Word: lampooner
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...NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE...
Before National Lampoon's Animal House, no one ever had the guts to make an honest movie about college life. From Good News to Love Story, from Campus Confidential to The Paper Chase, Hollywood has chosen to regard the campus as a haven for earnest young lovers, gung-ho jocks, inspirational professors and tortured class losers. Animal House, a riotous farce set at fictional Faber College in 1962, presents quite another picture. The film's so-called animals-the inhabitants of Faber's most disreputable fraternity house-are a filthy, outrageous lot. They guzzle and spit beer...
Animal House is the first film project of the National Lampoon, the magazine that prides itself on raising sophomoric yuks to a fearlessly nasty pitch. The movie has the same strengths and weaknesses as its parent publication. At its best it perfectly expresses the fears and loathings of kids who came of age in the late '60's; at its worst Animal House revels in abject silliness. The hilarious highs easily compensate for the puerile lows. A few dumb gags about ROTC thugs and big breasts do not detract from the film's scabrous assaults on undergraduate...
...story of these former Harvard yuk-hustlers forms only a sidelight, albeit an interesting one, to the success of Animal House. To put it simply, it is a truly funny film. It concerns the manic antics of a renegade frat at an uptight small college in 1962, and all Lampoon targets get theirs--sex, immature (but funny) pranks, assholes, preppies, and callow youth. The story line, if there is one, revolves around the frantic partying and rowdiness of the frat, Delta, and the efforts of a ruthless college dean (of Faber College, whose motto is "Knowledge is Good...
...black bar. All in fun, supposedly, but there really is nothing funny about perpetuating the stereotypes that lead to racism, even casual racism. And at times the noticeable tendency of the writers to repeat old gags becomes annoying--even some of the names are lifted directly from the Lampoon's 1964 yearbook parody of a few years abck--but most of these complaints are of the nit-picking nature. No doubt about it, this movie is quite funny, and definitely destined to bring even more cash into the National Lampoon coffers...