[citation needed] Originally an hour in length, after 13 weeks it was cut down to half-an-hour due to the difficulty of putting together the very considerable amount of material required for a one-hour show.
The Radio Hour was recorded in a studio specially built at the National Lampoon offices at 635 Madison Avenue, New York City.
Michael O'Donoghue was head writer for the first three seasons of Saturday Night Live, and this may explain why some of the radio show material, such as "What if Ed Sullivan Were Tortured?"
Two examples of the sometimes shocking humor of the Radio Hour are sketches featuring game shows entitled "Catch it and Keep it" (prizes - some quite lethal - are dropped from a great height to the crowd below), and "Land a Million" (in which a housewife is left alone in an airborne Boeing 747 containing $1 million in cash and a ton of TNT and must answer questions about literature in order to receive tips on how to land the plane safely).
National Lampoon released 5 albums that were created entirely with, or partly with, material from the Radio Hour: Gold Turkey was also subsequently issued as a CD.