Letdowns of Long Ago

A list of disappointments. Michael O’Donoghue or Chris Cerf or somebody had this idea 50 years ago. The list contains no explanations, just the items themselves. Go down it and an implacable effect builds. Highbrow or lowbrow, left or right, commercial or cultural or political, everything falls before the same immensely unstated comment: this came up short. The judgment ranges, or bounces, from “Jack Paar’s comeback” to “Richard Nixon’s ‘Second American Revolution’” to “Sleep-teaching.” The year in question is 1973, so Odetta’s on the list, as are the Wage-Price Control Board, Earth Peoples Park, X-rated cartoons, the Young Lords, “Lemon scented anything,” and John Kerry, the latter showing early form at age 30. “Garry” Hart’s there too—a badly proofed entry but forward-looking. The boys could call these things like birdwatchers.

It's accurate but painfully cute to observe that National Lampoon, which published the list in its Encyclopedia of Humor, was itself a disappointment, as was the Encyclopedia and the career of its chief editor, O’Donoghue. This clunker of an irony is shoved in our face by the facts. The fellows who generated Lampoon gags were so pleased with themselves, official accounts are so pleased with them still, and then you find the pages of ink-darkened drudgery interspersed with black people’s lips and overgrown pubic hair and cats posed like centerfolds. The Lampoon published enough very good work that the place mattered, but the good stuff was found against a junkyard landscape. Dull mainstream art is bland, dull outrage art is dismal. But “Great Disappointments II” (there’s no “Great Disappointments I,” the title’s a goof) is one of the Lampoon’s occasional home runs and a fine representative of the team’s underrated snotty-young-highbrow side.

The Encyclopedia as a whole almost makes it. One admires the phrasing in Anne Beatts’ famous pseudo-ad for Volkswagen, the car that could’ve prevented Chappaquiddick (idea by Phil Socci): “It floats. The way our body is built, we’d be surprised if it didn’t. The sheet of flat steel that goes underneath every,” etc. The fake Volkswagen ad may be the pithiest example of the Lampoon’s strong suit: mimicking the voice and style of the adults to make it look like the official world has gone off the reservation. A special category within this approach, the creation of detailed trad art that shows reality-mocking situations involving mechanical contraptions, is generously represented here by “Battling Buses of World War II” (O’Donoghue, Alan Rose, P.J. O’Rourke) and two Bruce McCall articles, but this time around the crazy apparitions on display don’t seem wild enough to justify their full-page color splashes. Another subcategory, the cutesy-wholesome depiction of activities officially denied by the adults’ cutesy-wholesome version of life, is represented by Doug Kenney’s “First Blowjob.” The story seems typical of its sort, perhaps overwhelmingly so: “‘Gee,’ exclaimed Jeff as he began to lash out viciously at her unprotected body, ‘I’ve been wanting to try this ever since I first heard Negro music!’” Kliban and Edward Gorey appear, so that has to be good, but their entries here aren’t so different from what the fellows did elsewhere.

One does admire the Encyclopedia’s clever placement of the table of contents; under the alphabetical heading “Contents,” it falls about 20 pages in, with a full-page black-and-white photo of Churchill on the other side of the page. The idea is that a reader would browse the first 20 pages, then take it in his head to start flipping through the book, going item by item instead of page to page. When he made that leap, the contents would be there to tell him what was on offer; when he returned for further guidance, the Churchill page’s black-and-white would make the contents easy to find again. Anyway, I like to think that was the idea. O’Donoghue and P.J. O’Rourke, at that time O’Donoghue’s young buddy, sit on the living room floor and smoke their joints while they move pages about and plot their sideways reader-logic stratagems—it’s a 1970s image and I say good for them.