\n<\/p>\n
Brian McConnachie, who brought absurdist humor to three comedy touchstones of the 1970s and \u201980s \u2014 National Lampoon magazine and the NBC television series \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d and \u201cSCTV Network\u201d \u2014 died in hospice care on Jan. 5 in Venice, Fla. He was 81.<\/p>\n
The cause was complications of Parkinson\u2019s disease, his wife, Ann (Crilly) McConnachie, said.<\/p>\n
Mr. McConnachie \u2014 who stood 6-foot-5 and often dressed in a bow tie, suit and saddle shoes \u2014 had an elegant, patrician presence that set him apart from the wilder, more disheveled writers (most of them men) who often surrounded him.<\/p>\n
\u201cLook, if you told me that he had been a welcomed member of the Algonquin Round Table, and he was there with James Thurber, I\u2019d get that,\u201d Alan Zweibel<\/a>, an original \u201cS.N.L.\u201d writer who worked with Mr. McConnachie, said in a phone interview. \u201cThe rest of us were hooligans.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet even if he appeared to be more of a grown-up than other writers in the Lampoon and \u201cS.N.L.\u201d orbits, Mr. McConnachie\u2019s laid-back, whimsical style \u2014 with some anarchic, disturbed twists \u2014 fit in well with the other writers\u2019 contributions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIf the story of the National Lampoon were a script by Rod Serling,\u201d Rick Meyerowitz,<\/a> a leading illustrator there, wrote in \u201cDrunk Stoned Brilliant Dead\u201d (2010), his history of the magazine, \u201cthe main character would have been Brian McConnachie, a man who his colleagues were convinced was from another planet.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In a phone interview, Mr. Meyerowitz added that the sense of Mr. McConnachie as otherworldly was \u201cwhat you got when you read him but not when you sat and had a beer with him.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn all ways,\u201d he added, \u201che was very modest and not showy.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1973, Mr. McConnachie satirized the cartoon cat and mouse characters Tom and Jerry in \u201cKit \u2019n\u2019 Kaboodle,\u201d a Lampoon mini-comic book (illustrated by Warren Sattler) in which Kit the cat sustains brutal injuries \u2014 an anvil crushes his spine, a gunshot blows off part of his head \u2014 that don\u2019t heal as they often do in comics and animation. <\/p>\n In 1973 he appeared in a photograph in \u201cNational Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook Parody\u201d as a music teacher, Dwight Mannsburden, standing at an angle mimicking his nearby metronome. A year later, for \u201cThe National Lampoon Radio Hour,” Mr. McConnachie collaborated with Louise Gikow on \u201cMoby! The Musical,\u201d a parody of \u201cMoby Dick.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In \u201cName the Bats,\u201d<\/a> a game-show parody written by Mr. McConnachie\u2019s for \u201cS.N.L.,\u201d Michael Palin, as the M.C., shuts a rickety barn door on two contestants (John Belushi, whom Mr. McConnachie was close with, and Gilda Radner) and barks at them to give names to the bats flapping at them in the dark.<\/p>\n When they <\/span>identify various types of bats, Mr. Palin excoriates them.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re supposed to name the bats!\u201d he shouts. \u201cDon\u2019t tell us what kind of bats they are! We know what kind of bats they are! Who do you think put \u2019em in there?\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Zweibel said that at the table read of the sketch, \u201cI <\/span>never laughed harder; we were all doubled over.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n For \u201cSCTV,\u201d Mr. McConnachie and Dave Thomas, one of the show’s stars, wrote a sketch in 1981 in which Vikings board a ship in the year 986<\/a> \u2014 bored with the sameness of their past methods of attacks on England \u2014 and bring a new and unexpected weapon: bees.<\/p>\n \u201cBees<\/em>?\u201d Mr. Thomas, who played the Viking captain, wrote in 2020 in The American Bystander,<\/a> a humor magazine conceived in the 1980s by Mr. McConnachie and revived more than 30 years later. \u201cThis was such a delightfully insane concept that I fell in love with it right away and offered to help write it.\u201d<\/p>\n The Vikings\u2019 plan to \u201crelease the swarming terror\u201d faces a farcical obstacle: The beekeepers\u2019 leader (Joe Flaherty) says the bees can\u2019t travel west at night, so during the day the Vikings will have to row east, complicating the task of reaching England, which \u2014 spoiler alert \u2014 they never do.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Brian John McConnachie was born on Dec. 23, 1942, in Manhattan and grew up in Forest Hills, Queens. His father, Morton, was a reporter for The New York Journal and a newsreel production manager. His mother, Mae (Clark) McConnachie, was a teacher.<\/p>\n Mr. McConnachie studied English at University College Dublin from 1961 to 1963 and served in the Army for two years. He then worked at an advertising agency, where he reviewed TV shows that the agency\u2019s clients advertised on. To his colleagues\u2019 chagrin, he praised rural comedies like \u201cThe Beverly Hillbillies\u201d and \u201cThe Andy Griffith Show\u201d for their sweetness and their smart gags, he told Review Magazine<\/a>, which covers news and entertainment in the Great Lakes Bay region of Michigan, in 2008.<\/p>\n He was shuttled to what he called the \u201cFloor of Lost Men\u201d with no work to do.<\/p>\n After the Lampoon began publishing in 1970, Mr. McConnachie looked to it as his career salvation.<\/p>\n \u201cI had to be there,\u201d he said. \u201cI was like some kid from Kansas going to New York to get the part in the show, but I did it from New York. I started going there with cartoons.\u201d<\/p>\n The cartoons were crude, but they got the attention of Henry Beard, one of the magazine\u2019s founders and editors. Mr. McConnachie was hired in 1972. He left the magazine after four years and joined \u201cS.N.L.\u201d for the 1978-79 season, its fourth. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He was nominated for an Emmy in 1979 as a member of the \u201cS.N.L.\u201d writing staff. After joining \u201cSCTV\u201d for its 1981 season \u2014 its first on NBC after several years in syndication \u2014 he shared an Emmy for outstanding writing for a variety or music program.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Around that time, Mr. McConnachie helped start The American Bystander, but it produced only one pilot issue, in 1982, doomed by the financial impact of the recession that began a year earlier.<\/p>\n