Chris’ first love as a writer was short stories, and that is what he mainly did for National Lampoon.  You can sample them here. There'll bee a new one up every so often, so stay alert.

“The Magic Show” – When Chris was, oh, 12-16 years old, he made a bit of pocket change performing magic with his best friend, Mark (aka Frog), at children’s birthday parties.  He had a high hat to pull a rabbit (stuffed) out of and a suitcase of additional equipment purchased from Lou Tannen’s Magic, a funky little shop in Manhattan, so crammed with magic and magicians that you could hardly move in it.  The shows were as much fun for the performers as the audience, featuring at least as much slapstick (hitting each other on the head, falling down) as magic tricks, and the moms and dads loved being able to kick back while Chris and Mark did the heavy lifting, party-entertainment-wise.  So that’s what Chris was thinking back on, the day he wrote this story.  The ending, he assures you, is strictly fictional.  There was no pony.  In real life, it was a horse.

"Thanksgiving Memory" - Chris’ earliest short stories contained a lot of bad fathers and mothers.  You could say he had some accumulated attitude to vent.  But, in “A Thanksgiving Memory,” he took revenge on his entire family.  Written in March of ’70, well before his affiliation with National Lampoon, it did not see publication until July of ’74.  That’s because Michael O’Donnehugh rejected it twice, from the November issues of ’71 and ’72.  Why?  Fuck, why did O’Donnehugh do anything?  Then, when it finally did get used, Chris was travelling in Nepal and the editors published the wrong draft, using all the real names of his family members.  You can imagine his father’s reaction to that.  “You put a turkey on my cock!” he screamed at Chris over the phone.  And it was true.

"Telejester". In the summer of ’73, the Watergate hearings were the by far the most interesting show on TV.  Chris must have watched them for months.  Seeing Nixon’s minions sweating and squirming in the witness chair was fascinating, like turning over a rock and watching all the creepy-crawlies run for cover.  So he was moved to write “Telejester.”  The narrator is an evolution of the narrator of “Pipe Dream.”  His voice, by now, has become quite Runyonesque.  More “dealer stories” would follow, including “Species Argument” and “Lunacy.”  In time, you will be able to read them here.

“Boxed In” is another of those stories that had a subtext Chris was unaware of during the writing process.  He was, in 1973, stuck on the spiderweb of a bad relationship.  “Boxed In,” as well as “Cock Tales” and “Another Cock Tale,” also written in ’73, end with an unusual form of physical entrapment, and—duh!—were about his need to escape from that particular young lady.  Think of them as messages from his subconscious he was too dumb to recognize.  Or, think of them as mosquito bites, subway trains, or brassieres, it doesn’t matter to him.