The Harvard Lampoon

The Harvard Lampoon building with its characteristic rooftop ibis and its purple and yellow door. Designed by Edmund M. Wheelwright.

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 such as Entertainment Weekly and Sports Illustrated. 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, Ian Frazier, Andy Borowitz, Conan O'Brien, B.J. Novak , Nicholas Stoller, and numerous writers and producers for The Simpsons, Futurama, Saturday Night Live, Late Night with David Letterman, Seinfeld, NewsRadio, The Office, 30 Rock, and dozens of other television comedies and feature films.

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Bored of the Rings

The publication had a long and successful history, beginning in 1876, the same year that Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for the telephone, Thomas Edison received a patent for his mimeograph, and the United States celebrated one hundred years of independence from Great Britain. However, the Lampoon and its sensibility have been an especially important expression of American humor and 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 magazine, which spun off a live show Lemmings, and then a radio show in the early 1970s, The National Lampoon Radio Hour introducing such performers as Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Chevy Chase. Lampoon writers from these shows were subsequently hired 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, The Strokes, and Aerosmith. Also, it is a yearly tradition for the current cast of SNL to visit the castle. The most recent guests have been Zach Braff, Dan Aykroyd, and Paris Hilton. 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 2007, the Lampoon launched a new design for its website: www.harvardlampoon.com.

In 2008 as part of their continuing business operations the Harvard Lampoon went IPO (AMEX: POON). Although hyped by Mad Money's Jim Cramer, POON shares immediately plummeted. The Lampoon attributed the steep decline to recession fears and industry-wide difficulties, although analysts note that poor first quarter sales (revenue $0, cost of revenue $1,000,000) and and investor fears over the unusually large number of short shares, mostly deriving from 14 Plympton Street.

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.

External links

• The Harvard Lampoon
• Harvard Lampoon castle on WikiMapia