These Are the Good Old Days

A new book looks at that tumultuous decade, the 1980s

The Great Wall of China attracted record crowds during a coast-to-coast tour of the U.S. On a "mission of mercy" to Chad, est Founder Werner Erhard urged natives to "take responsibility for your own starvation" and was promptly eaten. Alarmed at declining election turnouts, the Administration offered free toasters to anyone who voted. Congress made 1984 the Year of the Total Recall when it ordered the return of everything manufactured in 1983.

If this sounds like the kind of smart-alecky prognostication one might hear on a slow night at Elaine's -- well, it is. The celebrity-studded staff of last fall's hit parody Not the New York Times is back, this time with a send-up of tomorrow's news, The 80s: A Look Back at the Tumultuous Decade 1980-1989. Due out next month, the 288-page, large-format book (Workman Publishing; $14.95; paperback $6.95) offers a fantastical but not utterly implausible history of "hot years, cold years, big years, little years, sweet years, sour years, yes-years, no-years."

Before the decade was half over, Walt Disney Productions had acquired financially troubled Great Britain and turned it into a theme park, the United Magic Kingdom. In Italy, 65% of the population was living blindfolded in cellars and the trunks of cars, and kidnap victims were accepted as legal tender. Mexico's oil reserves made it a land of opportunity, and streams of unemployed migrant U.S. business executives -- "whitebacks" -- turned the teeming slums of Mexico City into hotbeds of conservative unrest.

In the U.S., Allan Bakke became the Surgeon General, Muhammad Ali was named Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and John-John Kennedy took over the Tonight show ("Heeeeeeeere's Johnny-Johnny!"). The bankrupt Ivy League colleges announced they would sell expansion franchises. Children won the right to divorce their parents and cruised "singlekids' bars" trying to find new ones; Hollywood capitalized on the trend with a smash-hit movie, Looking for Mr. and Mrs. Goodbar. Food shortages put the Fat Look in vogue, and fashion-conscious women draped themselves in Sheetrock, paper lamb-chop collars and plastic garbage bags. As the population grew older, self-conscious young people added years with Agequake makeup.

Seriously, folks, The 80s was the inspiration of Peter Elbling, 35, a director and actor. Last winter he took the idea to Christopher Cerf, 38, and Tony Hendra, 38, a pair of National Lampoon alumni who helped edit Not the New York Times, and Art Director Michael Gross, 33, another Lampoon veteran. The four men, aided by half the wits in Manhattan, brainstormed for months and recruited more than three dozen writers from such places as the Lampoon, the New York Times, Harper's, TIME, New York magazine and The New Yorker. George Plimpton wrote an unsigned parody of Truman Capote's long-unfinished Answered Prayers ("He thought about the smooth leather of the banquettes under his rear end and how he would look out and think about his enemies"). Fugitive Abbie Hoffman mailed in word of the Checker Cab Co.'s new nonpolluting taxi: a rickshaw pulled by a jogger and known as the Chinese Checker.

The group's 80s chronology finally became so tangled that they had to run it through a computer. That helped the book but not the editors: they find themselves dating checks 1980. A movie based on The '80s is in the works, they report, and Cerf and Hendra have lined up financing for a new satirical magazine. Even so, life has become a bit anticlimactic. Says Hendra: "There seems to be nothing to talk about in 1979 since we've already lived through the next ten years."

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