Early Life
O'Donoghue was born Michael Henry Donohue in Sauquoit, New York. His father, Michael, worked as an engineer, while his mother, Barbara, stayed home to raise him.
O'Donoghue's early career included work as a playwright and stage actor at the University of Rochester where he drifted in and out of school beginning in 1959. His first published writing appeared in the school's humor magazine Ugh!
After a brief time working as a writer in San Francisco, California, O'Donoghue returned to Rochester and participated in regional theater. During this period, he formed a group called Bread and Circuses specifically to perform his early plays which were of an experimental nature and often quite disturbing to the local audience. Among these are an absurdist work exploring themes of Sadism entitled "The Twilight Maelstrom of Cookie Lavagetto", a cycle of one-act plays called Le Theatre de Malaise and the 1964 dark satire The Death of JFK.
His first work of greater note was the picaresque feature "The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist", published as a serial in Evergreen Review. This was an erotic satire of the comic book genre, later released in revised and expanded form as a book by that magazine's publisher, Grove Press. Drawn by Frank Springer, the comic detailed the adventures of debutante Phoebe Zeit-Geist as she was variously kidnapped and rescued by a series of bizarre Inuit, Nazis, Chinese foot fetishists, lesbian assassins and other characters. Doonesbury comic-strip creator Garry Trudeau cited the strip as an early inspiration, saying, " very heavy influence was a serial in the Sixties called 'Phoebe Zeitgeist'. . . . It was an absolutely brilliant, deadpan send-up of adventure comics, but with a very edgy modernist kind of approach. To this day, I hold virtually every panel in my brain. It's very hard not to steal from it."
In 1968, O'Donoghue worked with illustrator and fellow Evergreen Review veteran Phil Wende to create the illustrated book The Incredible, Thrilling Adventures of the Rock. Biographer Dennis Perrin described it as having "no plot. The same rock sits in the same spot in the same forest for thousands of years. Nothing much happens. Then, while two boys roam the wood in search of a Christmas tree, one sees the rock and is inspired."
Taking the idea to the publisher Random House, the pair sold the book to the young editor Christopher Cerf. Cerf was a former member of the Harvard Lampoon, and O'Donoghue's first acquaintance from that group. Through Cerf, O'Donoghue would meet George W. S. Trow and other former Lampoon writers looking to start a national comedy magazine.
In 1969, O'Donoghue and Trow co-wrote the script for the James Ivory / Ismail Merchant film Savages. This film tells the story of a tribe of prehistoric "Mud People" who happen upon a deserted Gatsby-esque 1930's manor house. The Mud People evolve into contemporary high-society types who enjoy a decadent weekend party at the manor before ultimately devolving back into Mud People. Savages was eventually released in 1972.
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