Download That's Not Funny, That's Sick: The National Lampoon and the Comedy Insurgents Who Captured the Mainstream AudioBook Free
The untold history behind a revolution in American humor Labor Day, 1969: Two recent college graduates move to New York to edit a fresh journal called the Country wide Lampoon. Over another decade, Henry Beard and Doug Kenney, along with a loose amalgamation of fellow satirists such as Michael O'Donoghue and P. J. O'Rourke, popularized a good, caustic, ironic brand of humor that has been the dominant speech of American humor. Ranging from sophisticated politics satire to wide raunchy jokes, the Country wide Lampoon unveiled iconoclasm to the mainstream, reselling millions of copies to an audience both large and committed. Its excursions into live shows, information, and radio helped condition the anarchic earthiness of John Belushi, the suave slapstick of Chevy Chase, and the deadpan wit of Expenses Murray and brought them together with other talents such as Harold Ramis, Christopher Guest, and Gilda Radner. A fresh generation of humorists surfaced from the crucible of the Lampoon to help create Saturday Night Live and the important film Dog House, among many other notable humor landmarks. Journalist Ellin Stein, an observer of the picture since the early 1970s, pulls on a wealth of exposing firsthand interviews with the architects and impresarios of the comedy explosion to offer crucial information into a raucous ethnic change that still echoes today. Filled with insider testimonies and set up against the roiling politics and cultural landscape of the 1970s, That's Not Crazy, That's Sick and tired should go behind the jokes to see the fights, the celebrations, the collaborations - and your competition - among this fraternity of the self-consciously disenchanted. Generations later, their brand of subversive laughter that provokes, offends, and frequently illuminates is as relevant and necessary as ever before.
