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!

Praise for Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead:

""The other night I started laughing so hard I had to leave the room . . . And then I realized that I hadn't laughed so hard in 35 years, since I was a teenager, reading National Lampoon."" --The Wall Street Journal 

""If you grew up with the Lampoon, this book is a trip down memory lane like no other; if not, it will demonstrate that the much maligned 70s could produce humor that has never been surpassed."" --Vanity Fair 

""Meyerowitz delivers more than he promises [in his introduction]. The alumni reminiscences he commissioned, taken together, paint a vivid picture of a tight-knit family of twentysomething humorists at the dawn of their careers."" 
-Newsweek 

""Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead is a coffee-table book-big, colorful, and fun to flip through. But it also serves as an important reminder: Where would American humor be without the National Lampoon?"" 
-The New Yorker

""With page after page of exquisitely reproduced articles and illustrations, DSBD is a satiric cornucopia . . .You're gonna need a bigger stocking for this one!"" 
-NationalEnquirer.com