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If
you're not dying to read this book after reading just these two
paragraphs of Andrew Ferguson's review, then move along. Nothing
to see here.
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Forgive
me if I open on a personal note: The other night I started laughing so
hard I had to leave the room. My daughter was trying to study, and I
could see she was getting alarmed. It was kind of scary to me, too, if
you want to know the truth. For a moment there, as I made it into the
bathroom and shut the door, I thought my body was approaching organ
failure, not that I know what organ failure feels like, thank God. You
hear people say things like "I laughed so hard I cried" and "I nearly
fell out of my chair," but I had gone well beyond the crying stage by
the time my metabolism began to return to equilibrium. And then I
realized that I hadn't laughed so hard in 35 years, since I was a
teenager, reading National Lampoon.
American men of a certain age will recall the feeling. What I'd been
reading the other night was, no coincidence, National
Lampoon—specifically the monologue of a fictional New York cabbie named
Bernie X. He was the creation of Gerald Sussman, a writer and editor
for the Lampoon from its early days in the 1970s to its sputtering
death in 1998. Sussman, it is said, wrote more words for the magazine
than any other contributor. I'm sorry I can't quote any of his pieces
here. They're filthy.
If I'd gone ahead and died the other night, my wife would have known
whom to sue. "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead," in which Bernie X appears
...
Drunk,
Stoned, Brilliant, Dead
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Ferguson refers to "the bad driving out the good" in comedy with "a few exceptions—the Onion, a sitcom or two..."
ReplyDeleteI wonder which sitcoms he had in mind. Any suggestions?
To this day I recall an item in the "True News" section of NatLamp that had me howling with laughter.
ReplyDeleteThere was a Brazilian folk singer named Waldick Soriano (name is right but spelling is suspect) who, at a show was singing a song called "I Am Not A Dog." About halfway through, a dog came out on stage wearing a sign that said, "I Am Not Waldick Soriano." The singer got so upset he stopped the show.
I wish I'd been there.
my fav "True News" was the guy who had a contract on him was sitting between his 2 would-be assassins when the car hit a bump and both fired their guns, hitting each other. One was killed and the other is a paraplegic whom the intended victim sends "anniversary" cards to. Details may be off, but you get the gist.
ReplyDelete