National Lampoon February 1974

National Lampoon

February, 1974

Let's step back in time 51 years, to February, 1974. 

 

The February 23, 1974 Billboard Top 200 album chart shows none other than Bob Dylan with the number one selling album in the USA, Planet Waves.

 

The latest issue of the National Lampoon is out on the newsstands, with the theme of 'Strange Sex.'

 

Perhaps sensing an opportune moment, Bob Dylan's record company bought some full-page advertising for Dylan's back catalogue:

 

Elvis (!) still was releasing albums, although they were mediocre, and got zero play on the album oriented rock (AOR) stations then dominating the FM airwaves. If you wanted to listen to Elvis on the radio, you went to the AM frequency and the Top Forty stations.

It was bands like ELO, 10CC, the Jackson Five, and Foghat getting attention on the AOR FM stations, and they would come to be chart-toppers as the decade wore on. Compared to them, Elvis and Dylan increasingly were old fashioned and out-of-date.......

This February issue highlights 'Strange Sex,' more of a Matty Simmons marketing come-on rather than anything really substantive. Although the Lampoon staff did do something transgressive:

 

As part of the Nostalgia Craze of the seventies, Marilyn Monroe came back into prominence, mainly through the bestselling 1973 photography book (below) authored by Norman Mailer, who was infatuated with Monroe and saw her as something of a timeless Muse and eternal avatar of female beauty and sexuality.

Satirizing the Monroe craze in a truly deviant fashion, the Lampoon staff featured a '1974 Marilyn Monroe Calendar' which consisted of a gruesome parody, artfully rendered by Melinda Bordelon, of Monroe's 1953 picture in Playboy magazine. 

 

Monroe, the Lampoon staff were telling Mailer and his fellow nostalgia enthusiasts, was dead and gone. Long dead, and long gone........!

 

 

The four-color comic insert in this February issue is 'First Lay Comics,' which features a primordial Animal House storyline from Doug Kenney and Joe Orlando. 

 

[Note to modern-day readers: David Eisenhower was the grandson of President Dwight Eisenhower, and a frequent target of derision from the Lampoon and the counterculture for two reasons; first, in 1968 he married Julie Nixon; and second, in 1970 he enlisted in the Navy Reserve, thus avoiding being called up in the draft and possibly serving in Vietnam. The counterculture saw this as a blatant act of political privilege.] 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'Boxed In,' the short story by Chris Miller, starts off as a satirical look at horny teens: Benny is hoping to score during a hot-and-heavy makeout session on the couch with the luscious Suzette Kornfeld. However, when Benny arrives at the Kornfeld home, he must endure some odd remarks from Mr. Kornfeld about his daughter, including "Do you ever...squeeze her tushie ?"

 

When Mr. Kornfeld and his wife head upstairs  to give the young couple the living room and some privacy, Benny can't help but wonder what is going on in the Kornfeld family.

 

The story takes a real turn into horror in its closing paragraphs. Another great entry from Miller, and another reason why I'm hoping that someday he can get permission from the current owners of the Lampoon property to release a compilation of his work for the magazine.

Keeping to the theme of 'strange sex' (i.e., gay) editors Tony Hendra and Sean Kelly (?) do a 'Homo Funnies.'

And we of course have the comics and cartoons that are present in every issue of the Lampoon.

 

 

 

That's what you got for your 85 cents, back in February of '74..............