Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great

From its first issue in April, 1970, the National Lampoon blazed like a comet, defining comedy as we know it today. To create Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, former Lampoon illustrator Rick Meyerowitz selected the funniest material from the magazine and sought out the survivors of its first electrifying decade to gather their most revealing and outrageous stories. The result is a mind-boggling tour through the early days of an institution whose alumni left their fingerprints all over popular culture: Animal House, Caddyshack, Saturday Night Live, Ghostbusters, SCTV, Spinal Tap, In Living Color, Ren & Stimpy, The Simpsons—even Sesame Street counts a few Lampooners among its ranks. Long before there was The Onion and Comedy Central news shows, there was the National Lampoon, setting the bar in comedy impossibly high!

A very similar title, differing only in the subtitle, was used for the 2015 documentary film, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, for which Rick Meyerowitz designed the poster, as he also did for the 1978 film National Lampoon's Animal House.

Praise for the documentary Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead (2015):

This film looks longingly back at the 1970s when a smart, tasteless joke could make you laugh out loud without worrying about hurting someone’s feelings or being attacked on social media.
—The New York Times

It all looks like more fun than you or I will ever have in our lives, and Chevy Chase and Ivan Reitman are on hand to tell some of the stories.
—Hollywood Reporter