National Lampoon is and has been one of the leading brands in comedy for the last 30 years. Currently, this comedic corporate giant is active in a broad array of entertainment activities, including feature films, television programming, interactive entertainment, home video, comedy audio CDs and book publishing. In the 1970s and '80s, National Lampoon was the most widely read publication on college campuses, while today, the website, www.nationallampoon.com, is one of the most popular humor sites on the Internet. Blah, blah, blah. Thanks for rubbing it in our faces.

We finally came to the harsh realization that even though we think we're funny, the 'Poon must be doing something right. After all, they're listed on Wall Street (Nasdaq OTC BB: NLPN), while we sometimes travel up and down the interstate sneaking into the free "breakfast buffets" at budget motel chains. Finally, after one stale bagel too many, we sent Door Contributing Editor Becky Garrison to track down National Lampoon Editor-in-Chief Scott Rubin to see if she could steal … er … learn the secrets of their success.

THE DOOR MAGAZINE: Why should our readers log on to your website www.nationallampoon.com?
SCOTT RUBIN: They would be getting the "National Lampoon" sensibility that you would have found in the magazine in the 25 years that it was published.
DOOR: How do you define that sensibility?
RUBIN: We take no prisoners. We figure out whom we want to attack and we go for the jugular. Hopefully we do it in a smart clever way, and we're not afraid of a good fart joke.
DOOR: Speaking of old farts, why should a Catholic congregation order your cleric tracker collar?
RUBIN: I can't think of anything more despicable than a cleric who takes advantage of a young boy or girl in a sexual way, especially in a church environment. So, we thought they'll have to have priest collars like those ankle bracelets that they put on criminals under house arrest that are hooked up to a global positioning satellite so you can see every move that your priest makes. We thought this would be a product that would be useful for the church today.
DOOR: But would they really buy it?
RUBIN: We just purchased The National Lampoon Network, and it's a cable TV station that goes out to all the universities. We have a reality show called Crash where we're going to actually set up a sales pitch to different churches with the cleric tracker, actually make it, and then follow our sales people, and try to sell it diocese to diocese. It's all make-believe, but we're going to do it and see what happens.
DOOR: Are you also still playing the pedophile priest shell game on the streets of Boston and New York City?
RUBIN: The way they were shifting the priests around was something that blew away our art director Joe Oesterle. He does these flash animations including the Jesus one, where he brings these real photos to life. In this case, he illustrated a Three Card Monty kind of game where they were moving the priests around.
DOOR: So, who anointed Father Stanley as a qualified advice columnist?
RUBIN: Steven Brykman, one of our managing editors, went down on spring break to find the greatest sinner of spring break. He had a confessional set up that's still on our website, and you could find it in the NLBS section of our site. Anyway, people would come in and confess real sins. The winner was this woman who had apparently slept with some record-breaking number of men in a three-day span. What goes on at spring break today is just beyond belief; it's over the top. We probably could use a little religion. It's interesting – the target of The National Lampoon for many years was to destroy the institution of religion in many ways, especially during the 1970s.
DOOR: You can't get any ruder than Michael O'Donoghue's The Son of God Comics, that's for sure.
RUBIN: But we're at the point now, where a lot of our contributions that are religious-based are anti-Christian. It's a little too easy of a target for my taste, and it better be done in a very clever way or something that's going on in the news. If anything, we could probably use a little more religion in certain things, especially after witnessing what we saw at spring break. This was like at the end of the world. We actually voted on the ultimate sinner. We put her up on the website and asked if she would contact us, she never did.
DOOR: So, it sounds like you're an observant comedian, if you'll pardon the pun.
RUBIN: I'm an observant Jew, and go to Temple every Saturday. In fact, I'm going to Torah study class in about an hour and a half after this interview.
DOOR: And there are those that think your website is going straight to hell.
RUBIN: It's a real interesting dilemma that I personally go through as to how I can write or edit some of the things that are up on the website, and then have this other life where I observe many of the laws or attempt to, and discuss the meaning of it all, and then go back the next day and write these pieces.
      That's why we try to write pieces that have some sort of social relevance or some real target that we're going after as opposed to just kind of taking the easy way and attacking Jesus or any religious figure because it's a revered icon and could be attacked.
DOOR: But then you have the Catholic Church that's such a joke right now that it deserves a swift kick in the priestly posterior.
RUBIN: We took on the Catholic Church over this pedophilia scandal, and I believe they had it coming. We went all the way with it including a diary of a priest descending into pedophilia. I think it's one of the best things written on the website. To me, that is attacking the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church that allowed this (and how they) moved people around. It's absolutely incredible that goes on. They say it's just two percent or five percent of the priests, but it should be zero.
