By his own admission, Al Jean missed out on the glory years of the National Lampoon. He joined the magazine’s staff in 1981, after the Radio Hour and Animal House and the departure many Lampoon stars to SCTV and Saturday Night Live.
But it was still a great place to start one’s career, and like many Lampoon alumni Jean and his writing partner Mike Reiss eventually wound up working on some unknown FOX cartoon called The Simpsons. These days, Jean spends his time running that show – but he was happy to take a few minutes to talk about his participation in Douglas Tirola’s new documentary Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story Of The National Lampoon.
Is it strange to see a documentary about the National Lampoon after all this time?
It’s great. It’s like, you know, a high-school reunion that I didn’t go to. [laughter]
It’s incredible how heavily the next four decades of comedy were influenced by the Lampoon.
P.J. O’Rourke [said] it’s the roots of comedy, and the trunk is Saturday Night Live … or if I can compare it to a river instead of a tree, it’s Second City merging with the Lampoon sensibility. It’s really hard to find an American comic institution that didn’t have those two in it. Certainly The Simpsons [does].
You were on the ground floor of The Simpsons, but the National Lampoon was already an established property when you joined its staff in the early 80s. Were you intimidated by its history?
I definitely thought it was revolutionary prior to my getting there. Brian McConnachie and Michael O’Donoghue and Bruce McCall, as well as the founders, did these amazing things. What’s great about the movie is that some of these guys might be a little less familiar [now], like McConnachie and McCall, and even O’Donoghue, are getting their moment.
You and Mike Reiss joined the magazine in 1981, straight out of college. When did you feel like you were properly a part of it?
I would say, I feel like I’m a part of it now. [laughter] At Harvard, we were required to get issues of National Lampoon, because the Harvard Lampoon owned the word “lampoon”. And we’d read these bound volumes and go, “Oh my god, these are the greatest things in the world and why isn’t our magazine this funny?” And I was one of the few Harvard guys after the original wave to go to National Lampoon there was a nickname somebody coined, the black-tie hordes. And when I was there, although there were really funny guys like Ted and Tod Carroll, there was a really palpable sense that a) the best days were behind it and b) the real security would be found in television. And when you think television is a place of security, then you’re really in an insecure place. [laughter] You can see the writing on the wall …
What was happening?
In 1981, [humour] magazines that you had to buy were already being superseded by [comedy] videos, and in our low-rent version of Boogie Nights the dictate of the magazine was to [include] more and more soft-core sex so it could be sold in places that Playboy and Penthouse weren’t. But that was less and less connected with making it funny. I’d say we were at the very sombre years of the humour magazine industry.
And the audience was changing as well.
We were shocked, there was an audience survey that said the average reader was something like 12. And it was mostly boys who were reading it, because they couldn’t buy Penthouse or Playboy but they could buy the National Lampoon. And meanwhile we’re doing parodies of Mark Twain [laughter] for boys just looking for boobs.
The bloom was off the rose, then.
It was very exciting for about a year, when we were there physically. And again, you know, even people there said to us, “You’d be better off going to Hollywood, if you got an offer.” So we did.
And the two of you eventually ended up as writers on The Simpsons, which was this weird upstart cartoon on the FOX network – but it had some of the same traits as the Lampoon, like biting the hand that fed it.
Well, that never changed. We still take shots at Fox they never told us to stop. [laughter] The only thing that happened with us which was a little different was we really stayed the same, as much as anything can – really, as much as possible for an institution of 27 years. But the landscape has morphed so that on the one hand it’s a little more politically correct, and on the other hand there are extremely vulgar animated shows that make us look like a semi-conservative option – when we’re not doing anything really different, that wasn’t outrageous 25 years ago. We don’t like changing the characters or moving them.
Speaking of changing the characters, earlier this week the news broke that Mr. Burns’s assistant Waylon Smithers would be coming out this season. Is that even news? It feels like the show outed him decades ago.
What’s so funny lately is I’ll make an offhand comment – like, someone will say “If you had to pick a year the show would end, when would it be?” And I’ll say, “Logically season 30, but I don’t have any guarantees.” And then the next headline I read is: “Show Ends In Season 30.” We have a really good episode a writer did where Smithers realizes Burns does not give him anything that he wants emotionally, and he’s been blind all these years, and finds somebody else. But you’re correct – the rest of the Springfield landscape is pretty aware Smithers is gay, it’s only Burns who has no clue. The [actual] story is a man who has loved someone in vain trying to break free of this relationship. That’s the story.
That sounds a lot more interesting, actually.
Yeah. It’s just funny, I’m doing an interview like this and I say one little thing and the next thing I know – I’m not exaggerating, this is really the truth – it’ll be a headline in Uruguay. We had a little thing where I said the couple separated, you know, and it was part of a longer plot that then became a dream within a dream within a dream, and literally then everybody goes “Simpsons To Break Up!” So I knew I had to rebut that, and make sure people didn’t think that we were going to permanently break them up. We never do anything permanently. Let me be clear. [laughter]
Gotcha. Don’t worry, I have you covered.
I’m sure you do! It’s not even the fault of the interviewer! CNN grabs, like, two words and turns it into a clickbait headline.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
