Unlike many of his peers, Brian McConnachie—the comedy writer and actor, who died on January 5—was not a California guy. Many of Brian’s friends became California guys, living lives straight out of Steely Dan songs, but he stayed a New York guy, right down to spending his final days in Florida. Gentle, natty Brian blossomed in the gritty, decadent Manhattan of the ’70s, when he and his colleagues at National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live redefined funny. Brian held Hollywood lightly, picking up cameos and character roles (Caddyshack, Strange Brew, Celebrity) and becoming a “comedy writer’s comedy writer” rather than a marquee—and household—name like Belushi or Murray.
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In March 2014, Brian flew out to Los Angeles to attend a wake for another one of those names, his friend Harold Ramis, and added an extra day to visit me in Santa Monica. We’d been working together to launch a humor magazine he’d tried to start back in 1981, the American Bystander. This was a fascinating challenge because—still—Brian didn’t seem quite sure what the magazine was. He had called it, variously, “National Lampoon for grown-ups,” or “a hip New Yorker,” or, most tantalizing, “a little house with wings.” Brian was a quantum physicist of comedy, generating “spooky action”—you often couldn’t explain why something Brian wrote was so funny, and the moment you tried to pin it down, it would disappear. My job was to pin him down, but gently, and make his old Bystander dream a reality.
When he first tried to create it in 1981, the magazine’s timing was precisely wrong: comedy had shifted from print to video, as well as from New York to California. Things were even worse in all-digital 2014, but we hoped the once-lush forest of print had burned so thoroughly that one green shoot would be able to grow. Basing the Bystander in Santa Monica was part of our master plan: in a town full of brilliant comedy writers trained on print but chained to sitcoms by golden handcuffs, we hoped our quarterly, book-length “house with wings” would attract some high-class boarders. Amazingly, it did.
We even attracted a genial Delaware businessman who thought he could get us a cool million in exchange for putting a few Shenzhen billionaires’ kids on the masthead. Humor magazines are a great landing spot for what can charitably be described as failsons, and it would add spice to the origin story, so Brian and I met for brunch at the Fairmont Miramar to get the dummy issue spit-polished for our Chinese friends.
We talked for three hours, but I remember only one exchange.
“I have to ask you a question,” Brian said, “and you must answer it.”
Brian was 27 years my elder, and I was raised in the South. “Of course,” I said.
“You don’t have any relationships, do you?” he asked. “With substances. Chemicals.”
I laughed at the sheer ’70s of it; Brian would never straight-up ask me if I was a druggie. Collaborators were allowed their vices.
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I don’t have the constitution. After this one mimosa, I’ll need a nap.”
I saw a weight come off him. “Thanks for being honest.” We worked together happily for the next 10 years.
Like any Gen X comedy nerd raised on secondhand copies of National Lampoon and VHS tapes of the original SNL, I’d always loved Brian’s work. As I came to know the man behind the jokes, I learned that he was perhaps the most personally beloved comedy writer since Robert Benchley. Brian was friendly, kind, and always good company. More than that, he was unique—nobody else could’ve written the magazine parody Guns and Sandwiches for the Lampoon, or the SNL sketch “Name the Bats,” or “The Vikings and the Beekeepers” for SCTV. Comedy writers are a merciless crowd; those of us who do this for a living quickly become jaded by every typical joke or angle. Brian’s work always surprised us and, in doing so, made us remember why we wanted to write comedy in the first place.
But I think being so singular made Brian lonely. Stu Kreisman, Brian’s SCTVcolleague, told me a story from 1981, just before they all won Emmys: “Brian, Chris Cluess, and I were in this hotel hallway in Toronto, and it was late, and we were drunk, pitching pennies against the wall. Being drunk, I started telling Brian how I finally understood ‘Vikings and Beekeepers’ and went into this whole brotherhood-of-man bit about it. I thought he was going to tell me I was full of s---, but instead, Brian gave me this big hug. ‘You got it! You’re the only one who got it!’”
Brian didn’t talk about his famous friends much, which is probably how he kept them. I remember no stories starring Harold, or “Billy” Murray, Dan Aykroyd or Rick Moranis. I begged Brian to write a memoir, but after a chapter, he succumbed to second thoughts. About Doug Kenney, the wunderkind Lampoon cofounder whose hero’s journey took him from Cambridge to New York to Hollywood, then over a literal cliff in Hawaii at age 33, Brian was almost too pat, calling the Animal House and Caddyshack writer “our Mark Twain.”
The only one Brian spoke of regularly was John Belushi.
“Belutchi”—he always pronounced it like that—“no door was ever closed to him,” Brian told me once. “People were always giving him things. We were walking in the Village one day—around the time of Lemmings—and it was just pissing down rain. There were holes in John’s shoes, so we ducked into a little, narrow shop, a cigar store or something. Five minutes later, John walked out with a new pair of rubber boots. He’d charmed the owner, this crusty guy from Eastern Europe. No payment was necessary past the pleasure of keeping John’s feet dry.”
At the beginning of the first Bystander, Brian was full of hopes and plans for his magazine, and with a talented young staff backed by money from John and Lorne, Danny and Gilda and Billy—comedy royalty at the height of their power and fame whose last names were practically superfluous. But two years later, promoting the Bystander on Letterman, you can see that something had changed. Brian seemed unsure; he vacillated as though he didn’t want to talk about his own magazine. It’s only when he started talking about ideas—future plans, things that could be—that the laughs started to come. The concrete bored Brian; as our partner Alan Goldberg told me last week, “Brian didn’t think outside the box. There was no box.”
Sometime after that appearance, it was clear that the Bystander wasn’t going to happen, at least not in that form. The original Bystander never made it to the newsstand, and the handful of “Pilot Issues” printed to entice investors are now considered collector’s items. The restart was luckier. Of course our Chinese deal fell through, but we pivoted to Kickstarter, then Patreon. We just celebrated our 28th issue, which must be some kind of record for an independent comedy magazine in the year of our Lord 2024.
Through the ’80s and ’90s and ’00s, Brian pressed on, acting when he could and writing, always writing. He helped bring Shining Time Station to a generation of kids and wrote an episode of The Simpsons, but he was never so ambitious again.
What happened with Brian? What happened with the old Bystander? I have a guess.
On March 5, 1982, Belushi was deep in a funk at the Chateau Marmont when someone gave him something. With that, Brian’s happy quantum world of “what could be” collapsed into a single, unhappy “what is.” And it happened out here, where so many friends seemed to go and never come back.
There’s an old comic strip from the Lampoon, a parody of Blondie written by Brian in 1974 that shows mourners at Brian’s funeral, sometime in the future. In the strip, Lampoon writer Michael O’Donoghue quips, “What kind of wine goes best with grief?”
Several people have quoted that to me since Brian passed. I think, for my dear friend and colleague, whom I miss already, that vintage would be a California 1982.•
Michael Gerber is editor and publisher of The American Bystander. He can also be found, for now, on Substack.
