8 THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020
mings” might play. Reached by phone,
Chevy Chase was skeptical. “I think it’s
odd and silly,” he said. “ ‘Lemmings’ was
so much for its time. To steal the name—
if I did a movie tomorrow called ‘And
the Holy Grail,’ it might make people
come, but it doesn’t fit the time.”
At the reading, though, more jokes
had landed than not. The writer, An-
drew Farmer, and the songwriter, Henry
Koperski, both in their thirties and with
solid alternative-comedy credentials,
asked the cast for notes. Eric Lockley,
who plays a washed-up rapper, said he
didn’t get a line about the Hardy Boys,
those now ninety-three-year-old teen
detectives. “I had to look them up,” he
noted, and suggested subbing in Alex
Mack or Shelby Woo, Nickelodeon
sleuths from the nineties. On the other
end of the cultural-temporal spectrum,
a debate broke out over a reference to
VSCO girls (a subspecies of teen that
cropped up last year, characterized by a
fondness for scrunchies).
During a break, Farmer explained
the show’s comedic philosophy, which
aligns with the National Lampoon’s new-
found desire to find an intersection be-
tween outrageousness and wokeness.
(The brand has been sponsoring standup
evenings with themes like “Lesbian
Agenda” and “Rape Jokes by Survivors.”)
Farmer detailed how he and Koperski
had revamped the show’s Ariana Grande
number, which initially focussed on her
dating habits. They worried that it was
slut-shamey and, worse, tired. They also
cut a bit poking fun at Kanye West.
“Clearly, he’s going through something,”
Farmer said. “And punching someone
when they’re down doesn’t feel like the
best joke at the moment.”
That was not a scruple held by the
mostly straight white male writers for
the old Lampoon, much of whose work,
where it involved women, minorities, and
underage sex, has not aged well. Farmer
heralded the new Lampoon’s multiplicity
of voices. “We’re both gay,” he said of
himself and Koperski, “and I’m disabled.”
(He has clubfeet and a condition known
as windswept hands.) “Being handed the
mike to work with a comic institution
like this and to be lampooning culture
from a different perspective is a great
way to change what people think about
National Lampoon. ”
That change will have to wait. During
1
DEPT.OFREBOOTS
LEMMINGS,AGAIN
I
s there anything more hopeful and
cheery than a group of young musi-
cal-comedy types gathered for the first
rehearsal of a new show? No, there isn’t.
But “hopeful” is also the word for inves-
tors trying to resurrect a once potent
but now tarnished comedy brand, and
these two forces collided recently in a
downtown rehearsal space where a re-
boot of National Lampoon’s fabled 1973
musical revue, “Lemmings,” was getting
on its feet, before a run at Joe’s Pub.
It is fair to say that the National Lam-
poon transformed comedy in the nineteen-
seventies—heady stuff for a magazine,
even in print-friendlier days, although
the movie “National Lampoon’s Animal
House” helped, too. It is also fair to say
that the Lampoon has since bankrupted
its credibility by having attached its name
to a string of dumb, largely unseen sex
comedies like “National Lampoon’s Barely
Legal” and “National Lampoon Presents
Jake’s Booty Call.” Whether there is
twelve million dollars’ worth of equity
left in the brand—that’s what PalmStar
Media paid in 2017 for the name and as-
sets—remains an open question.
One of those nearly fifty-year-old as-
sets is “Lemmings,” remembered by com-
edy nerds for giving John Belushi, Chevy
Chase, and Christopher Guest an early
platform, two years before Belushi and
Chase joined the first cast of “Saturday
Night Live.” The revue, which ran for
ten months at the Village Gate, was a
druggy burlesque of the Woodstock fes-
tival, rebilled as Woodshuck: Three Days
of Love, Peace, and Death, with cutting
impersonations of performers such as
James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan,
and Joe Cocker. “Very, very good and
very, very funny,” Edith Oliver wrote in
these pages. The evening ended with
festival-goers committing mass sui-
cide—a finale in tune with the Water-
gate era’s souring on hippie idealism, and
with the Lampoon’s sense of itself as a
fearless, smart-ass scourge.
But back to hopefulness: around a big
table, the cast and creators of “Lem-
mings: 21st Century” gave a new script
its first read-through. The reboot takes
place at the “Downfall festival”—a
stand-in for the likes of Coachella, Bonn-
aroo, Gov Ball, and the Fyre Festival.
There are digs at influencers, glamping,
Goop, Instagram culture, cancel culture,
one-per-centers, long lines, and expen-
sive festival cuisine, like “vegan hot dogs
and vegan T-bones and vegan imitation
crab / Plus real-fish sashimi that we grew
in a lab.” Among the performers paro-
died: Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Coldplay, Lil
Nas X, Bob Dylan (again), Taylor Swift,
“Ariana Venti,” and “Florence and the
Appliance.” (Mercifully, a sketch involv-
ing “Justin Creeper” and “Carbi D” was
cut.) Updating the original’s gloomy
finale for the climate-change era, the
new show climaxes with a Category 5
hurricane. Plus Beyoncé.
It was hard to tell how the new “Lem-
tried to learn how to juggle. Mostly, they
just talked. “Tyler lived through Katrina,
and we had talked a little bit about that
before, but not as in depth as we did
during quarantine,” Rachel said.
“We also joked about what it would
look like to escape from quarantine,”
Tyler said.
Greg and Rose Yerex, a Canadian cou-
ple in their sixties, tested positive for the
virus on the cruise, but they were asymp-
tomatic. “We felt fine,” Rose said. Still,
they were put in quarantine and couldn’t
leave until they each produced two neg-
ative tests at least twenty-four hours apart.
“We learned to talk to each other again,”
Greg said. “We’ve been married thirty-
four years, and we’d drifted into some
pretty serious bad habits.” He went on,
“Being put together for twenty-four hours
a day for two weeks, we wound up learn-
ing a lot about each other’s fears, hopes,
and dreams.”
Despite being cleared by the Cana-
dian public-health agency, the Yerexes,
who are now back home, in Port Dover,
Ontario, have continued quarantining—
voluntarily. “Greg and I decided that
there’s a lot of fear out in the commu-
nity and that people would feel more
comfortable if we quarantined for an-
other fourteen days,” Rose said. “We
have an acre of property. We can go out-
side in the yard. We can wander around
the house. It’s pretty cushy.”
—Tyler Foggatt
