Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Uncompromised humor in compromised times

COMEDY ISN'T pretty. Steve Martin said that, but Michael O'Donoghue lived it. As a founding writer for National Lampoon (when it was funny) and "Saturday Night Live" (when it was funny), he fashioned his laff riot from death jokes and needles in the eyes -- Texas chainsaw humor. "Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy," he once said.

He termed his approach "stalk 'n' slash" humor and located it somewhere beyond wherever the boundaries of taste were being drawn that day. His credo was simple: "It's not enough to tickle the ribs," he once explained. "Now you must drive an ice pick into the brain pan. Did I say 'an ice pick'? I meant '900 ice picks,' of course." His work did as much as anyone's to darken American humor away from the gentle whimsies of James Thurber and the old New Yorker crowd.

Those are serious comedy credentials, so why haven't you heard of him? Because O'Donoghue's life, as chronicled in Dennis Perrin's new book, "Mr. Mike: The Life and Work of Michael O'Donoghue," perfectly illustrates the pitfalls of positioning yourself as an uncompromising artist in a compromised culture.

After the success of his Lampoon years -- marked by such scathing pieces as "The Vietnamese Baby Book" (a scrapbook with, among other things, room to note "baby's first wound") -- and the greater success of his first "SNL" years (among his famous "Saturday Night" skits was the depiction of Mike Douglas with long needles plunged into his eyes) O'Donoghue was widely hailed as a dark genius who would one day outstrip even Woody Allen.

And then, nothing. Aside from what became a loathe-hate relationship with "Saturday Night" (he left and came back several times), he never came close to unseating Woody Allen.

After "SNL," O'Donoghue tried Hollywood, but his artistic integrity kept getting in the way. His scripts, while wildly comic, were nonetheless far too long and filled with unfilmable sequences. He refused to alter them for mere commercial purposes and slowly accumulated a shelf of rejected manuscripts, expending more and more energy battling show-biz formulaism instead of writing. Except the formula doesn't yield; pop culture prefers the content provider over the artist every time, hands down. The way to make it in Hollywood, of course -- and, by extension, in the rest of America -- is to go along, to accumulate independence incrementally. But O'Donoghue couldn't stand to see even one of his babies eviscerated by Hollywood (particularly after his one filmed script, "Scrooged," was eviscerated by Hollywood). It was always 900 ice picks or nothing.

Few of us are granted the independence of a Woody Allen, but O'Donoghue believed that to be his due as an artist. It was a dangerously naive stance to take as the country drifted rightward from the experimental-theater freedoms of the '60s to the Reagan '80s, and so, what could have been a long and fruitful career instead coasted to a disappointing halt.

O'Donoghue died in 1994, but he'd faded long before that, the tides of comedy having ebbed from the stalk 'n' slash mentality. And maybe it's just as well. We don't need his kind in these parts, ridiculing our pieties, picking our scabs. We've done just fine with "Seinfeld" and his humor of nothing, with the easy blasphemies of "South Park," with HBO comedians considered "edgy" because they use the F-word liberally. These days, making people laugh is quite enough.

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