Some are laugh-out-loud funny, like Moerder’s concocted list of subliminal messages coded in Disney films. (“In 101 Dalmatians, when Patch rolls over, the sound of his stomach hitting the floor eerily resembles the sound of a dick slapping a watermelon” . . . “In one scene of Bambi, Bambi’s mom emerges from the forest in a dazed, disheveled manner. You know, like she just got fucked.”)
Some items are real head-scratchers: not just inside-baseball, but borderline nonsensical. Like this poem excerpt:
A puppy stands naked and shivering in the October dusk,
Apparently abandoned by a cruel Professora.
Her name is Harvard Professor Helen Vendler,
And she has left puppies to die each October dusk.
And others are just dumb. Like a short dialogue about a kid who doesn’t want to take a bath with his brother because his brother craps in the tub, or another about an old lady being detained by airport security for having a duffle bag full of falsies.
A reviewer commenting on some Lampoon back issues on Amazon.com describes the oeuvre best. “Cerebral parsley. Lets be honest, that’s what this really is: garnish for the mind.” Sometimes it’s hard to square what you read in the magazine with literary and comedic giants from its past, such as Plimpton and O’Brien. But then again, this is Harvard; shouldn’t we expect a legend to come around every decade or so?
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Most Lampoon pieces are now written as snatches of dialogue, perhaps indicative of so many contributors’ aspirations aspire to write for TV and film.
“It changes,” says Moerder. “Some people write really funny long pieces. Just so happens that the current vogue is for dialogue. It used to be longer short stories and prose.”
“If you look at a lot of older issues, some of them are longer prose pieces, some are mini-essays, some of them are short stories,” says Limm. “It sort of goes with the times. Even now though, you read through the magazine and there are a lot of different voices, different kinds of pieces.”
“The culture of the humor changes very quickly,” says Pearson.
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OCCASIONALLY PUBLISHED: On campus, the Lampoon is held in rather low regard by students.
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Time tested
The Lampoon was indeed created in the year of America’s centennial, the year of Little Bighorn and Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone call. It was founded by Harvard undergrads with names like Edmund March Wheelwright, William Sigourney Otis, and Ralph Wormeley Curtis. It was conceived as an American version of the English magazine Punch: heavy on illustration and winking satire, ripe with ribaldry. “Our success was immediate,” Wheelwright remembered on the mag’s 25th anniversary in 1901, “although twenty-five cents was asked for the little paper, and our first edition of twelve hundred was sold at once, from Whiton’s cigar store, at the corner of Main and Holyoke Streets.”
The magazine’s influence on American comedy was immediate and profound. It was in the Lampoon’s pages that such time-honored groaners as “Have you taken a bath?” “No, is one missing?” first appeared. And soon its renown spread. “United States President Rutherford B. Hayes was advised not to read the magazine,” says the Lampoon Web site, “as he would be too much ‘in stitches’ to run the government.”
(It was also early on, in 1896, that the Lampoon began its long tradition of parodying other publications with a send-up of Life. In the decades following, it would ape Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle (the latter in collusion with the genuine article), the New York Times and USA Today, right up to ’04’s sly sabotaging of the high-minded Harvard smut mag H-Bomb (their spoof hit streets before the first issue did) and last year’s Premiere parody — which led at least a few people to momentarily think Tom Hanks had croaked.
The first half of the 20th century saw a procession of eminent literary lights pass through its purple and yellow door: humorists, novelists, poets, and journalists such as Robert Benchley (’12), John Marquand (’15), and Communist agitator John Reed (’10).
By mid century, the Lampoon counted among its members Fred “Herman Munster” Gwynne (’50), George Plimpton (’48), and John Updike (’54), each of whom served a term as president. Interestingly, the latter’s primary contributions to the magazine weren’t literary but artistic. “In due course, some of my drawings were printed in the magazine, and I was accepted for membership,” he wrote in the New Yorker in 1997. “The Lampoon, I was too ignorant an outsider to realize, was a social club, with a strong flavor of Boston Brahminism and alcoholic intake; to me it was a magazine for which I wanted to work.”
Then the ’60s happened. And, as happened everywhere, there was a sea change at the Harvard Lampoon. “In the ’60s, all of the [sic] sudden they could print whatever they wanted,” Plimpton told the Globe in 2001. (He laughingly lamented being put on probation by the university in the ’40s for publishing a cartoon showing a squirrel reaching for some nuts, another squirrel telling him, “Cough.”) At once, scatology, barbed political satire, and drug humor weren’t verboten but encouraged.