<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Mike Reiss only\u00A0worked at National Lampoon for 10 months. He wouldn&amp;#039;t call it\u00A0a fond memory. Today, it&amp;#039;s a\u00A0fine point on his\u00A0resume, only included\u00A0as a reminder to a generation unaware of\u00A0the essential comedy magazine.\u00A0&amp;quot;For years I&amp;#039;d be talking to people 20 years younger and I&amp;#039;d say, &amp;#039;My first job was the National Lampoon,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Reiss tells Esquire.\u00A0&amp;quot;And they&amp;#039;d go, &amp;#039;Oh yeah? You make those dirty, direct-to-video comedies?&amp;#039;&amp;quot;\u00A0 But even a wry guy like\u00A0Reiss knows life\u00A0wouldn&amp;#039;t be the same without his\u00A010 months in comedy hell. The\u00A0off-color jokes and demented parody prose he wrote in Lampoon\u00A0caught the eye of Hollywood. In the TV-writing trenches, he\u00A0became one of the founding fathers of\u00A0The Simpsons. He&amp;#039;d go on to\u00A0create\u00A0The Critic, a cult favorite, and\u00A0lace studio movies with acerbic\u00A0wisecracks.\u00A0So when filmmaker Douglas Tirola asked him to appear in Tirola&amp;#039;s\u00A0new documentary Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead\u00A0(in theaters and on demand Friday),\u00A0chronicling the rise and fall of the satirical magazine, he joined in. He was shocked, but he did it. Reiss\u00A0spoke to us\u00A0about his long career and a comedy brand\u00A0that spawned\u00A0Animal House, Saturday Night Live, and Caddyshack...\u00A0all before he\u00A0showed up.\u00A0 You joined the Lampoon at a turbulent time. Many of the pillar writers left for Saturday Night Live and other comedy gigs. What was the environment like from the inside? I&amp;#039;ve been thinking about this a lot, reflecting on it a lot. In one way, it was a dream. I mean, when I was 14\u00A0years\u00A0old, I read the Lampoon and said, &amp;quot;I want to work here.&amp;quot; And when I saw the job [opportunity], I remember thinking, &amp;quot;Either I get a lot better or the magazine gets a lot worse\u2014I&amp;#039;ll bet I can get a job here.&amp;quot; I didn&amp;#039;t get any better, but the magazine got a lot worse. They hired me right out of college and I had my lifetime dream. I mean, anything you wrote they would print. It was a fun environment. I&amp;#039;ve never had that kind of freedom anywhere else in the rest of my career. You wrote it, they put it in the magazine. And it wasn&amp;#039;t hard work. But on the other hand, the magazine was just in horrendous decline. There was this fear it was literally going to close any day. The other thing was there were only, like, five people working. It was a super-quiet environment. Who was still there? Gerry Sussman was running the magazine\u2014a lovely guy who doesn&amp;#039;t get any mention at all in the movie, which is a little sad. I believe he&amp;#039;s the most prolific writer in the history of the Lampoon. You just see a picture of him at the end, but nobody talked about him. He was running the magazine. [Editor-in-chief] P.J. O&amp;#039;Rourke had just left. \u00A0And there was a guy named John\u00A0Bendel,\u00A0and Ted Mann who&amp;#039;s now a very successful drama writer back with Tod Carroll, who was probably the funniest guy there. Then you had Al Jean and myself. That was it. It was five writers besides me.\u00A0Everybody just sat in their offices all day making phone calls trying to get a better job.  Did you write anything at\u00A0Lampoon\u00A0that you are still\u00A0proud of? Al and I wrote an article about Thurgood Marshall teaching you how to write pornography. It was funny and seemed like a very arbitrary topic. But in fact, I had just read The Brethren by Bob Woodward, which said the Supreme Court justices had to watch a lot of pornography. They were deciding First Amendment cases, and every Tuesday, they had to spend an afternoon looking at porn. Most of the justices didn&amp;#039;t enjoy it. Some of them didn&amp;#039;t show up at all. But Thurgood Marshall loved it. He loved it. So we wrote this article, which was dirty and racist and stupid. People loved it. Someone loved it so much they brought us out to Hollywood. And I thought, Thurgood Marshall&amp;#039;s gonna like this article, too. Ten\u00A0years later, when Thurgood Marshall died, one story read, &amp;quot;Thurgood Marshall died, first black justice on the Supreme Court.&amp;quot; And the second paragraph was, &amp;quot;He was the attorney in Brown v. Board of Education.&amp;quot; And the third paragraph was, &amp;quot;Thurgood Marshall was so offended by an article in National Lampoon, he had the FBI investigate the writers.&amp;quot; I guess the FBI has a big file on me because of a dumb article I wrote when I was 21. Did your Lampoon tenure cross\u00A0over with those first Hollywood jobs? It definitely preceded all of the TV. The one thing we were doing on the fly, sort of on nights and weekends, was\u00A0 sending in jokes to the movie Airplane II. Not the good Airplane!\u2014Airplane II.\u00A0 At the time, people were really let down because Airplane! was a classic. It reinvented comedy, in a way. Then there&amp;#039;s Airplane II. There was no Airplane III. We killed the franchise.\u00A0 The only other showbiz work we had was a job writing for Meatloaf. Mr. Loaf\u2014that&amp;#039;s what everybody called him in the office\u2014wanted us to write a movie treatment. It was based on a children&amp;#039;s book called Fat Men from Space. We wrote it, turned it in, and then never got paid. A couple weeks later, we go back to the office, and it was literally empty and barricaded. They just cleared out to avoid paying us the $5,000 for the Meatloaf movie treatment.