Buy This Box or We'll Shoot This Dog: The Best of the National Lampoon Radio Hour

Without the writers and performers behind the National Lampoon Radio Hour, comedy today would be an altogether different beast. In truth, it wouldn't be nearly so beastly. For a time, overeducated, chemically altered white boys with attitudes were an extraordinary font of humor, and they didn't come much more educated, altered, white, and boyish than the Nat Lamp crew. Led first by Michael O'Donoughue and later by John Belushi, the radio program lasted from 1973 to 1975, with many of its creators then moving on to the inaugural company of Saturday Night Live. But if TV proffered innately impertinent, un-P.C. types like O'Donoughue, Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner in slightly deluded form, and movies would further water down their personas, radio served them up in all their concentrated glory. The show, as this astonishing 3 CD box demonstrates, was the comic equivalent of a lethal speedball. --Steven Stolder