Sorry, been out of it for a few hours here. Actually, I have been revisiting my formative influences — to be exact, the old National Lampoon from the 1970s and early 1980s. A reader alerted me that you can now buy the entire magazine, all issues from 1970 to 1998, on a DVD. So of course I had to get it. Been sitting here reading some old favorites. Oh boy.

I think the humor has stood up pretty well … but then, my sense of humor stopped developing around 1980, so I’m really not the person to ask. Inevitably, of course, not all of it works, or ever did, but the proportion that does (or did) work is surprisingly high.

The general standard is pretty gross, of course. There was actually a special “Bad Taste Issue” (July 1970), but it hardly notices among the rest. I don’t know how it looks now, after 30-plus years, to someone who came up in the South Park/Beavis & Butthead generation — be interested to hear, if any reader has an opinion. For me, the nostalgia factor keeps me hooked. I remember showing one cartoon to my Mum, a very respectable lady born in 1912. She laughed till she cried, and it was a running joke between us for the rest of her life. WARNING: VERY BAD LANGUAGE. The cartoon.