LAMPY STEPS ON NO TOES IN NEW PARODY NUMBER

The following review of the current parody issue of the Lampoon was written by Harford W. H. Powel, Jr., '09, a former president of the comic and at present editor of the Youth's Companion.

"It would be rash," writes A. P. Herbert, in Punch, "to suggest that there is a decline in the celebrated sense of humor. But there is a plague of touchiness. The lot of the humorous writer is an increasingly hard one. If we are merely mild and agreeable the critics cry at us: 'Have you nothing to say? Have you no fierceness, no anger, no satire?' They little know, Whenever we do say anything, it is considered propaganda, or else a breach of taste."

Princeton and House Planners Touchy

Among the objects of humor which Mr. Herbert finds to be afflicted with this touchiness are domestic servants, policemen, civil servants. Americans, Mussolini, clergymen and plumbers. To which the Lampoon, no doubt, would add Princetonian and the House Planners. But nobody's touchiness will be outraged by the current Lampoon. It is a monstrous fat book, the fattest in all Lampoon history, and it is a parody of that strangely sportive new child of Boston. The Sportsman.

The Sportsman is an Aristocrat

Now, the spirit of The Sportsman is not that of the common or (Boston) garden fan. The Sportsman is the American equivalent of the Earl of Lonsdale. It wears the tallest of tall gray hats. It rides to hounds, and it does more; it hounds its readers to ride. Steeplechasing, polo, the court games, and its more gentlemanly side of aviation are its favorite themes. There is no humor in these things, but plenty of fun can be poked at their devotees. The Lampoon has done a good job.

Kodaking the Koodoo is Fun

You will find your attention called to the hazardous sport of cribbing, to the fast and savage new indoor game of feather wafting, to kodaking the koodoo in Africa, to drop-tag as a pleasing sport for the flyer, and to the fact that while you cannot afford to buy a race-horse, the Aga Khan. The pictures are better than the text, but of what sporting paper, is this not true? Leslie Cheek '31 supplies an uproarious cover, and the whole staff has been busy making composographs and very good composographs they have turned out to be. There is something bold and fine in the conception of a pair of apteryxes defying gunners on the top of the chimneys of the Cambridge Gas Company. There is a charming and not heavily exaggerated view of the Cape Cod Canal; and the aviation photographs strike a not which is but seldom sounded in the current rotogravures.

It is a good Lampoon, even though It whacks a victim that will not whack back. Neither the CRIMSON nor this reviewer has ever encouraged the Lampoon to show too much flerceness and anger and satire.

Measured by that test, this is the most successful Lampoon of them all. And perhaps, as the pendulum called progress swings slowly to and fro, there will come a time when touchiness will disappear and the Lampoon can be flerce and angry and satiric--and be regarded, nevertheless, not as a menace but as a joke