Word: kenney
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Screenplay by Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller...
Today National Lampoon, the brainchild of Douglas Kenney, Henry Beard and Robert Hoffman, is a show-biz empire of comedy. Not only has the magazine been a huge success (circ. 600,000), but it has also launched popular spinoffs: books, records (three Grammy Award nominations), stage revues, a radio show. Better still, the Lampoon has nurtured a new generation of comic talent. Many of the creators of NBC's Saturday Night Live, including Michael O'Donoghue, the Chief Writer, are Lampoon alumni. That show's Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time-Players Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gilda Radner...
...such tasteless license can come some of the best comic writing in the country. Four years ago, O'Rourke and Kenney edited the Lampoon's most successful publishing project to date (1.6 million copies sold): the 1964 High School Yearbook Parody. A precursor of Animal House (also co-written by Kenney), this work was a replica of a second-rate school annual, right down to the pushy ads for local merchants and the classmates' autographed cliches in the margins. The book is so rich in social detail that it brings a whole fictional town, Dacron, Ohio...
...deserves particular credit for the growth of the Lampoon's diverse enterprises, it is Matty Simmons, 51, the man whom Hoffman, Kenney and Beard approached in 1970. A co-founder of the Diners' Club, Simmons quickly saw the need for the Lampoon. "Even the Soviets had adult humor magazines," he recalls, "but we hadn't had one for 30 or 40 years. Once the Lampoon came out, it was the fastest-growing magazine in the country...
Every smirking teenager who has grown up enough to be bored by Mad magazine knows the rest of the story. Those funny Harvard boys, among them Douglas Kenney and Michael O'Donohue have parlayed their National Lampoon into an established success. Their magazine has prospered largely because it was willing to be unconventional; the staff was willing to trample over almost all boundaries of taste, just as they had at college, in the pursuit of laughs. Outrageous sexism, casual racism, sickness and, at first, the rare ability to keep their perspective combined to make the first few years of National...