When Alan Donnes, the first of the last three leaders of National Lampoon not to be sentenced to prison, joined the company, five years ago, he discovered that it was a magnet for off-the-wall film pitches. One day, he took a call from a guy who knew a guy with $5 million and a script for “the perfect National Lampoon movie.” “It always scares me when they say, ‘It’s the perfect National Lampoon movie,’ ” Donnes said, sitting in his office at National Lampoon headquarters, in Los Angeles.

This one, called Monkey’s Paw, was about a kid who, after making a wish on a magical monkey’s paw he found in an archaeologist neighbor’s house, gets to have sex with the hottest girl in his high school. “But there’s no limit, because it’s a monkey’s paw,” Donnes explained. “So, the girl is compulsively having sex with him. And eventually the girl realizes the only way out of this is if she fucks him to death. Am I kidding? No. She has to fuck him so much he will die. And the guy’s like, ‘Perfect National Lampoon.’ I said, ‘It’s not perfect National Lampoon.’ ‘Yeah, National Lampoon, all about fucking and stuff.’ I say, ‘Where’s the sex in Animal House?’ ‘Huh? There’s lots of sex in Animal House.’ ‘No, there’s not. The Vacation movies—no sex.’ ” And so on.

Donnes, a 56-year-old former stand-up comedian and boxing manager who is now the president of one of America’s best-known comedy brands, has, like the company he is charged with reviving, endured a rough decade. He is operating on his second kidney transplant, the first having failed when he was bitten by a brown recluse spider. In his office, where we were talking, there were nods to National Lampoon’s former glory: posters from classic movies like Animal House and Vacation, shrink-wrapped DVDs containing the complete digitized archives of the magazine that had hit early-70s America like a grenade.

Donnes had grown up on not just the magazine but also the extraordinary efflorescence of talent and humor that came out of it. The magazine’s spin-off stage show National Lampoon’s Lemmings, along with National Lampoon Radio Hour, had launched John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Christopher Guest, and Harold Ramis, providing Saturday Night Live with much of its original cast as well as its first head writer. The movies Animal House and Vacation were based on stories published in National Lampoon (the Vacation stories written by Lampoonstaffer and future 80s-teen-comedy king John Hughes). Animal House was co-written by Ramis, directed by John Landis, and produced by Ivan Reitman, who collectively would be responsible for decades of influential film comedies (Trading Places, Ghostbusters, Old School), often starring fellow Lampoon alumni. It’s not a stretch to say that the Lampoon sensibility and people have informed much of modern humor in America, from Spy to gross-out comedy to Judd Apatow.

PRIME TIMES

From left: John Landis and John Belushi on the set of 1978’s Animal House; the film’s poster; Harold Ramis and Chevy Chase while filming 1983’s Vacation. From Left, from mptvimages.com, Universal Pictures/Photofest, by Steve Schapiro.

Donnes’s office also suggested the depths of the brand’s fall. It was a small room in a tiny suite off a narrow courtyard in the innards of sleepy Sunset Gower Studios, in a part of Hollywood once known as Poverty Row. This was where Lampoon had gone to nurse its wounds. To Donnes’s right, a glass case framed a certificate of its now worthless stock, which was currently trading at a fifth of a penny per share. To his left, in the wall above his head, a divot made by Donnes’s National Lampoon coffee mug memorialized one of his lower moments.

When Donnes arrived in 2012, after his two predecessors decamped for the hoosegow, he found a devastated company. To save money, the offices, then on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, had been turned into a makeshift storage facility, and rent hadn’t been paid. The phones had been turned off, and for two years calls to National Lampoon had been routed to the pink-cased iPhone of Cora Victoriano, the beloved longtime receptionist/office momager who in a previous life worked in the office of Imelda Marcos. Victoriano, already owed at least $50,000 in back pay, had used her own pension money to pay other employees’ salaries. It was left for Donnes to deal with the hangover: a tangle of lawsuits, debts, conflicting contracts, and very little money.