06 November 2006

Animal House: The Memoir.


Chris Miller has written The Real Animal House; reviewed by Christopher Buckley in the the New York Times:

Has it really been almost 30 years since “Animal House” came out? We grow old. The movie, on the other hand, hasn’t aged a bit. “Double secret probation,” “See if you can guess what I am now? I’m a zit! Get it?” and “To-ga, to-ga!” are classic, time-defying, laugh-out-loud moments encased in celluloid amber. I’ve watched the movie with my father, now 80, and my son, who is 14; both were on the floor gasping for breath.

Comes now Chris Miller, Dartmouth Class of ’63, who wrote the screenplay along with Harold Ramis and Douglas Kenney, to give us, as his subtitle puts it, “the awesomely depraved saga” of Alpha Delta Phi, the fraternity whose bacchanals and outrages provided the inspiration for the movie, along with Ramis’s and Kenney’s own experiences of Greek life. (Not to be confused with Plato or Pythagoras.) Miller calls this book, on its cover, “a mostly lucid memoir.” It’s unclear whether “lucid” is a typographical error. Miller may well have meant “lurid.”

His book is sophomoric, disgusting, tasteless, vile, misogynist, chauvinist, debased and at times so unspeakably revolting that any person of decent sensibility would hurl it into the nearest Dumpster. I couldn’t put it down. I make this self-indicting admission with all due trepidation, but there it is. For better or worse, this an utterly hilarious book.

Here's the whole thing.
 

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