High School

I had the original and lost it. It is a work of pure genius!

I love it.It looks so much like my yearbook. And the characters are fabulous.
Rating: 5 / 5

Before “National Lampoon” devolved into a brand name for films about college hijinks, it was a magazine of some of the most brilliant and subtle satire ever written in a monthly format. Riding the counterculture wave, it was a hip and intelligent skewering of all things that could lend itself to parody and irreverence. Sometimes you couldn’t tell where reality began and satire ended. I’d bet every NL fan remembers the Volkswagen ad with a photo of a classic VW bug floating in a river, the slogan in the photo sagely counseling from hindsight, “If Ted Kennedy had been driving a Volkswagen, he’d be president today.” Nearly every page was distinguished by some level of this mordant ingenuity.

As an avid NL reader, I bought into all things NL, including a parodic record album of a rock festival, which further illustrates what protean talents these guys were. This parody of a 1964 yearbook came out at the peak of their powers (or so it seems to me). I read it cover to cover more than once. The brilliance here is that the yearbook isn’t just a facsimile that captures the self-conscious bittersweet motifs of high schoolers. This particular copy of the C. Estes Kefauver Memorial High School yearbook belongs to “Lawrence Kroger” and it’s really about HIM, his senior year. A larger piecemeal narrative develops through the student biographies, club memberships, candid photos of student activities, and student autographs. The winners and losers are implicitly identified, stuffy attitudes are laid bare, and the identity of a notorious prankster is revealed. However, if you don’t read it from front to back, you could miss that story. If this had been something else besides a softcover newsstand item, it would be deemed a must-read comic masterpiece. Yes, that sounds a bit hyperbolic, but I stand by it.

I stumbled on this new edition by searching for the original at eBay. I was thrilled at the discovery that someone somewhere also considered it brilliant enough for a reprint. I opted for the newer edition, as an original would probably be dilapidated after forty-odd years, especially if someone loved it as much as I did. Missing from this edition is the trick cover. Originally, the front cover you see here — sans the censor strip — was for the news rack display only, so it could catch the eye and be identified as National Lampoon. But once you have it in your hands, you flip the book over, upside down, and the back is now the front, a leatherette-printed cover of the “1964 Kaleidoscope,” and complete immersion into the parody begins. There is no other reference to NL until you get to the back page, where the credits are listed. This new edition bypassed that neat gimmick, marketing the book toward a nostalgic readership. This time, the fake yearbook cover was just another page in the book, behind the NL cover.

Also, a reunion update is illogically added at the beginning of the book, before the pages of the original faux yearbook begin. Unless you’ve got a steel-trap memory as to everyone’s names and what they represented as characters, it’s best to bypass this until you’ve reread the original stuff. It’s very funny, but you’ll need a refresher to get the humor.

It’s great stuff, and I’m happy to see it again. I’ve thought about this for years, and have mentioned it to so many people. Sadly, there’s nothing like National Lampoon on the market these days. It was slick and smart, parody and satire aimed at informed grownups. I guess the idealism of the anti-establishment milieu that made mocking things so much fun has turned to cynicism, and the national mood is too dark and divisive for this sort of humor (in a periodical format). Now all that remains of the NL brand is what’s associated with adolescent humor obsessed with horniness and drinking, stuff ANYBODY can produce.

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Rating: 4 / 5