Given the renewed frenzy in the debate surrounding the (mis)placement of comic boundaries, the history of two great American comedic institutions are ripe for exploring how sensibilities have changed when it comes to humor. One is, of course, SNL, which considered its approach to comedy revolutionary when it began in 1975. The other is the show’s one-time contemporary, the influential but now-defunct National Lampoon magazine, which gave SNL some of its biggest early stars. A pair of new documentaries about the respective humor behemoths—Bao Nguyen’s Live From New York! and Douglas Tirola’s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead—offer some timely and compelling context for understanding how social changes and technological shifts have changed the milieu for contemporary American comedy. As both films show, today’s artists aren’t saying anything more shocking than their predecessors: The history of comedy over the past 50 years is steeped in offensiveness, but it’s that willingness to cross lines that has led to some of the most meaningful subversion in popular culture.

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Though perhaps best remembered for producing films like Animal House and Family Vacation, the National Lampoon began in 1970 as an offshoot of the Harvard Lampoon. A wild mix of bawdy boys-club humor and sharp political satire, the magazine reached its apex in the mid-‘70s, spawning album recordings, a live theater show, and its nationally syndicated radio hour. There’s a telling little nugget in Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead that credits the brand’s failure to put John Belushi on retainer as the primary reason for SNL’s early success. It’s an oversimplification, to be sure, but it many ways it was a classic case of video killed the radio star: Once Belushi was poached by NBC, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, head writer Michael O’Donoghue, and eventually Bill Murray followed suit. The National Lampoon Radio Hour died out completely and the magazine began to unravel, before going out of circulation in 1998.

But at its inception, the Lampoon began with the goal of using humor to take on (and take down) the establishment. In the midst of Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, the magazine’s original staff—mostly young, whip-smart (white) men, firmly believed that America was in desperate need of a stern wake up call and that offending people was merely an inescapable part their job as humorists. Comedy was a means of sublimating their rage against the country’s policy makers and power structures. As O’Donoghue puts it in an archival interview in Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, “We’re doing this instead of hitting you in the face.”

And people noticed. Despite the recent outcry over the dangers of political correctness, the National Lampoon saw plenty of backlash during its day: The host of talking heads in Tirola’s film fondly recalls angry letters accusing them of being sexist, racist, and generally a bunch of filthy animals. But for them, getting a rise out of people was precisely the goal, and the magazine was steadfast in its dedication to what it saw as a decidedly non-partisan approach to humor. For the writers, it was important to make fun of everyone and everything with equal impudence—Jews, African Americans, Catholics, Muslims, homosexuals and heterosexuals, the political left and the political right. Taboos were meant to be talked about, and nothing was off limits—sex, race, religion, incest, or abortion.