DOOR: It's a subject worthy of satire, for sure.
RUBIN: So I go through these moral crises that what I'm doing is actually part of the problem, and not trying to correct the problem. There is some stuff on the website now that I'm not particularly proud of, and that's part of the problem. It's very difficult to control everything that goes up as you're changing it out every week. Some things slip in that are just, oh my God – you know. Generally, we try to do something that has a point of view.
DOOR: So, how do you pick your subjects to satirize?
RUBIN: We choose the things that tend to piss us off on a given day – sometimes it's the stuff that was kind of skewed to the left, sometimes it was skewed to the right, but we try to stay in the middle and attack both sides equally. We're opportunistic satirists or something like that.
DOOR: That said, how would you define a fundamentalist?
RUBIN: They're not willing to listen to possible new ideas, and they're very much in their box, and they're locked into their religious point of view. There's really nothing that can change their point of view. It's very sad, and that's one of the things that we have targeted. Recently, on our website, we did a piece about the 72 virgins that these Islamic terrorists are going to find in heaven.
DOOR: How come the Islamic virgins are really hot and the American virgins were pretty skanky?
RUBIN: It's just amazing that people are still killing themselves over the idea that they are going to meet these 72 virgins in heaven. So, we tried to imagine if there was any kind of justice in this world – and a just God – that the virgins they would meet would be some of the ones that you will find on our website. Then we took it to another level, where the United States government dropped pamphlets letting potential terrorists know that these would be the kind of virgins they might see if they committed an act of terror.
DOOR: Do you think it's funny that Jesus was portrayed throughout history as Anglo-Saxon when he was really of Middle Eastern descent?
RUBIN: Some British technology company had been working on what Jesus actually looked like. They did this 3-D scanning, and stuff like that, then fed into a super computer all this information of people's bone structures back then – who knows what they had. It came out that He looked like some Eastern European Jew who came over here on a boat in the 1920s. He looked nothing like these angelic, Anglo figures that are on everybody's wall in the United States. So, we imagined if He spoke how He would sound. We added the voice to this image, and just kind of extrapolated from that. I think it's actually kind of ridiculous that they've made Jesus look like an Anglo-Saxon man.
DOOR: One really outrageous piece took on the Qu'ran. Holy Jihad, Batman!
RUBIN: We got a lot of flak for the Qu'ran, The Ten Tricky Verses by Osama Bin Laden piece, when we tried to show how Osama turned these passages into proclamations that we must kill all Americans. I didn't realize we had so many Muslim readers, but apparently we did, and they just couldn't believe that we did anything to the Holy Qu'ran in any way. I got a ton of nasty email about that. How dare I insinuate that this was a Muslim thing and so on.
DOOR: How did you respond?
RUBIN: I'd write them back and say, "It's interesting you're so quick to complain about us making fun of this, and what causes this, and the root of this, yet I don't see any outrage over the fact that your fellow Muslims are part of this terrorism. Where is the marching on the street, that you're ashamed of this and will not tolerate it with your fellow Muslims? Let me know when there's public outcry towards your fellow Muslims, and I'll pull this stuff down."
      These Muslim readers were just a percentage of our faithful readers who just couldn't handle Islam in any way being attacked. But when I put it to them, "These people are doing it." They say, "Well, but that's not Islam." I say, "Well then, come out and say it! Get your leaders together, have a march, and say it isn't. Don't have the sporadic, one here and there. Say something or organize something. But instead, you guys organized an email campaign against us." It was pretty intense. Maybe the Qu'ran thing might have got them.
DOOR: When you attack someone's sacred cow, that person moos pretty loudly.
RUBIN: I think the Islamic community, though, is a little bit of a different animal. For example, we've tried to stay in the middle in terms of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and when we had some anti-Israel, we didn't really get that much email.
DOOR: The victims of the subject you're satirizing – be it priestly pedophilia or 9-11 – find that jokes about this particular subject are offensive to them and that nobody understands their pain. How do you respond to these people?
RUBIN: I'm glad you brought that up because like I mentioned earlier about having this dilemma of being this observant Jew. I'm not Orthodox but I'm somewhat observant, and to me that's the dilemma because there is a certain coldness to it. There really isn't a way to do National Lampoon and have that little warmth, where you just kind of want to reach out and tell the victims that we're sorry we had to do this but this is what we do for a living, like a disclaimer or something.
