When in Rome . . .

By JOSEPH RAGO

The brothers of Delta Tau Chi were already behind the times in 1962, the year in which the 1978 movie "Animal House" is set, and certainly their arrested development has not kept pace with the half-century's progress since. So how come their misbehavior is as alluring, and hilarious, as ever? At this distance, aren't we supposed to know better?

In "Fat, Drunk, and Stupid," a memoir of the movie's creation, Matty Simmons simply takes the appeal for granted. If I had produced one of the greatest comedies of all time, I'd probably leave it at that, too. "Animal House" is imperishable because it is hysterical.

Still, the question stands. The GPAs of Bluto Blutarsky, Otter Stratton, Kent "Flounder" Dorfman et al. hover somewhere around a Gentleman's F. The boys contribute nothing worthwhile to what today would be called "the Faber College community," except free beer and unofficial electives in partying.

This is a film, after all, that shows the gang drunk-driving to the nearby Emily Dickinson College, where Otter poses as the "engaged to be engaged" fiancé of the late Fawn Leibowitz. Having learned that she recently died in a kiln explosion, he tells her bereaved roommate: "She was going to make a pot for me." Otter parlays the con into a group date at a seedy roadhouse, which ends when the Delta guys are intimidated by the black clientele and desert the girls. "What baffles me is why Fawn would go out with boys like that," one of the Dickinson girls says as they make their way back to their dorm on foot. "They reminded me of criminals."

In the 1970s American humor found a new comic register—ironic, pitiless, irreverent toward anything resembling a status quo—and "Animal House" had perfect pitch. So did National Lampoon, the magazine that Mr. Simmons bankrolled in 1969. (Technically, the movie's full name is "National Lampoon's Animal House.") He had made a fortune, starting in the 1950s, as one of the entrepreneurs behind the first credit card, the Diners Club, and for some reason he gave part of the money to Doug Kenney and a couple other genius Harvard reprobates. They had what was then a fresh idea, namely to publish a humor magazine of the sort that would give Diners Club customers heartburn.

The Lampoon became a bible for the under-30 crowd, especially college students, and Hollywood beckoned. Kenney started working on a script with the writer Harold Ramis; their treatment, with the working title "Laser Orgy Girls," depicted the high-school exploits of a young Charles Manson. Mr. Simmons, playing the voice of reason, insisted that the writers tone down the material. He also moved the plot to academia, loosely defined, and brought in a third writer, Chris Miller, whose short stories about his Dartmouth College capers were among the Lampoon's most popular.

Today at Dartmouth—public service announcement: my alma mater—the faculty and school administrators hold "Animal House" in somewhat less esteem than Yale must feel for George W. Bush. Yet in my informal surveys, alumni of the era depicted by the movie regard it less a satire than cinéma vérité. (The resemblance to modern student life is also uncanny.) There's a reason for that, as Mr. Simmons details. "Double secret probation" was a real thing. The true-to-life stories he expurgated from the screenplay but describes in "Fat, Drunk, and Stupid," however, are—to use a line employed by the Faber administration—so profound and disgusting that decorum prohibits listing them here.

Such restraint is, paradoxically, part of the reason the movie succeeds. "Animal House" is often called tasteless, and it is, but it is tastelessness elevated to art—a comedy of bad manners. Unlike its gross-out derivatives, from "Porky's" to "American Pie," the movie is the work of smart, literate people. Watch it again if you don't believe me.

The same impulse—to run it back, to do it again—also helps to explain why "Animal House" is canonical. At heart, it is a backward-looking and rather sentimental appeal to a passage in life when the only things that matter are fun and friends and youthful extravagance, before settling down to career, family and other adult responsibilities. "We invented nostalgia," Doug Kenney once claimed—and it was true, at least for a happy few.

“Unlike gross-out derivatives like 'American Pie,' 'Animal House' is the work of smart, literate people.”

"Animal House" was quite literally an effort to re-create a world that was by then already gone. The clean-cut New Frontier of the early 1960s had been obliterated by the counterculture, and the kids had traded in their shetland sweaters for burlap ponchos. The movie was filmed in 1977 over 32 days on an active campus, the University of Oregon in Eugene. The decommissioned frat house that became the Delta headquarters was being used as a halfway home for ex-cons.

For Mr. Simmons and his humorist-elegists, the whole point was to achieve time-defying verisimilitude. A hairdresser imported from Beverly Hills turned out to know only how to cut disco styles and was replaced by an old-school barber in Eugene who "knew how to do sides."

The cast was mostly unknowns, except for "Saturday Night Live" star John Belushi, who played the immortal Bluto. The director was John Landis, who had attracted attention that year with "The Kentucky Fried Movie," an anarchic collection of comedy sketches written by future "Airplane!" and "Naked Gun" wizards David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker. The "Animal House" actors were encouraged to relive their school days, and their devotion to method acting was total. On their first night in Eugene, some of them showed up at a U. of O. party, where a fist fight broke out involving the uninvited guests and some student athletes; a few in the "Animal House" contingent spent the balance of the evening in a hospital emergency room. Belushi tried unsuccessfully to rally the movie crew's Teamsters to retaliate.

Avoiding getting beaten up is generally a good policy, but Mr. Simmons makes it all sound like an awful lot of fun. In retrospect, plenty of things we've done that might seem, with the disadvantages of hindsight, like bad decisions were actually enriching. Consider the line that Mr. Simmons borrows for his title, the stodgy, malevolent Dean Wormer's counsel to one of the Deltas: "Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son." That's generally good advice too. But given that you're only an undergraduate once, one or two of the three is not the worst way to go through college.

"Animal House" endures, I think, because this spirit is so antithetical to Wormer's heirs, the moral regulators on the left and right who run America's institutions of higher education and want to choose for everyone what is supposed to be valuable or appropriate to their college experience. An unregulated group like a fraternity is a threat to their control—even as the reality, in my view, is that the people who don't take college so seriously go on to much better things than the ones holed up making grades. Anyhow, it's hard not to pity the underprivileged who obey and will never remember what might have been the greatest night of their lives.

Mr. Simmons doesn't seem to quite grasp that his achievement couldn't be repeated either. In the 1980s, he commissioned treatments for an "Animal House" sequel that would have fondly evoked the 1970s. The proposals included the obligatory Bluto Junior, psychedelic mushrooms and encounter groups. None of them was made. Like being a college student, "Animal House" could be made only once—a good thing on both counts.

—Mr. Rago is a member of the Journal's editorial board.