The Onion didn’t just grow out of the ground. It had a great ancestor named National Lampoon, who lived in a strange, unstable time called the 1970s and created super-smart, often scalding social satire.

The Lampoon’s heyday is documented in a new coffee-table book that’s as awesomely designed and illustrated as it is catchily titled: Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead (Abrams, $48) by Rick Meyerowitz, an artist whose work with the national monthly magazine began with its first issue, in April 1970.

DSBD offers sharp profiles of the young, largely fucked-up crew of contributors, among them the scarily clever, scarily volatile writer Michael O’Donoghue and the surreally gifted cartoonist Gahan Wilson. All of these verbal portraits are the work of former colleagues who’ve managed to survive to this day. There’s also plenty of full-length articles reproduced here, some of them sprawling by current 140-character standards.

A page from Doug Kenney and Daniel Maffia’s “The Undiscovered Notebook of Leonardo Da Vinci”, showing the Renaissance genius’s prototypes of the water pistol, the gumball machine, and the personal vibrator.

But the shortest route to laughs is through samples of National Lampoon’s amazing artwork. Every bit of it comes off as a painstaking labour of love, mimicking Sunday-paper funny pages, business brochures, phone books, and many other print forms that have joined the Lampoon itself in the blue box of history.

Without question, some of the humour would do poorly on 21st-century tests of race-and-gender sensitivity. Then again, it’s worth remembering that the makers of the Lampoon were out to offend. That can be refreshing in an era when the label “subversive” gets slapped on everything from footwear to mayonnaise.