National Lampoon: A Dirty Book

by P.J. O'Rourke (Editor)

A joke book.

Genres: Humor

Mass Market Paperback

First published March 2, 1976

About the author

Patrick Jake "P. J." O'Rourke is an American political satirist, journalist, writer, and author. O'Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on National Public Radio's game show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!. Since 2011 O'Rourke has been a columnist at The Daily Beast. In the United Kingdom, he is known as the face of a long-running series of television advertisements for British Airways in the 1990s.

He is the author of 20 books, of which his latest, The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn’t My Fault) (And I’ll Never Do It Again), was released January 2014. This was preceded on September 21, 2010, by Don't Vote! – It Just Encourages the Bastards, and on September 1, 2009, Driving Like Crazy with a reprint edition published on May 11, 2010. According to a 60 Minutes profile, he is also the most quoted living man in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations.

Reviews

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A filthy fossil from the 70s well worth revisiting. I know Chris Miller, whose work is among those featured here, but my love of this paperback runs deeper than that. The National Lampoon gave us the radio hour, SNL and some of the funniest movies of all time. The writers included in this book (Doug Kenney, Anne Beatts, Michael O'Donoghue, Terry Southern, Chris Miller, et al) sizzle with audacity and provocative nihilism to the extent that one could argue even punk music with its refreshing anger owes a debt to the NL writers.

If you have the NL radio hour box set, any of the numerous anthologies, this is indispensable. Some of the finest humor fiction of all time.

[Scott Meidroth]

This book really shaped me. Oh yeah.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the classics from my preadolescent days, a collection that did irreparable damage...