal life cam apart, he fell to pieces, not knowing how to be perfect anymore. The failure…..of his marriage must have echoed his inability to fit in as a child, his inability to make his parents understand and love him the way he needed.
These expositions tend to wear after a while.
Also detracting from the book is the author's insistence that the early years of the Lampoon were its best years. The reality is that in its first several years, the magazine was rarely as funny as it sought to be. There was an over-reliance on lengthy text pieces by Beard and other editors and contributors, that were dull and displayed an abstruse, highbrow approach to humor. This may have been effective in the ivied walls of Harvard and its environs, but were flaccid when compared to the transgressive comedy of the underground comix then sweeping the counterculture.
Looking through my collection of old Lampoons printed from 1970 to 1973, I'm fortunate to find one, rarely two, features per issue that genuinely are funny. And while I agree with Karp that Kenney's pieces are usually among the funnier ones, with a subversive quality that Beard lacked, it's also true that quite a few of Kenney's pieces were duds.............
Where 'Stupid' has value is in its observations about the day-to-day life in the magazine's offices and the perspectives of the staff (which, unsurprisingly, sometimes are at odds with those of Matty Simmons in his 1994 memoir 'If You Don't Buy this Book, We'll Kill this Dog').
The book does avoid viewing Kenney's behavior in the last year of his life (when his cocaine use frequently made him unpleasant to be around) through rose-colored glasses. Readers will have to make their own conclusions as to whether, had he lived, Kenney would have progressed in his career, or simply continued on the path of self-destruction that he seemed to embrace at the time of his death in August, 1980.
Summing up, hardcore fans of the National Lampoon likely will find 'A Stupid and Futile Gesture’ to be a rewarding, if at time ponderous, read. But if you are someone who has simply a passing interest in the Lampoon and its unique milieu of 1970s humor, then Matty Simmons's book is the recommended choice.
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