National Lampoon Presents True Facts: The Big Book Book

In rereading National Lampoon Presents True Facts: The Big Book, I was a bit surprised at how little I enjoyed it compared with the many, many previous times I had read its pages. For those unfamiliar, True Facts: The Big Book presents a more-or-less complete collection of a significantly more risque version of Jay Leno's "Headlines" that appeared in the pages of National Lampoon over the years. And while True Facts: The Big Book remained mostly funny, this time it felt like a bit of a letdown.

The hallmark of National Lampoon was edgy, often sophomoric humor peppered with more than occasional flashes of wisdom and true satire, and liberally laced with NSFW material; in 2015, Cracked has largely taken over where National Lampoon left off. True Facts: The Big Book is full of such material'all precipitated by typographically-inaccurate advertisements and newspaper headlines, actual weird signs and billboards, and actual unusual storefronts'complete with cheap sex gags, smarmy remarks at the expense of some poor copy editor, and "no comment needed" images. Some of the material is funny precisely because one really can't make this stuff up'witness an advertisement for a crocheted baby-bottle holder in the shape of a bunny, in which the bottle unfortunately resembles a certain part of the rabbit's anatomy'while some is enhanced by editors John Bendel and Jason Ward's editorial comments; my favorite is the death announcement of a poor gentleman accidentally killed by a bowling ball, with Bendel and Ward's caption, "Stop laughing, you insensitive bastards!" preceding it.

And therein lies some of the difficulty. Yes, sophomoric, even juvenile, humor is enjoyable sometimes, but there's a certain emptiness in it, particularly on multiple re-readings. Say what you will about National Lampoon Presents Cartoons Even We Wouldn't Dare Print and The Best of the Rejection Collection: 293 Cartoons That Were Too Dumb, Too Dark, or Too Naughty for The New Yorker; at least most of the cartoons, while often along similarly snide lines, are clever, which is frequently more than one can muster about a simple caption to a "true fact". While a cartoon contains real creativity by definition, found items, even ones with captions, essentially laugh at accidents, and so have theoretically limited potential for humor. (I still laugh at many, if not most, of these "true facts", however, so take my comment with a real grain of salt; after all, many National Lampoon writers and staffers had graduated from the Harvard Lampoon, so there's that to be said for it.)

All that being said, when one gets right down to it, True Facts: The Big Book is just plain fun, and there's nothing wrong with that. I just wish a little more effort went into its creation.