I think this is a every-male-reader-in-his-fifties-has-a-tedious-opinion-on-Gettsysburg thing, but it could also be that my editor brain - long-unused professionally, but once switched on, it can never be entirely silenced - is finding things to complain about with every possible novel I'm thinking about reading.
Or why not both? It could easily be both.
So I recently read That's Not Funny, That's Sick, Ellin Stein's [1] 2013 history of the National Lampoon comedy empire of the 1970s. Stein starts with the moment when the two founding editors of the magazine - Henry Beard and Doug Kenney - headed there from Harvard and ends with Kenney's death just over than a decade later.
In between, she pulls in a lot of threads of American comedy. She spends the first chapter mostly setting up the backstory of the Harvard Lampoon, which licensed "Lampoon" to the new national magazine and was the source of a bunch of writers and editors for the NatLamp over the years, and was particularly important in the way it shaped the early NatLamp.
The magazine itself is central for about the first half of the book, but Stein wants to tell the wider story, so the second half of the book is something of a back-and-forth, from the magazine itself to its immediate offshoots: the Lemmings stage show and later similar things, the radio shows, and, most importantly, the actors and writers that worked on the stage and radio shows and then went on to Saturday Night Live and, in some cases, massive fame.
Stein has a very wide remit here, but she's done a lot of original research - there's a long list of people she interviewed in the back matter, and she quotes from those interviews throughout the book. In fact, she seems to have talked to basically everyone still alive - with the inevitable exception of Henry Beard, who I don't think has ever agreed to any interviews, from anyone, about his time at NatLamp. (A Henry Beard biography would be an interesting thing, if anyone could pull it off - but I doubt it would be possible.)
There's a part of me that wanted a more in-depth look at the magazine itself, or maybe a tighter focus on the things that actually had "National Lampoon" in their title. But then Animal House has to be included, and then how do you get John Belushi from Lemmings to Animal House without mentioning SNL? And that's assuming that you keep Stein's basic framing of the first decade - if you run longer, you need to include Vacation, and you have the same problem with Chevy Chase. Stein's implied point, which I have to agree with, is that NatLamp was foundational to a strain of American comedy, and that strain went in blockbuster directions fairly quickly.
There are thus a lot of names in That's Not Funny, from Beard and Kenney to publisher Matty Simmons (and his son Michael, later a NatLamp editor himself) to their Harvard Lampoon predecessors and occasional collaborators Christopher Cerf and George Trow, to later NatLamp writers and editors like Tony Hendra and P.J. O'Rourke and Michael O'Donoghue to the actor/writers like Chase and Belushi and Bill Murray and his older brother Brian Doyle-Murray. Stein includes a twenty-page epilogue bringing the careers of all of the major figures up to the point when she wrote the book - that's an additional thirty years of career, though not all of them lived through all of it.
She also, I think, interviewed some people who did not want to be named, or at least not to have some quotes attributed to them. (Stein is a long-time journalist, which shows in her clean prose and facility in navigating this big, complex group of people with shifting loyalties and relationships to each other.) That's Not Funny is full of the voices of these people - named and unnamed, some from historical documents but largely from Stein's interviews around 2010 when she was writing this book.
The book generally focuses on that first decade, from the magazine's April 1970 launch issue to Kenney's death in August 1980, but does extend the timeline both at the beginning (to explain what the Harvard Lampoon was and to give a quick look at notable events and people of that magazine in the '60s) and the end (to untangle threads and talk about the major projects that especially the SNL actors were working on, even if those didn't emerge until 1983 or 4.)
That's Not Funny doesn't have a central premise or argument to make, other than "this was an important thread in American comedy, and here's how it worked out." Stein covers the schisms and differences of opinion, without, mostly, taking sides in things like the Hendra-O'Donoghue feud. Simmons in particular often has a different view of events than others, a view in which Matty Simmons is more central and important than other people believed, and Stein quietly underlines those moments without explicitly calling him out. She comes across as even-handed, honestly interested in this world and what these people did without being dazzled by any of it.
I suspect that may be because she's an outsider: NatLamp was '70s, aggressive, juvenile, masculine, American. Stein is based in London, a long-time journalist, and obviously female. I don't know if she grew up reading NatLamp at any point - I did, in its later, lesser years, though I also spent the early '80s collecting back issues as well - but, whatever her history, she didn't let that affect her viewpoint or understanding.
This is a fine, even-handed look at an important time in comedy, with lots of insight well-packaged and organized to tell the story in a clear, reasonable, honest way. There may be better books about SNL - there have been a lot there - but there's nothing that comes close about NatLamp.
[1] Pointless digression: this author is only the second person I've heard of with the name of Ellin, after my wife's great-aunt. (The great-aunt spelled it with only one L, which is apparently the Danish spelling. No idea if two Ls means Norwegian or Macedonian or Nepalese.) That may have been one reason why I noticed this book in the first place, actually.
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