Forgive me as I dash off this article. It will not be particularly well written. But it will be slightly, possibly, maybe almost informative. Still reading? Great. Let’s lower that bar together, one half-assed web article at a time!
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ON THE SUBJECT OF JOHN HUGHES’ DEATH

I was the Senior Editor at the National Lampoon for about 4 years. Well, for the last couple years anyway. Before that my title had been, “Young Writer Who Got Paid the Least.” It was a glorious time. Oh to be young, white, and fairly talented.

So when I heard last night that John Hughes had died, I started thinking again about those years at the NatLampoon which I’d blocked out. Traumatic mass-staff firings can make me “forgetfully.” But as shitty an ending as the writing staff there was given, there were plenty of great memories.

The thing that stands out for me most though isn’t anything in specific, it’s that during my stint there I probably read every issue from the 70′s and most from the 80′s. I devoured them. I was a zealot. I wanted the NL to make a fairy-tale comeback to relevancy and hipness based at least in part on my writing. Hubris: A Comedian’s Tale will be showing all this week. Check out the matinee special.

Anyway, I was so hungry to make the Lampoon capital “G” Great again that I’d work totally unacceptable, insane hours–insane especially given how much I was making. I’d vomit out article after article and Photoshop endless images, from 9 am till 1 in the morning… every day for months. And those hours don’t even include the crap LA commutes to and from the office. Even exhausted and bleary eyed, I’d find time to read as many of the old mags lying around as I could find. That was the best part of the job. Free, easy access to the funniest, sharpest satire in our country’s history.

Sound a little grandiose? Of course it does. Didn’t you see Hubris: A Comedian’s Tale?
(I hear they’re making a sequel, where Sean is older and if you can believe it even funnier–I know, hard to believe, right?–but he’s still kind of a dick in this one–so, you know, it’ll have all the stuff you like.)

My subjective tastes aside, relatively objectively speaking (is that even possible?), I’ve read more than my share of humor over the years, enough at least be able to make a strong case for such a claim. And if you’d read as many NL mags as I have, you might just agree with me.

Which takes us to the dearly departed John Hughes. The first article I read about his death was this one in the Washington Post. And it really cheesed me off.

JOHN HUGHES is quoted in it as having been a “joke writer” at the National Lampoon.

A joke writer! Piffle!

As if he was mailing in one-liners in his free time to the real staff.

According to what I was told by Matty Simmons while I was still at the Lampoon, John Hughes was the only member of the magazine ever who made full time pay but was allowed to stay in his hometown (Chicago). That’s how talented and valued he was at the time–and this was before any of his movies had been written, let alone shot!

John wrote some of the smartest, silliest pieces for what was the funniest humor magazine of the day and during its strongest years. How cool is that?

AND THEN, after he’d already accomplished what most writers of the day would have stabbed themselves in the femoral artery with a typewriter for, he went on to make, what, a bazillion movies which everyone you know and love under 50 probably worships. Ok, maybe not a bazillion. Maybe just a gazillion.

Look, if you’ve never read MY PENIS or VACATION 58, you’re doing yourself a disservice. This was a seriously funny guy waaaaay before his movies made him famous.

So when he’s referred to with what is essentially a diminutive title, “joke writer” — diminutive given what he accomplished and given the comedic heft the National Lampoon magazine used to enjoy… it bothers me. As tiny a piece of that long National Lampoon history as I was a part of, even though the company never regained its meaning or heart (thank the parade of owners who come from the comedy=boobs school of humor for that), it’s important to me. The way, say, a really good sandwich would be to you, dear reader. But you know, a REALLY good sandwich.

John Hughes is that sandwich for me. Or for another example, if you had done your post grad lab work under a Nobel Prize winning chemist, someone to whom you felt you owed allegiance and thanks for the skills and wisdom he’d imparted…wouldn’t you be a little pissed off if when he died, the papers then described him as a “Bunsen burner technician?”

You would! Yes, you would. Don’t deny it.

How do I know you would? Because I’m from the future but a future that is also from an alternate reality. And in that alt future, I get to know you pretty darn well. (Pssst….we get married in the future on Earth #245. Our baby’s name is Mistake. After your father. I wanted to name her Idiot, after mine. But you insisted!)

So there it is. John Hughes didn’t just submit “jokes.” He dreamed up hilarious stories that bore his indelible, satiric mark with every turn of phrase. Now am I making too much of all this? Of course I am. I’m a John Hughes fanboy. Can’t be helped. I just wanted to set the record straight for as little as it’s worth.

Which is very little.

And not to worry. I’ll tell Mistake you said hello.

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If you’re looking for anything Hughes or NL related, check out Mark’s Very Large National Lampoon site.