\u00A0 When you segued to television and\u00A0joined the\u00A0Simpsons team, did you have to shake off the Lampoon&amp;#039;s sick-humored sensibilities? An amazing thing that happened just the other night:\u00A0I went to the premiere of this documentary, and older people in the audience were loving it. The film shows you great jokes from the magazine. And I saw a lot of young hipsters from the Village very uncomfortable with it because it is not PC. This was the first time I was face-to-face seeing political correctness in action. The older people are hipper and more liberal than young people today. Did The Simpsons run into that problem? Nobody remembers that\u00A0when The Simpsons came on the air, it was considered the most shocking thing on television. The first President George Bush came out and attacked the show. His wife called it the stupidest thing she had ever seen in her life. We were condemned by the National Council of Churches. Schools banned Simpsons t-shirts. The show has not changed at all, and yet now it&amp;#039;s considered sort of the benign part of American culture. We had the church and the U.S. government against us when we came on the air! Do you see modern Simpsons as benign? That sounds like a negative. The show is sort of raunchier. It&amp;#039;s not Family Guy, but it&amp;#039;s rawer, it&amp;#039;s dirtier. It is a comment on the rest of American culture. What was considered shocking at one time is now taught in school. Ministers quote The Simpsons. They teach college courses in The Simpsons. We haven&amp;#039;t changed. It&amp;#039;s the whole rest of the world that has changed around us. Parody was a huge part of the Lampoon, and I can&amp;#039;t imagine it&amp;#039;s coincidence that you\u00A0wrote several of The Simpsons&amp;#039; Treehouse of Horror episodes and created The Critic. Is parody what attracts you to comedy? I&amp;#039;ve been very lucky that for most of my career, I&amp;#039;ve been hired to write the things that I&amp;#039;m best at doing. I have a nice job on the side. I fix animated movies. I&amp;#039;ve been a sort of ghost writer on two dozen animated movies. I can come in and throw a parody of a Hitchcock movie in the middle of Ice Age 3 or something like that. I&amp;#039;m the guy, because they just tell me, &amp;quot;We don&amp;#039;t need you to tell a story, we don&amp;#039;t need you to do emotional moments, just make it funny. Put in jokes.&amp;quot; I wish I could do it more. But I&amp;#039;m afraid those guys who made Scary Movie and Epic Movie killed all the parody. I think it&amp;#039;s going to take 10 years to recover from their string of crappy, churned-out movies.\u00A0 Who do you see carrying the banner of Lampoon and parody in general? The biggest one, for sheer Lampoon tradition, is Seth MacFarlane. I love Family Guy\u2014it&amp;#039;s funny and it&amp;#039;s shocking. That&amp;#039;s what the Lampoon was. It&amp;#039;s very hard to shock people anymore, and with The Simpsons, I don&amp;#039;t want to shock anyone. They can be appalled, but their overall reaction should be &amp;quot;I like it.&amp;quot; Seth MacFarlane, South Park too, these shows shock me when I see them.  Have you thrown your hat in the ring to write an episode of Family Guy? I asked. I asked some of the young writers on the show, &amp;quot;Hey, if you need somebody, I&amp;#039;d love to do it.&amp;quot; Because I loved the show so much from the start. They didn&amp;#039;t help me. I helped them get their first five jobs, I asked them for help, and they said,\u00A0you know, &amp;quot;Get lost, Grandpa.&amp;quot; How often do you work on The Simpsons these days? One day a week. I live in New York, and I fly to L.A. every Wednesday just to be part of the group process. I&amp;#039;m not running anything, I&amp;#039;m an emeritus advisor. The show is just written by a gang. Every Wednesday I&amp;#039;m part of that gang. You were one of the veterans who returned for The Simpsons Movie. Are there plans to make another? It was a hit. It was,\u00A0and I&amp;#039;m sure the studio would like another movie. But the Simpsons people, the Simpsons staff, never wanted to do a movie. It was just a challenge: What can we give them at the movies we don&amp;#039;t give them on TV every week? We were trying to make a movie every single week. If you want the truth, for 15 years we just said, &amp;quot;No.&amp;quot; Fox kept asking us to make this movie. For 15 years we said no. And finally they showed us the market research that said the public wants a Simpsons movie. They&amp;#039;d rather see that than another Star Wars movie or another Harry Potter movie. So we said, &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ll give it a shot.&amp;quot; When we decided we were going to make a movie, we all sat down at the table, and two hours later, we had the whole plot. The whole thing: the dome over Springfield, Homer&amp;#039;s pig\u2014it all came to us in two hours. And we said, &amp;quot;Eh, that seems pretty good.&amp;quot; The idea was actually the very easy part, and we never strayed from that first meeting. Then we went through 165 drafts. Is there anything from National Lampoon you cling to 35 years later? The only story I haven&amp;#039;t told is something I&amp;#039;ve felt bad about for years. When we got a call to work on\u00A0Airplane II, we went into work the next morning and quit. We just quit and walked out. They came to our office to tell us to keep up the good work and we quit. I always forget to tell people why we quit. The editor had an idea and we were assigned to write an article over the weekend. It was a parody comic of Indiana Jones\u2014but he&amp;#039;s a gynecologist. Instead of carrying a whip, he carries a specula. &amp;quot;Go write it boys!&amp;quot; Al and I had the most miserable weekend of our lives. We never fought our whole career, but we fought over every line of this thing because we could not make that idea good. And so then Hollywood calls, they said, &amp;quot;We want you out here.&amp;quot; And we said, &amp;quot;Good!&amp;quot; I don&amp;#039;t think we wanted to go to Hollywood, we just didn&amp;#039;t want to write Indiana Jonesas a gynecologist.        "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a38144/national-lampoon-simpsons-critic-writer-mike-reiss/>