I went to see Chris Rock on Saturday night here in Atlanta, and he made a statement in his comedy. He said, look, when you're the big person, when you're the rich person, poor people can say stuff about you, but it's downright wrong and brutal for rich people to beat up on poor people. He said people who are larger can lampoon people who are skinnier, but not the opposite.
I was managing editor for a while [in National Lampoon ], and it does cause business problems when your circulation goes up.
Having spent a substantial part of my career parodying religious figures from my own Christian background, I am aghast at the notion that it could, in effect, be made illegal to imply ridicule of a religion or to lampoon religious figures.
Harold Ramis and I together did the ‘National Lampoon Show’ off Broadway, ‘Meatballs,’ ‘Stripes,’ ‘Caddyshack,’ ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Groundhog Day. ’ He earned his keep on this planet. God bless him.
From National Lampoon, you go directly to Saturday Night Live, because it's a lot of the same people.
In the wake of Animal House, all of us at the Lampoon had a lot of Hollywood opportunities. We could definitely get people to return phone calls.
I had grown up as a feature writer, and basically my career had been in The National Lampoon and as a magazine editor, and I'd never been a reporter.
Lampoon was a very collegial operation, though "collegial" usually means "friendly" and it wasn't that friendly. But we were tight, like a family.
