Douglas Kenney

Douglas Kenney remains a largely unsung figure, yet he helped pioneer a wildly popular and revolutionary style of comedy and satire. While an undergraduate at Harvard, he worked on the Harvard Lampoon and went on to co-found both the National Lampoon magazine and the National Lampoon Radio Hour. At Harvard he had teamed up with his friend Henry Beard, and together they launched the National Lampoon, combining their gifts to produce a daring new humor publication—sophomoric, rebellious, off-color, vulgar, and uproariously sharp. The magazine's comedy was seen as radical, and it became a runaway bestseller, most famously with its notorious cover showing a gun aimed at a family pet: "If you don't buy this magazine, we'll kill this dog." Kenney extended his comic reach in many directions. He and other Lampoon contributors wrote books, the most popular being the 1974 "1964 High School Yearbook Parody" (co-edited by P.J. O'Rourke), which mimicked a real yearbook while spoofing all the details that make such volumes cringe-inducing and funny—a small masterpiece. Another bestselling classic was the cult favorite "Bored of the Rings," a comic send-up of J.R.R. Tolkien's legendary bestseller; it became a bestseller and, thanks to Peter Jackson's Oscar-winning film adaptations of the trilogy, was reprinted, keeping Kenney's legacy alive. He also produced "Mrs. Agnew's Diary," which skewered the Nixon administration.