P.J. O'Rourke, who was the editor-in-chief of National Lampoon around the time it stopped being wonderful — not necessarily his fault — explains a little about what happened there. One point he doesn't make is that just about all magazines began sliding down a cliff about that time. Lampoon's content suffered a lot as its best people discovered there was much, much more money to be made in television and/or movies…but that was also a period where much of America seemed to decide it just wasn't comfortable with the whole idea of reading magazines. And not just because this new thing that was coming called The Internet.