“We know folly and evil when we see it,” X-posted the great American novelist Walter Kirn last week. “That is why literature and drama speak across time and across cultures.” Cinema certainly qualifies. And comic cinema may have the longest, deepest reach of all. At least it used to before Hollywoke killed the genre and wounded the art form. And few films have been more prophetic of the Trump Effect than one of the best screen farces ever made, National Lampoon's Animal House.

Last week, Nineties male fantasy Sharon Stone ...  insulted America during an interview in Italy.
The 1978 monster hit shook the still pliant liberal order of the era, and retarded feminist-centric “entertainment” for more than a decade — by being hilariously brilliant. A single scene of John Belushi’s Bluto on a ladder peering into a sorority house window had more cultural power than anything in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, An Unmarried Woman, Maude, One Day at a Time, or the then fully Alan Alda-nized MAS*H. Another bit, where fraternity pledge Tom Hulce is torn between a little devil and angel over performing sex on a passed-out date, would trigger a riot in academia and multimedia today. Even without the losing devil’s insult, “Homo!”
Thanks to a masterful sequence from director John Landis, the movie re-popularized college toga parties, at the time deemed passe sexist bacchanalia. For years later, the highlight of every party we young people of both sexes attended was the Isley Brothers’ Shout. During which we would imitate the film’s revelers, even doing the Twist down and up.
But what makes Animal House great art is how well it challenged the late-Seventies zeitgeist forming under an unmanly President, post-Vietnam depression, a sense of male impotence, leftist sermonizing, and national Malaise (about to get much worse with the Iran Hostage Crisis). To be fair, Star Wars had punctured the progressive bubble a year earlier by resurrecting male heroes and the clarity of good versus ...