Doug Kenney didn’t do and say those things. Tom Snyder didn’t seethe and fume. The whole episode has been distorted for entertainment value. I’m going to look at a TV talk show clip from half a century ago and show how a Netflix movie and a popular biography got it all wrong.
The late Doug Kenney, a honcho at National Lampoon magazine, appeared on TV with a colleague, Chris Miller. The show was Tomorrow, which ran after the Carson show was done for the night. The host was the late Tom Snyder, a rambunctious man with mighty sideburns and safari-suit lapels. There was no particular hook for the occasion. Snyder just talked with the young fellows about their work and why they’d taken up shocking and sneering as an occupation. (In the early 1970s the young were still rattling their elders’ cages instead of going tsk-tsk.) The encounter lasted 22 minutes and involved Snyder’s signature hanh-hunh-honh’s, by which I mean his booming laugh—more of a guffaw, really.
The Netflix film about Kenney, A Stupid and Futile Gesture, leaves out Miller and presents Kenney as a cool-headed provocateur. It’s a funny scene. “Is that a marijuana cigarette?” Snyder asks. Kenney (after a considered pause): “No.” Oh, but it is. Snyder wants to know why Kenney has to make trouble. Kenney answers with some deliberation. “A long time ago there was someone else society found offensive,” he says. “They thought what he did was radical, dangerous. They persecuted him… and eventually killed him. Of course I’m referring to Dracula.” Will Forte, as Kenney, plays out the line delicately, dropping the kicker with precision. The joke and delivery are admirable, though I admit to being especially tickled because I forgot my history and expected the payoff to be Charles Manson. Kenney also shows the camera a Lampoon issue with a borderline racist spread of a naked black woman. The scene ends with Snyder (Ed Helms) in a snit, drawing in a slow, pained breath before saying, “Doug Kenney of National Lampoon, folks. That’s a humor magazine. Doing very well. Maybe we can do something about that.”
The movie’s based on a book by the same name, a biography of Kenney written by Josh Karp. The book describes the scene this way: “To prepare for his first network television appearance, Doug smoked an enormous quantity of hash. A few questions into the show, it became apparent to Doug that Snyder knew almost nothing about National Lampoon. Addled by the hash and riled by the host’s ignorance, Doug decided to have some fun.” Well, no. Kenney seemed lucid during the interview, and Snyder made no displays of ignorance regarding the magazine.
The book tells us Snyder asked the following question: “What do you think of yourself as? A satirist? A writer? A comedian?” Kenney’s alleged answer: “Actually none of those things, Tom. I think of myself as a cheap hustler. Just like you.” The book: “Snyder snapped back in his chair, speechless for the first time in his career. Uncomfortable silence followed.” No again. Snyder never asked the question, Kenney never said, “Actually none of those things, Tom.” He did make the “cheap hustler” remark but while talking about a Time parody that featured a nudie cover, and he broke into something of a giggle when he said it. The remark itself would seem to be the heart of the matter, but what followed wasn’t silence of any sort, it was Snyder’s hanh-hunh-honh, after which the host asked a friendly question (“Take today as an example, or the week so far. The president was on, talking about cutting the taxes,” and so on). Many more hanh-hunh-honh’s followed, as did friendly questions. “Cheap hustler” wasn’t a ferocious attack, it was towel snapping.
“You said a little while ago that you hate everything,” the supposedly seething TV host tells Kenney at one point. “I’m certain that you don’t, or I’d like to be certain that you don’t.” But Snyder does criticize here and there. Regarding one of the magazine’s more cold-blooded items, we get a demure “It just seems to me, on first blush, that that is an extremely bad judgment to run that sort of a thing, because you are spoofing, really, the death of a human being.” In response to a bleeped comment: “Jeez, you really are a sickie, you know, you really are a sickie! Goodness, you are sick.” These words are threaded through with Snyder’s delighted chortles. There’s a wince take when Snyder hears about Linus from “Peanuts” “chopped up like some kosher salami” (Kenney’s words). In response to what may be a joke about Jayne Mansfield’s death, the host says levelly. “I find that very offensive.” But that’s about it.
At the end Snyder does say, “The National Lampoon is available everywhere and maybe someday we’ll fix that.” This comes out as “we’ll fi-i-i-i-i-ix that,” with the jolly rising intonation of an ad announcer, or somebody doing an ad announcer voice. “Thank you both for being here for some good spoofing,” he concludes. To Kenney’s interjected “Hey hey hey,” Snyder rejoins with “Yes, sir, boys and girls, and we’ll be right back with [rising tone] these announcements.” Just larking around. The “fix that” was in response to Chris Miller’s reference to a story of his where frat boys engage in virtuoso-level regurgitation. Nothing to do with any cool-headed provocations by Kenney, or anything else but some simple grossing out.
The interview clip was posted to YouTube a year ago by an outfit called Obsolete Video, a decade and a half too late for the biography’s author to consult it. But lack of a primary source didn’t stop him. In fact no source for the description of the interview can be identified in his book’s bibliography. Maybe it’s there, but you can’t tell. I’m left wondering how the author, or his possible source, came up with the nonexistent dialogue. The book quotes Chris Hart, a college buddy of Kenney’s, on the fellow’s supposed state of mind during the interview (“nervous and weird,” “no respect for Snyder”). Maybe Hart also reeled off dialogue from memory and the writer figured he’d go with it, and then the Netflix version went further.
This small but disturbing episode leaves us with grave questions regarding the nature of knowledge, or maybe just the reliability of books about smartasses from the popular culture of the 1970s. But a different issue engages me. It’s a small one but important to me and it’s this: I really think Tom Snyder deserved better. And now hanh-hunh-honh.