The Problematics: ‘National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation’ is Maybe More Family Friendly Than You Remember

Not to belabor the obvious, but most people — okay, most Boomers, of which I’m one (a late Boomer, I insist!) — understand that “objectionable” is part of the National Lampoon brand. The understanding being a pretext, or an excuse, or what have you, for sitting still for the objectionability of films with that rubric in their titles. 

An indirect spinoff of the Ivy League humor magazine Harvard Lampoon, NatLamp was the periodical that published that infamous “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog” cover in 1973. National Lampoon’s Animal House set a standard, so to speak, for loutish behavior and boorish humor in youth-oriented films. (Unlike Revenge of the Nerds, another of The Problematics pretty explicitly inspired by Animal House, it did not condone rape.)

So, the most shocking thing I discovered when revisiting National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, released 22 years ago this month, is how relatively, well, toothless it is. 

This was, now that I think about it, likely an organic development. While the first installment in the Vacation series, predictably titled National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) had an R rating, the follow-up, 1985’s European Vacation, went for PG-13 because PG-13 was the way studios wanted their family comedies. And as a Christmas movie, the producers were no doubt aiming for a rewatchability quotient.  Even though Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life was a box office bomb, its resurrection on television introduced the idea of the cinematic Christmas Perennial. And, just like the slightly-raunchy-but-sweet 1993 A Christmas Story, that’s a status the producers of Christmas Vacation no doubt wanted. 

So for much of its running time, the movie’s doofus humor, centered on the varied forms of cluelessness manifested by Chevy Chase’s hapless patriarch Clark Griswold, is woolly and pratfall-heavy. From the very beginning, though, the movie announces itself as a “nothing but the best” kind of studio production. R&B and gospel great Mavis Staples sings the theme song, penned by Brill Building hitmakers Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. (They wrote “On Broadway!” Okay, they wrote it with Lieber and Stoller, but still! They wrote “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling!” Okay, they wrote it with Phil Spector, but…oh never mind) The screenplay is pure John Hughes — his National Lampoon piece, “Vacation ’58,” was the basis of Vacation, and in 1987 he wrote and directed Planes, Trains and Automobiles, a quintessential holiday film in its own right. The four-star cast included E.G. Marshall, Diane Ladd, Doris Roberts and John Randolph as the first slew of in-laws. 

The movie’s opening scenes reestablish Clark’s near-psychotic insistence that his family is not completely, or at least relatively, dysfunctional, as he drives the clan out to a forested area to cut down the Griswold Family Christmas Tree. En route they get into auto hijinks with rednecks (there’s a bit of this in Planes, Trains as well) and then the Griswold’s ever-rotating daughter, here played by Juliette Lewis, gets frozen-eye. 

The way-too-big tree the family brings home captures the attention of the Griswold’s snooty quasi-yuppie neighbors, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Seinfeld was in its very first season) and Nicholas Guest (yes, Christopher’s brother, and better seen with Christopher in the 1980 Western The Long Riders). These characters don’t really do anything villainous except express extreme distaste for the family next door, and yet one of them will be obliged to endure a mauling-by-squirrel at film’s end. The barely-motivated comeuppance is reflective of a certain indifference in the creative process — box ticking, I think they call it nowadays.

In the same vein, when Clark goes Christmas shopping, trying to find something nice and sheer for Bev D’Angelo’s Mrs. Griswold, Christmas Vacation reprises the homina-homina Christie Brinkley stuff. This time with a brunette. Department store sales rep Merry (or maybe Mary?), played by Nicolette Scorsese (absolutely no relation), of plunging neckline and high-rise something or other, drives Clark to distraction and soon attracts the attention of Rusty. Rusty is here played by a very fresh-faced Johnny Galecki, and this scene must have been good practice for the “Holy moly! A GIRL” faces he’d be obliged to make through much of the run of The Big Bang Theory. Later, when Clark fantasizes about the swimming pool he’s going to bestow on the fam once he gets his much-anticipated bonus (and guess what the plot twist on that might be), Mary (or maybe it’s Merry?) reappears in a variant of the Phoebe Cates pool business in Fast Times At Ridgemont High. This is both pro forma and a little weird. Clark is here most firmly established as the ultimate family man, and a Wife Guy by extension, yet his adolescent horniness still knows no bounds at this late date in his development. 

Still, nothing to get overly bothered about. Forty-two minutes in, Randy Quaid’s Cousin Eddie shows up with wife and two kids and RV. Things are about to get really rank!

Well, a little rank — can’t say REALLY. Little girl Ruby Sue used to have crossed eyes, after falling in a well, but then she was kicked by a mule, and that uncrossed them. There’s a dog named Snots that Eddie prizes on account of its unusually large genitals. Eddie’s male child is fixing to go into carnival work when he gets older. And so on. Calling these jokes “classist” is kind of giving them too much credit. 

This holds when the really old relatives, an uncle and aunt played by William Hickey and Mae Questel, show up.  Hickey does a low-rent retweet of his 1985 performance as a doddering don in 1985’s Prizzi’s Honor. Questel, who once voiced adorable cartoon sex bomb Betty Boop, remains adorable as she cycles through a few hard-of-hearing japes, followed by a few touched-with-the-funny-kind-of-dementia gags. 

When a cat in a box shows up, you know it’s doomed; when Clark gets out the carving knife, you don’t necessarily know the turkey’s going to explode, but you don’t kick yourself for having not predicted it. After all the mishaps with the Christmas tree, the Christmas lights, the Christmas turkey, and the Christmas relatives, the family’s fortunes take an unlikely turn, and while Clark may not end up as the luckiest man in Bedford Falls, his family likely will get that swimming pool. And that’s all, folks.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.

Watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation on HBO Max