The Harvard Lampoon

Well blow me over and cover me with Ibis drippings. September's Lampoon is funny. In fact, in the tradition of one venerated Crimson ex-scribe, I might as well fess right up at the start. I laughed my fool head off.

Ordinarily, the discovery of humor in a humor magazine offers little cause for astonishment and Freshmen--to whom this merry September number is dedicated--may wonder what the hullabaloo is all aout. The sordid veritas is that out 'Poonie friends have churned out, with alarming consistency, flabby issues of insipid verse and effete prose; they have nourished an involuted, exclusive brand of sneery-smile humor (nothing off-color, of course) and the result has been that, m beyond the arid confines of Lampoon Castle and Hasty Pudding, I have scarcely ever heard anyone laugh out loud at a Lampoon.

Ah, enough lamentation. This Lampoon is, as I said before, another story. What's to be bitter? It's funny. And now, the palable crux of this innovation: four "distillations" of four Harvard publications. Caustic, sophisticated, sometimes subtle, sometimes slap-stick--honestly, they're just marvelous. A pity that freshmen, whom these parodies are designed to initiate, are unfamiliar with the archetypes, here so unmercifully stripped down to their naked pretensions.

First and best is the CRIMSON'S megalomaniacal Confidential Guide, looking frighteningly like the real thing, and all smothered in absurd stylistic conceits and kittypaw ambiguities.

As always, most of the polls lavished praise on "this heartwarming teacher," though one sourzouled individual carped about Alfred's "excessively heartwarming manner."

Beautiful, what? Then, Lampy gives us an idea of what they can come up with when Crimeds feel sufficiently in the clear for a bona-fide dump. Take this evaluation of a spurious Hum 2 section man:

Knout came in for the lion's share of criticism this time around. Poll after poll called him "dumb," "unintelligent," "thick-skulled," "stupid," or moronic." As one student summarized the feelings of the class: "That man is an idiot."

Here also are samplings of the Freshman Register, a mire of errata and out of focus pictures; the HSA Calendar, (a moribund collage of ads for itself, and a rather fair approximation of the "Complete Listings" featuring a good sprinkling of those inevitable Endocrinology Colloquiums); and the Advocate (replete with unintelligible, but vaguely suggestive, woodcuts, some poems of the same order, and a short story entitled "Filth"). As if all this were not enough, the Lampoon once again treats Cambridge to her perennial Merino, still shaggy, still standing there.

I was gratifies, as well. to find the "editorial" much diminished. It is still the same old horse-manure though; gracious knows why the editors cling so tenaciously to their cretinish little jester and that tired bird. The introduction to the "publications guide" chides freshmen with some grace and gentility. But Ibis's witless spleen can only remind us that Lampy wil probably remain the most literate of Harvard's prep-school fraternities, but only the ingrown toenail of her literary corpus.

Nor am I encouraged to think otherwise by a second piece of asinine twaddle, again much closer to Lampy's norm. Two undergraduates find that Harvard's phantom colored paneler has murdered some Georgian architects. It's tough to imagine anyone cracking a smile over this insipid little soporific, except possibly Dean Sert.

Now to end positively. I must mention at last the opening article. "A senior speaks to freshmen" in a charming series of confused associations, illustrating that he is less confident, and probably a damned sight more muddled than they. The piece is signed with the initials "HTC" and, as no corresponding name may be found on the masthead, I assume it to be the work of H. Todd Cobey, Lampoon Narthex. Substitution of the improbable monicker "Wyeth Wonderbar" for this office is a typical bit of Lampoon tomfoolery.