"Making people laugh is the lowest form of humor."

The aphorism above was one of Michael O'Donoghue's, and I love it. Most people probably react quizzically, wondering why humor should do anything _but_ make people laugh. Others pick up on the fact that the aphorism's saying something _else_, but they're really not sure what, so there's a nervousness behind the dutifully-appreciative chuckle. 

But some of us love _black_ humor, where laughs can be found in some of the most horrible things imaginable. Most of us remember those sick jokes form childhood, the ones about using pitchforks to load truckloads of babies or the colors of nuns in blenders. They're _okay_. And over the past thirty years or so, we've enjoyed movies and TV shows and comic books that give death and mayhem a happy, comical spin, ranging from _Buffy_'s wisecracks to the whimsy of _Pushing Daisies_. Again, it's okay. 

But black humor's something deeper. It's a really aggressive comedy which confronts us with something truly _horrible_, but there's a detail or a description or a fact that makes you laugh _against your will_. It's extremely difficult to accomplish beyond a single joke, because if you dwell _too_ much in the Land of the Dead, the humor burns out and your audience just wanna get the fuck _outta_ there. There aren't many films that sustain black humor for their full length; _Dr. Strangelove_ and _The Hospital_ are about the only two successes I can think of right away. 


http://www.bakedziti.net/video/TheEnchantedThermos.mov

Michael O'Donoghue achieved a wonderful notoriety in the 1970s through his skill at dark, evil-oriented comedy. He was one of the breakout geniuses of the early _National Lampoon_, writing articles like "The Vietnamese Baby Book" and "Eloise at the Hotel Dixee." (In the latter, Eloise's mom has to relocate to a fleabag hotel filled with meth freaks, transvestites, and lead paint.) Lorne Michaels wanted some of the Lampoon's style, so he hired O'Donoghue as head writer on the original _Saturday Night Live_... where O'Donoghue wrote pieces like "Let's Kill Gary Gilmore for Christmas," the famous _Star Trek_ sketch, a long and sophisticated parody of _Citizen Kane_, and many more. He also turned up as an impressionist who imitated celebrities with long needles plunged into their eyes, and as the unsavory "Mr. Mike," whose "Least Loved Bedtime Stories" usually involved small furry animals meeting horrible ends.

(A few months ago, I wrote a blog entry describing the spectacle of John McCain having a stroke on national television. That was a riff on O'Donoghue's distinctive style.)

It's not hard to find recurring stuff in O'Donoghue's work. He love the decayed elegance of the 1920s and prewar Hollywood, and children's stories gave him an easy entry into really shocking material and the despoilation of children. Nazis were perhaps inevitably part of O'Donoghue's universe, and he was an early enthusiast of using fetish imagery in his work. And no matter how many Taschen reprints of Helmut Newton photos you've seen, nothing can prepare you for O'Donoghue's "Frederick's of Toyland" piece.

O'Donoghue himself was... well, okay, I'm basing this on having read about him since the mid-1970s, and on Dennis Perrin's biography, but don't blame Perrin for my comments. His first works were surreal experimental theater productions and articles in the _Evergreen Review_, making him a latecomer to the classic Beats. His first film script credit, the James Ivory film _Savages_, was a mannered sature that drew heavily on the work of Luis Bunuel as well as O'Donoghue's fascination with the lost elegance of the 1920s. (This was aroung the time John Waters was getting started, and there's a lot of similarities between his work and O'Donoghue's.) O'Donoghue always thought of himself as an artist and, as both artists and poseurs do, he encouraged people to see his eccentricities and erratic behavior as indications of his genius. (He was capable of towering rages, and frequently lost jobs when feeling insulted over some minor slight.) He could be generous with help and encouraging younger writers, but he also employed the Zen technique of psychologically berating his underlings to get them to push themselves further. 

In many cases, in worked. The _Lampoon_ and _SNL_ quickly took on the colors of O'Donoghue's style, and were long associated with his style of aggressive, black humor. But O'Donoghue's influence would fade as others would find their comedy voices, and O'Donoghue would grow restless or bored... or he'd fly into a rage over some minor slight, quit, and tell everyone else about the philistines who just didn't recognize his genius. In short, despite his considerable talent, O'Donoghue could be a major asshole. (Some of this may have been due to brain disorders; O'Donoghue suffered from migraines his whole life, self-medicating with Percodan and marijuana, and he died of a sudden brain hemorrhage at the age of 54.) 

So why am I writing this now? Well, when O'Donoghue upped-and-quit _SNL_, he had another project in the works. Lorne Michaels bankrolled a TV special that would have been O'Donoghue's own show. Titled _Mr. Mike's Mondo Video_, it was to be a parody of those exploitative "Mondo Cane" films of the early 1960s, where the filmmakers included "shocking" footage under the pose of anthropological interest. O'Donoghue's film-- hosted by his "Mr. Mike" character-- would depict a South Seas cult devoted to the worship of Jack Lord, an Amsterdam clinic where cats are taught to swim, lengthy discussions of Dan Aykroyd's webbed toes, affirmations from sexy women about their desire to date nerds and freaks, and whatever else O'Donoghue threw into the pot. 

The film was, by all accounts, exceedingly strange, but very poorly made: O'Donoghue was a writer, a radio producer, and a performer, but he couldn't direct film or video. The result was an ugly mess that NBC rejected, so the nascent New Line Cinema converted it to film and gave it a theatrical run. It's existed solely on the fringes of the fringes, hard to find outside of worn VHS copies. 

The 1980s weren't kind to O'Donoghue. He did well enough, getting screenwriting gigs here and there, but the only thing that bore his name as writer was _Scrooged_. And as I said, a brain henorrhage took him out in 1994, around the time he was talking to Quentin Tarantino about a collaboration. But, this was also a time when fringe culture seemed to have caught up with O'Donoghue. He'd modelled a TV show after a notorious exploitative travelogue, and once said he regarded serial killers as authentic American folk artists... and the 1990s gave is a fringe culture that resurrected modern primitives and "incredibly strange movies"' (remember ReSearch?), dwelled on serial killers and neo-Nazis and freaks, gave us a high-market fascinations with fetish gear and pulp-era low-down trash, from Tijuana bibles to Bettie Page and Irving Klaw. But Michael O'Donoghue had been there first. 

I've been a fan of O'Donoghue's for thirty years, and I've never seen _Mondo Video_. But Shout! Factory;s brought it our on DVD. I'll probably buy it and watch it once or twice. My taste for O'Donoghue's work has faded a little, but this was his one shot at injecting his work in its "purest form" into American video culture, so it'll be worth watching. It'll also be a nice way to revisit the days of midnight cult movies that _were_ dangerous, evil, shocking, circulated on beat-to-shit copies and probably best enjoyed while toking up... and great fun. 

Oh, by the way, here are the first five minutes of _Mr. Mike's Mondo Video_. And if the above hasn't been enough of a warning, well...