SPIRIT OF XMAS IN LAMPY

In his latest number Lampy has concocted a sort of repressed Christmas medley. As one turns the hushed pages of his humour one somehow cannot recognize it as being really an effect of Christmas. To be sure there is the mild "Sania" spirit; the Yule log sputters over and anon doggedly, but the whole is so very mild and chastened that one cannot help attributing it to sadness at an abbreviated Christmas vacation. Such, at least, is the key-note set by the leading editorial with its pathetic plea for a longer holiday, and each succeeding Christmas thought follows hard on the heels of another with an uncanny restraint.

There is something sacred about a Christmas number which Lampy has been quick to perceive and he has striven to prepare a feast of humour at which Anthony Comstock would not have blushed to sit down. Occasionally a quip becomes recalcitrant and breaks loose, only to be swallowed up again by full page close-ups of the interior of the Lampoon building. But this is, after all, only what is to be expected in a Christmas number, and there are frequent flashes of decided Jevity, such as an unintentional likeness of Professor Rand performing on skiis, a clever whack at the Nominating Committee and a geographical joke or two which banish all dark thoughts of Christmas from our minds.

There is much serious verse that is good, an editorial that smacks of Lampy's halcyon days and a free translation into Chinese English of the Jimmian equivalent of "two threes" as "one couple in the royal bath for three exalted minutes"--which is not altogether Comstockian. Mr. Choate's and Mr. Behn's drawings are, as ever, exceptionally good, and there is a mildly amusing article on the annoying miscellany of "drives," as well as a Biblical distortion that is funny in spots. On the whole the number is a pleasant one, calculated to "tickle the great American public under the great American waistcoat" but not to split its sides.