National Lampoon
November 1973
November, 1973. I remember Thanksgiving of that year was unusually warm and mild, with temperatures up near 70 degrees. Usually in the part of New York state where I lived at the time, Thanksgiving meant temperatures of 40 degrees or lower, sometimes with snow on the ground.
On the Billboard hot 100 chart for the week of the 17th, the No. 1 single was 'Keep On Trucking' by Eddie Kendricks. For the Billboard top 200 album chart, 'Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road' by Elton John was number one.
The number five album in the charts is the third comedy album released by Cheech and Chong: 'Los Cochinos' ('The Pigs'). It goes to show that fifty years ago, comedy albums were a major part of the pop culture.
Looking at the November, 1973 issue of National Lampoon, the magazine clearly is prospering, with a length of 104 pages and lots of advertising for high-end stereo equipment and record albums. That said, the Lampoon still was happy to run a full-page ad from the Johnson Smith company, a firm well-known to comic book readers of that era.......... For the Letters pages, the Lampoon editors display appalling taste by running a fake letter from none other than Dean Corll. During the early 1970s, Houston resident Corll was a serial killer of 27 young boys and men. Making fun of Corll's atrocities was a signal that for the Lampoon, there was no line it wouldn't cross when it came to sick humor............!The theme for this issue was sports, so the comic section of the magazine offers up a satirical treatment of the hallowed TV movie Brian's Song. First released in 1971, Brian's Song, about the untimely passing of Chicago Bears player Brian Piccolo, was a pop culture mainstay of the early 70s, so it was a natural target for the Lampoon.Elsewhere, George Plimpton gets satirized. He's mostly forgotten nowadays, but back in the 1960s and 1970s, Plimpton was a major sportswriter and media figure. In 1963 he finagled his way into playing football for the Detroit Lions, an experience he chronicled in his 1966 book Paper Lion. Next, the Lampoon offers up some 'specialized sports magazines'.Talented artist Bernie Wrightson provides a two-page cartoon / illustrator celebrating, in gruesome fashion, 'Bat Day':In her regular cartoon 'Trots and Bonnie', Shary Flenniken takes aim at the early 70s craze for Kung Fu and 'Oriental' philosophies.The issue closes with a full page ad for the National Lampoon Radio Hour. Along with the comedy albums National Lampoon's Radio Dinner and National Lampoon's Lemmings, the Radio Hour, which ran as a weekly from November 1973 to the end of 1974, had as cast members such future luminaries as Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Harold Ramis, and John Belushi, can be seen as the forerunner of what later would be Saturday Night Live. And that's how it was, it the realm of humor periodicals, fifty years ago..........
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