George W. S. Trow died this week at 63, and every obit mentions his career at The New Yorker, his reputation as a social critic and author of several books. Briefly mentioned, if at all, is the fact that he was an early editor of The National Lampoon.
Barely remembered as the brilliant source of cutting satire it once was, The Lampoon's name has taken a beating in recent times, sold and resold to various entrpreneurs who see it only as a generic title to stick onto lame tit-and-ass comedies. That Trow died the same week National Lampoon's Van Wilder: The Rise Of Taj opens is a bitter irony he would have surely noted.
Because the magazine, as conceived by its earliest editors, Henry Beard, Douglas Kenney, Michael O'Donaghue and Trow, was the farthest thing imaginable from that. Sure, The Lampoon was a reliable source of tit jokes, but Trow and Beard envisioned it as a sort of counterculture version of The New Yorker, a place where the finest comedic writers and cartoonists of their generation could find a voice. The writing staff assembled in the early days included Tony Hendra, John Boni, Christopher Cerf and, briefly, Paul Krassner. Cartoonists who contributed regularly included Gahan Wilson, Vaughan Bode, R.O. Blechman and Edward Gorey.
Social satire was the order of the day. Though The Lampoon could be political, attacking the left as well as the right, most of its best pieces tended to be assaults on seemingly benign targets, like My Weekly Reader or Life magazine, finding the despair and conformity being peddled to Americans under the guise of normalcy. And however high-minded Trow could get in his later days as he railed against the corrosive influences of popular culture (as stated most succinctly in his book In The Context Of No Context), his work at The Lampoon revealed he was profoundly influenced by it, and perhaps retained a grudging affection for it all.
The time Trow spent at The Lampoon was relatively short, and a small part of a lengthy career. But it's a good legacy to have. Such exemplars of smart comedy as The Daily Show, the Onion and Borat would never have happened without it, and if it crashed and burned too early, Trow didn't care. He decided to crawl up into an ivory tower, and stay there until his dreaded popular culture forced him out, turning him into a despairing, drifting lost soul. If you want to remember him, track down an old Lampoon, read one of his pieces like Our White Heritage, and laugh your ass off.
