Thanks for the Flenniken link, I look forward to reading it with pleasure!

I also agree with Mark that Flenniken was especially great. See my appreciation here: http://comicscomicsmag.com/2011/01/pay-attention-national-lampoon.html

That said, in the end, I’m sure Flenniken and McAfee will be as collectible as Hogarth when P.J. O’Rourke has become nothing more than a brief footnote in the Norton Anthology of English Literature.

And Mark, I’m sure you’re right about National Lampoon. It’s clear you’re the go-to-guy with regard to that publication.

I can’t…but if you were trying to legalize gay marriage in Idaho, who would you rather put on the campaign poster:

a) Allen Ginsberg
b) Dan Savage
e) Jesse Tyler Ferguson
d) Peter Thiel

Because that’s what it boils down to. I’m definitely not the NRA demographic. I occupy more of the mushy middle. I’ve read my share of Ginsberg, but Savage and Thiel have been more responsible for moving my attitudes in a more progressive direction than Ginsberg.

I think you misunderstand why The National Lampoon was so funny in the seventies and early eighties. It had nothing to do with being politically correct or incorrect, and everything to do with never knowing from what direction the jokes would be coming from.

As for P.J. O’Rourke, and Holidays In Hell, while I’m sure it will still be in print fifty years from now, as far as I’m concerned his reputation as a humorist is built on National Lampoon’s High School Yearbook, Modern Manners, and The Bachelor’s Home Companion. None of the aforementioned titles are contingent on agreeing or disagreeing with the author’s political beliefs, or caring about who Newt Gingrich or Ted Kennedy was.

To be honest, I couldn’t care less about whether or not P.J. O’Rourke is the equal of the Sage of Baltimore. I bashed Tony Hendra a little bit earlier, but truth be told, he is funny, brilliant, profane, and every bit as pleasurable to read as O’Rourke. Is Tony Hendra the liberal, progressive, heir to Mencken that can knock that pretender, P.J. O’Rourke, off the throne?

We’ll never now. As brilliant as Hendra can be – as well his other liberal counter-parts on the National Lampoon staff – he never produced a substantial body of work on which a judgment can be based. O’Rourke, on the other hand, has more quotes in the Penguin Dictionary of Humorous Quotations than any other living writer.

Sometimes the prize goes to the person who shows up for it.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Ginsberg’s contribution was insignificant. In his very public wide-openness about his sex life, Ginsberg was, I believe, an inspiration to closeted gay men. That’s where his importance as a gay activist lies.

With regard to P.J. O’Rourke, when he was a humorist his schtick was being outrageously politically correct (that was also a key component of National Lampoon’s humor). It sometimes worked—Holidays in Hell was laugh-out-loud funny—but became problematic when O’Rourke decided to make a career change and become a serious (cough) political commentator, and then, as a serious commentator, to employ the same old schtick.

But P.J. O’Rourke is a conservative, so our expectations are already pretty low. Why doesn’t Tony Hendra, his colleague at The National Lampoon, and someone who isn’t afraid to let his progressive and liberal flag fly high ever get called out for his egregious sexism?

While some of the most blatant examples of his misogynistic attitudes from the seventies could be chalked up “to the times”, how do you explain the fact that in his memoir of writing for The National Lampoon during the seventies he never mentions the contributions of Mara McAfee or Shary Flenniken? On some level, O’Rourke worked well enough (and thought highly enough of their talent) with the women on staff to get Trina Robbins and Shary Flenniken to illustrate the pieces he wrote. I’ve read pretty much the entire run of the National Lampoon from it’s start in the seventies to a couple of years after O’Rourke resigned as Editor in Chief, and never saw any evidence that Hendra ever collaborated with a woman while on staff.

If that neanderthal P.J. O’Rourke thought Flenniken was qualified to work on the editorial side, or collaborate with, why couldn’t Hendra see it? In my humble opinion, one P.J. O’Rourke who says all the wrong things but actually does the right thing is worth a thousand Tony Hendra’s endlessly talking about doing the right thing, but never acting on those words.

The only possible exception is Bawer’s piece about Davenport, perhaps because Davenport was never easy for casual readers to politically pigeonhole (he says in his Paris Review interview that he always voted Democrat). Or maybe that Davenport wrote for the National Review fooled Bawer into thinking they were kindred spirits.

You may argue that Bawer was more than a casual reader of Davenport, but I’m not so sure. It’s clear, for example, that he believes Adriaan van Hovendaal existed in the world, not just in Davenport’s fiction.