Hey, this was National Lampoon. They didn’t know from Four Rules. The gun was probably loaded.
I refer, of course, to the best magazine cover photo ever, er, shot…
January 1973. Saw it on a rack and laughed right out loud. Damn betcha I bought a copy, and I wish I still had it. I’d frame the sucker.
Always wondered how they got that look – that perfect look – on that dog’s face. Remember, this was 1973. Nobody’d ever heard of computer graphics. If you wanted a funny look on a dog’s face you had to somehow get the dog to actually make a funny face.
…the cover shoot wasn’t going well. The dog was a professional model. Like Kate Moss, it sat perfectly still with a blank expression. Finally Lampoon’s art director Michael Gross had the idea of standing off-camera behind the dog’s trainer (who was holding the gun) and shouting the dog’s name. Hence the perfect pathos of the dog’s sidelong glance.
I confess I never really got National Lampoon. Guess it’s because I never went to college or something. But I did love that cover. Over 40 years old now, and sometimes it still gets parodied…
You blast just one friend with a shotgun, and they never let you forget it. Politics is like that.