DOOR: Dubya and a lot of other conservatives of his ilk tout that we're one nation under God. What do you think of when you see them invoking this "our God is better than their God" kind of thinking?
RUBIN: I was always taught that it was the same God. Apparently it's different interpretations of the same God. If you read the Qu'ran, all these religions kind of base a good portion of their faith on Judaism and to a certain extent Christianity. So when he says God, I think of a universal God. And I think that's the God that's referenced in the slogan "In God We Trust" that's imprinted on our money.
DOOR: We've noticed that many comedians like Al Franken seem to hang on to the coattails of the Democratic Party and bristle when someone trashes the left.
RUBIN: Sometimes I feel like I'm a lonely voice when I leap to the right, and if I leap to the right on certain issues, it's very lonely to be a satirist who leans to the right. For example, it's much easier to think that George Bush stole the election than to actually think of another way to take it, and good luck finding a kindred spirit to go with you on that. It's almost like a knee jerk reaction with the humorists of the last 30, 40, 50 years probably to immediately side with the left. They were so effective for so many decades that these humorists achieved their goals. They did bring down these institutions. People stopped going to the kind of church that was rigid, and people threw away religion, and it all became a big joke. Now look at the pit of society that we live in. They threw out the baby with the bathwater.
DOOR: It's like the left-wing agenda has won out, especially when it comes to academia.
RUBIN: We've got this political correctness that is so rampant in our universities, you don't have freedom of speech now, you can't even say certain things. It's outrageous, so the left now is as bad as the right was 40 years ago, and yet the humorists are still on the left. The left are in many ways, not all, but they really run many of the institutions in our society, such as the media and academia, though not big corporations. That's probably a mixed bag at this point. It's just like when these younger guys come in, especially when they come out of the university system, they've been indoctrinated. The Ivy League writers that we use a lot have been indoctrinated into the left thinking and this political correctness. They almost have to be deprogrammed to at least even think in the middle let alone, maybe possibly, dare I say, on the right. It's a real problem in satire, a real huge problem. You're not even willing to go there because you don't want to be ostracized by the community of humorists.
DOOR: How would you define religion Hollywood-style?
RUBIN: There has definitely been a paradigm shift since 9-11. There has been a little bit of a move toward more traditional worship with kind of a modern twist on it, a less rigid twist. I know that's true for me in Judaism. It might be representative of what's going on in the Christian community, I'm in a pretty popular synagogue that kind of is traditional but it is also like this evolving community that is open to new ideas, but definitely honors the more traditional past. I sense that appears to be what a lot of my Christian friends are looking for from their church as well. The kind of whacked out New Age stuff that permeated throughout the '90s seems to have lessened quite a bit, at least in the circles that I travel. In general people are much more willing to find some sort of spiritual foundation for their lives in Hollywood, and we've all been kind of impacted by this horrible event that took place, and there's the reality that is kind of like an umbrella over our heads constantly, that we could all basically die in some tragedy at any moment. I feel like there is a little bit of a movement toward more traditional values in the Hollywood community.
DOOR: You'd never know it watching the crapola that Fox and WB dish out.
RUBIN: There is still this kind of dichotomy, these people in their personal lives are like that, and then they go ahead and make this stuff that drags down our society. I'm not innocent myself either, and I struggle with it, because there is this constant push to get ratings, and you've got to appeal to young advertisers. Twenty year-old boys are interested in nothing but sex, and you've got to create programming for that. Everybody is trying to top each other. MTV sees that and they try to go further and further. Meanwhile, these people leave work, and on Sunday they go to church. You'd be amazed, especially in the last year or so, and I see the Hollywood community, believe it or not, does go to church. But eventually it has to show up in the kind of programming choices they make, and we can only, I guess, pray for that.
DOOR: Then you have the celebrity Scientologists.
RUBIN: The Scientology thing is it's own horrible animal, it's very sad, it's just very sad. I could go off on Scientology for about three days.
DOOR: So, what's the future of the 'Poon?
RUBIN: I think the National Lampoon is really returning to its roots of being smart, funny, clever and sophomoric at the same time, and kind of this rebirth of the company that we're going through in all media. We have a few television shows that are in development, in various phases of the networks also, outside of our own little network we have the next wave of movies coming. We're just going to remember where we came from. I don't think those guys who did the magazine have ever been beaten really in the world of humor if you look at some of the "best of" stuff, and there is just nobody who has come close. Some of the stuff is outrageous, and we try to honor that, and carry it to this new day with new writers, and hopefully we'll be around another 32 years in even greater success.

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