Harvard Lampoon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Harvard Lampoon is an undergraduate humor organization and publication founded in 1876 at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Published five-times yearly, The Harvard Lampoon was originally modelled on the former British satirical periodical Punch, and has outlived it to become the world's longest-running humor magazine still in publication. The organization also produces occasional humor books (the best known being the 1969 J.R.R. Tolkien parody Bored of the Rings) and parodies of national magazines. Much of the organization's capital is provided by the licensing of the "Lampoon" name to National Lampoon, begun by Harvard Lampoon graduates in 1970.
Notable Harvard Lampoon alumni include William Randolph Hearst, George Santayana, John Reed, Robert Benchley, William Gaddis, George Plimpton, Fred Gwynne, John Updike, Douglas Kenney, Andy Borowitz, Conan O'Brien, B.J. Novak, and numerous writers and producers for The Simpsons, Futurama, Saturday Night Live, Late Night with David Letterman, Seinfeld, NewsRadio, The Office, and dozens of other television comedies and feature films.
Although the publication already had a long and successful history, beginning in the same year that Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for the telephone, the Lampoon and its sensibility have been an especially important tributary for American comedy since the late 1960s. An important line of demarcation came when Lampoon editors Douglas Kenney and Henry Beard wrote the Tolkien parody Bored of the Rings. The success of this book and the attention it brought its authors led directly to the creation of the National Lampoon, which spun off a live show Lemmings, then a radio show in the early 1970s, introducing such performers as Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Chevy Chase. Lampoon writers from these shows were hired directly to help create Saturday Night Live, and that show's impact and alumni still supply much of America's comedy today.
The organization is housed a few blocks from Harvard Square in a small mock-Flemish castle with a copper statue of an ibis on the roof. The Lampoon is known for its bacchanalian parties, which can result in smashed plates and furniture.
Many celebrities have visited the Lampoon Castle as honorary members. The long list includes, among others, Winston Churchill, Kurt Vonnegut, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Chevy Chase, John Cleese, Bill Cosby, Jon Stewart, John Irving, John Wayne, James Brown and Aerosmith. Also, it is a yearly tradition for the current cast of SNL to visit the castle. The most recent guests have been Danny Bonaduce and Sarah Silverman. Their visits are documented on the Lampoon website.
In 2006, the Lampoon began regularly releasing content on their website, including pieces from the magazine and web-only content. In October, the Lampoon released a downloadable version of The Wiki Number, an issue containing humor about Wikipedia, the Internet and computers in general.
[edit] Rivalry with The Harvard Crimson
The Lampoon has a long-standing rivalry with Harvard's student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, which repeatedly refers to the Lampoon in its pages as a "semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization which used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine".
A noted event in the history of the Lampoon–Crimson rivalry was the Crimson's 1953 theft of the Lampoon Castle's ibis and presentation of it as a gift to the government of the Soviet Union. Lampoon staffers retaliated recently by "liberating" the Crimson president's chair and accompanying it to Reykjavík, where it was given as a ceremonial gift to the Prime Minister of Iceland. The president's chair is now chained to a wall in the Crimson building.
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