Classic, brilliant comedy from the National Lampoon at its best!
5 stars
One of the major achievements of the sharp-edged comedy of the later 70s, the Sunday Newspaper Parody is an enormous and enormously FUNNY intertwined parody of a medium-to-small town American newspaper. From front-page news to classifieds, personal ads, advertisements, TV listings, advice column, supermarket insert, comics...every inch is brimming with twisted, unexpected comedy. It's simply brilliant. And the connections throughout will have you cracking up again and again. For example, the front page tells of the Powder Room Prowler, who stalks women in public bathrooms. In the personals, an unknown apologizes to his girlfriend for his "prowling" problem. And the identity of the prowler soon becomes obvious in other pieces throughout the newspaper. And that's just one example among many.
There have been two print versions: the first was printed newspaper-style, on newspaper. The second was printed as a book, but the conversion wasn't done well; text went right into …
One of the major achievements of the sharp-edged comedy of the later 70s, the Sunday Newspaper Parody is an enormous and enormously FUNNY intertwined parody of a medium-to-small town American newspaper. From front-page news to classifieds, personal ads, advertisements, TV listings, advice column, supermarket insert, comics...every inch is brimming with twisted, unexpected comedy. It's simply brilliant. And the connections throughout will have you cracking up again and again. For example, the front page tells of the Powder Room Prowler, who stalks women in public bathrooms. In the personals, an unknown apologizes to his girlfriend for his "prowling" problem. And the identity of the prowler soon becomes obvious in other pieces throughout the newspaper. And that's just one example among many.
There have been two print versions: the first was printed newspaper-style, on newspaper. The second was printed as a book, but the conversion wasn't done well; text went right into the gutters and was obscured by the binding. However, you can find a good scan online, free, in the Internet archive. It's available in PDF and EPUB for download.
archive.org/details/nationallampoonsundaynewspaper1978/mode/1up
The online version is relatively low-res, or at least it was on my phone. But the downloadable PDF version is surprisingly high-res, clear and sharp.
There are a few flaws in the scan. First, the page orientation is a complete mess. Pages are turned sidewise, left and right; you have to constantly switch orientation. If I get the chance, I'm going to make a new PDF version that's consistently oriented. This classic deserves it.
Second, I noticed a little bit of what's either censorship or scanning errors - specifically, it looks as if a few paragraphs here and there were deliberately covered up with squares of white paper or were deleted. I'm 99.9% sure that's NOT in the original, which I read not long after it came out. I don't know why anyone would censor any part of this.
But in any case this is a rare treasure that's wonderfully funny, by some of the greatest minds in comedy.