Lampoon was exactly the opposite. The work was a lot of fun, but the office environment was hell. You cannot put 20 humorists together.

Christmas begins about the first of December with an office party and ends when you finally realize what you spent, around April fifteenth of the next year.

I had grown up as a feature writer, and basically my career had been in The National Lampoon and as a magazine editor, and I'd never been a reporter.

America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God. Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you get idealism, and the next thing you know you've got ideology, with millions dead in concentration camps and gulags.

I like the fact that they still run substantive pieces. I'm not sure I like the pieces, but it's nice that they do that. Anyway, it was always sort of ridiculous, me having anything to do with the youth culture, but now that I'm in my 50s, it's extra-double-ridiculous. They were losing interest in me, and I was losing interest in them. When I went to renegotiate my contract at Rolling Stone, I kind of halfheartedly asked if I could do half the work for half the money, and they asked if I could do two-thirds of the work for half the money. I ran that by my agent, since he can do math.

One nice thing about the Third World, you don't have to fasten your seat belt. (Or stop smoking. Or cut down on saturated fats.) It takes a lot off your mind when average life expectancy is forty-five minutes.

There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.