Honey, I Shrunk the 'Poon

By Leon Neyfakh

Two new issues of the Harvard Lampoon came out recently—“Cigarettes and Pornography” and “The Wiki Number.” The first one’s about vice, and the second is about computers. One of the jokes is that they’re both tiny—literally much smaller than most Lampoons.

They’re calling them Lampoon Minis; there are three so far and each one is just 15 little pages long. The first and best one, “The Finer Things,” is themed around the very wealthy. It came out back in September and was edited by recent graduates Yalun H. Tu ’06 and Lizzie S. Widdicombe ’06 (who is famous for her recent Talk of the Town article in The New Yorker).

One more Mini will be published in the next week or two, bringing the total number in the series to four. No one knows why the Lampoon is doing this. Curious, Doordropped e-mailed the Lampoon leadership: Vice President Samuel M. Johnson ’06-’07 and President Adam J. Moerder ’07 (pronounced murder).

Doordropped: Why are you releasing mini-issues instead of normal issues? Have there been Lampoon Minis in the past?

Adam Moerder: We decided to produce the mini-issues because, let’s face it, technology is constantly making things tinier and tinier. We’re hoping future minis will follow the trend of Moore’s Law, halving in size every year until finally they’re no larger than a microchip. Once this is achieved, the Lampoon will be able to make the claim that they’ve gone “digital,” at least from my understanding of computers. There have been no Lampoon minis in the past. In fact, in the ’40s publishing technology was so poor one Lampoon issue would take up entire warehouses.

Samuel Johnson: I found the old issues unreadably long and unwieldy to carry without some kind of bag.

Doordropped: Do you like doing little ones better? How’s it different, in terms of conceptualizing the whole thing and organizing its production?

AM: Conceptualizing the minis has been great! Since you don’t have to produce as much material, you can do slightly more nuanced topics than a regular issue, focusing on slightly narrower topics such as cigarettes, porn, Wikipedia and rich people. Basically what I’m saying is, get ready for a soon-to-be-released mini about 16th Century Italian pottery.

Doordropped: Do you think the minis are more ephemeral than the bigs? Does that run counter to the Lampoon’s dedication to timeless humor?

SJ: I don’t think I can really respond to this question. I just don’t know how you can judge a magazine as either masculine or ephemeral. And does it matter? Gender stereotyping is sort of not my thing.