John Wilden Hughes Jr. was an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He began his career in 1970 as an author of humorous essays and stories for the National Lampoon magazine. He went on in Hollywood to write, produce and sometimes direct some of the most successful live-action comedy films of the 1980s. He directed such films as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, She's Having a Baby, and Uncle Buck; and wrote the films National Lampoon's Vacation, Mr. Mom, Pretty in Pink, The Great Outdoors, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Home Alone, Dutch, and Beethoven.

National Lampoon was an American humor magazine that ran from 1970 to 1998. The magazine started out as a spinoff from The Harvard Lampoon.