Doug Kenney

In Greenfield, Massachusetts, Penn Jillette had actually engaged in a screaming match with a classmate over whether National Lampoon was just trying to get laughs or had content, with Jillette arguing the latter. “Teachers had to come in,” Jillette recalls, “that fight really escalated. Nothing [in the Lampoon] ever felt even slightly watered down.”

Today, Jillette remembers several Lampoon pieces nearly word for word, not having read them for over 30 years. “It’s like Catch-22, but I read that twice. Or Catcher in the Rye. I remember it that well…“[The Lampoon] is deeply influential [on Jillette’s act], but from the outside you can’t track it. What we do is entirely different, and you’d have to work hard to see what of the Velvet Underground or National Lampoon ended up in Penn and Teller. But, the answer is a whole fucking lot.”