Brian McConnachie, who brought absurdist humor to three comedy touchstones of the 1970s and ’80s — National Lampoon magazine and the NBC television series “Saturday Night Live” and “SCTV Network” — died in hospice care on Jan. 5 in Venice, Fla. He was 81.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Ann (Crilly) McConnachie, said.
Mr. McConnachie — who stood 6-foot-5 and often dressed in a bow tie, suit and saddle shoes — had an elegant, patrician presence that set him apart from the wilder, more disheveled writers (most of them men) who often surrounded him.
“Look, if you told me that he had been a welcomed member of the Algonquin Round Table, and he was there with James Thurber, I’d get that,” Alan Zweibel, an original “S.N.L.” writer who worked with Mr. McConnachie, said in a phone interview. “The rest of us were hooligans.”
Yet even if he appeared to be more of a grown-up than other writers in the Lampoon and “S.N.L.” orbits, Mr. McConnachie’s laid-back, whimsical style — with some anarchic, disturbed twists — fit in well with the other writers’ contributions.
“If the story of the National Lampoon were a script by Rod Serling,” Rick Meyerowitz, a leading illustrator there, wrote in “Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead” (2010), his history of the magazine, “the main character would have been Brian McConnachie, a man who his colleagues were convinced was from another planet.”
In a phone interview, Mr. Meyerowitz added that the sense of Mr. McConnachie as otherworldly was “what you got when you read him but not when you sat and had a beer with him.”
“In all ways,” he added, “he was very modest and not showy.”
In 1973, Mr. McConnachie satirized the cartoon cat and mouse characters Tom and Jerry in “Kit ’n’ Kaboodle,” a Lampoon mini-comic book (illustrated by Warren Sattler) in which Kit the cat sustains brutal injuries — an anvil crushes his spine, a gunshot blows off part of his head — that don’t heal as they often do in comics and animation.
In 1973 he appeared in a photograph in “National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook Parody” as a music teacher, Dwight Mannsburden, standing at an angle mimicking his nearby metronome. A year later, for “The National Lampoon Radio Hour,” Mr. McConnachie collaborated with Louise Gikow on “Moby! The Musical,” a parody of “Moby Dick.”
In “Name the Bats,” a game-show parody written by Mr. McConnachie’s for “S.N.L.,” 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.
When they identify various types of bats, Mr. Palin excoriates them.
“You’re supposed to name the bats!” he shouts. “Don’t tell us what kind of bats they are! We know what kind of bats they are! Who do you think put ’em in there?”
Mr. Zweibel said that at the table read of the sketch, “I never laughed harder; we were all doubled over.”
For “SCTV,” 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 — bored with the sameness of their past methods of attacks on England — and bring a new and unexpected weapon: bees.
“Bees?” Mr. Thomas, who played the Viking captain, wrote in 2020 in The American Bystander, a humor magazine conceived in the 1980s by Mr. McConnachie and revived more than 30 years later. “This was such a delightfully insane concept that I fell in love with it right away and offered to help write it.”
The Vikings’ plan to “release the swarming terror” faces a farcical obstacle: The beekeepers’ leader (Joe Flaherty) says the bees can’t travel west at night, so during the day the Vikings will have to row east, complicating the task of reaching England, which — spoiler alert — they never do.
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.
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’s clients advertised on. To his colleagues’ chagrin, he praised rural comedies like “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “The Andy Griffith Show” for their sweetness and their smart gags, he told Review Magazine, which covers news and entertainment in the Great Lakes Bay region of Michigan, in 2008.
He was shuttled to what he called the “Floor of Lost Men” with no work to do.
After the Lampoon began publishing in 1970, Mr. McConnachie looked to it as his career salvation.
“I had to be there,” he said. “I 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.”
The cartoons were crude, but they got the attention of Henry Beard, one of the magazine’s founders and editors. Mr. McConnachie was hired in 1972. He left the magazine after four years and joined “S.N.L.” for the 1978-79 season, its fourth.
He was nominated for an Emmy in 1979 as a member of the “S.N.L.” writing staff. After joining “SCTV” for its 1981 season — its first on NBC after several years in syndication — he shared an Emmy for outstanding writing for a variety or music program.
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.
“He was gentle, impossible to read and unpredictable,” Jennifer Finney Boylan, the managing editor for that sole issue, said by phone, “but tremendously encouraging to young writers.”
The possibility of resurrecting the magazine never left Mr. McConnachie over the years, as he wrote for the children’s series “Shining Time Station” and “Noddy”; acted in films (including small roles in “Caddyshack,” “Six Degrees of Separation,” “Sleepless in Seattle” and several Woody Allen movies); and delivered commentaries on NPR.
“He had that flush of success in the 1970s and ’80s, but then he couldn’t find the kind of institution that he flourishes in,” Michael Gerber, the editor and publisher of The American Bystander, said by phone. “He really needed one. He never really felt comfortable outside of a gang.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. McConnachie is survived by his daughter, Mary Crilly O’Hara, and three grandchildren.
In the 1982 issue of The American Bystander, Mr. McConnachie collaborated with the illustrator Frank Springer on a comic strip in which two brothers, playing for rival baseball teams, crash into each other at second base, strip naked and grapple in the style of Olympic-style Greco-Roman wrestlers.
“This can’t be good for baseball,” an umpire thinks to himself as he watches.
The baseball commissioner suspends them but quickly laments the resulting drop in attendance. Before they return to the field, the brothers doff their clothes and wrestle during a Bingo game.
“Sure beats playing Bingo,” one bystander says.
