 The Lampoon Castle, designed by Edmund M. Wheelwright | |
| Categories | Humor magazine |
|---|---|
| Circulation | 300,000 |
| Founded | February 1876 |
| Based in | Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts, US |
| Website | harvardlampoon |
The Harvard Lampoon is an undergraduate humor publication founded in 1876 by seven undergraduates at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Harvard Lampoon publication was founded in 1876 by seven undergraduates at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who were inspired by popular magazines like Punch (1841) and Puck (1871). [1] [2] The Harvard Lampoon is the world's third longest-running continually published humor magazine, after the Swedish Blandaren (1863) and the Swiss Nebelspalter (1875).
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.[ citation needed ]
The Lampoon publishes five issues annually. In 2006, the Lampoon began regularly releasing content on its website, including pieces from the magazine and web-only content. In 2009, the Lampoon published a parody of Twilight called Nightlight, which is a New York Times bestseller. [3] In February 2012, the Lampoon released a parody of The Hunger Games called The Hunger Pains , [4] also a New York Times bestseller. [5]
The Lampoon is housed a few blocks from Harvard Square in a mock-Flemish castle, the Harvard Lampoon Building. It has been ranked by the magazine Complex as the fifth most phallic building in the world. [6]
The Harvard Lampoon was first published in 1876 by seven founders including Ralph Wormeley Curtis, Edward Sandford Martin, Edmund March Wheelwright, and Arthur Murray Sherwood [7] (father of Robert E. Sherwood). [8] The first issue of the Lampoon was a single copy, nailed to a tree in Harvard Yard. In its earliest years the magazine focused primarily on the satirization of Harvard and Boston Brahmin society. As the Lampoon began to gain notoriety on campus, the society moved from offices in Hollis Hall to addresses on Holyoke and Plympton streets respectively. These collections of rooms rented by the trustees of the Lampoon were famous not only for their beer nights, but also with the regularity that the Lampoon spent the profits made on each magazine for these beer nights. "It was a good night when the Lampoon could afford coal and beer, and they often had to choose between one or the other." Pranks abounded in the early years, some more destructive than others. William Randolph Hearst was expelled from Harvard after sending a pudding pot used as a chamber pot to a professor. [9]
A Lampoon graduate from 1887, Archibald Cary Coolidge, professor of architecture at Harvard College, was chosen as the architect of Randolph Hall, one of the college's newest dormitories. Legend has it that when designing Randolph, Coolidge purposefully made the dormitory recessed further back from Mt. Auburn Street than was at first designed, purchasing for himself the land the Castle now stands on.[ citation needed ] The commission to design the castle was given to Edmund M. Wheelwright, then city architect of Boston.
The Lampoon and its sensibility began to branch out away from the Harvard campus in the early 1960s, and soon became an important expression of, and feeder system for, American humor and comedy.[ citation needed ] In 1961, Mademoiselle offered the Lampoon staff an honorarium to produce a parody of their own magazine for the traditionally lower-selling July issue. The project boosted Mademoiselle's summer circulation along with the Lampoon's ever tenuous cash flow, and the magazine renewed its association with the Lampoon for a follow-up parody in July 1962, and a third parody issue (of Esquire ) in July 1963. The magazine also produced a 70-page spoof of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels in 1962 titled Alligator, which was subsequently released by Random House. These projects proved popular, and led to full, nationally-distributed parodies of Playboy (1966), Time (1968), and Life (1969), and later, Cosmopolitan in 1972, Sports Illustrated (1974), and People (1981). [10]
An important line of demarcation came when Lampoon editors and National Lampoon co-founders Douglas Kenney and Henry Beard wrote the Tolkien parody Bored of the Rings . [11] The success of this book and the attention it brought its authors led directly to the creation of the National Lampoon magazine. This in turn spun off a live show Lemmings , and then a radio show in the early 1970s, The National Lampoon Radio Hour , which featured such performers as Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Chevy Chase.
Writers from these shows were subsequently hired to help create Saturday Night Live. This was the first in a line of many TV shows that Lampoon graduates went on to write for, including The Simpsons , Futurama , Late Night with David Letterman , Seinfeld , Friends , The League , NewsRadio , The Office , 30 Rock , Parks and Recreation and dozens of others. An old copy of the magazine was shown in the fourth-season finale of NewsRadio , and referred to as the "nefarious scandal sheet."
Lampoon alumni include such comedians as Conan O'Brien, Andy Borowitz, B. J. Novak, Greg Daniels, Michael Schur, Christopher Cerf (Sesame Street), and Colin Jost. Etan Cohen wrote for Beavis and Butt-Head as an undergraduate member. In 1986 former editor Kurt Andersen co-founded the satirical magazine Spy , which employed Lampoon writers Paul Simms and Eric Kaplan, and published the work of Lampoon alumni Patricia Marx, Lawrence O'Donnell, Suchetas Bokil, and Mark O'Donnell. The Lampoon has also graduated many noted authors such as Robert Benchley, John Berendt, Walter Isaacson, George Plimpton, John Reed, George Santayana, John Updike, and William Gaddis. Actor Fred Gwynne was a cartoonist and president of the Lampoon. Famous Boston lawyer Bradley Palmer acted as treasurer for the Lampoon.
Celebrities often visit the Lampoon to be inducted as honorary members of the organization. Honorary members include Aerosmith, Winston Churchill, John Cleese, Bill Cosby, Billy Crystal, Tony Hawk, Hugh Hefner, Kesha, Jay Leno, Elon Musk, Ezra Pound, Adam Sandler, the cast of Saturday Night Live, Sarah Silverman, Tracey Ullman, Kurt Vonnegut, John Wayne and Robin Williams.
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 that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine". [12] [13] [14] The two organizations occupy buildings within less than one block of each other. Interaction between their staff has included pranks, vandalism, and romance. [15]
The Lampoon–Crimson rivalry was furthered by the Crimson's 1953 theft of the Lampoon Castle's ibis statue and presentation of it as a gift to the government of the Soviet Union. [16] [17]
On 27 September 2011, the Lampoon stole the Harvard Crimson President's Chair, and had it used as a prop on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon . [18]
On 2 June 2015, the Lampoon again stole the Harvard Crimson President's Chair; this time, pretending that it was the Harvard Crimson's editorial staff, they took the chair to Trump Tower to fake an endorsement for later-president Donald Trump. [19]
On 5 October 2024, the Lampoon impersonated the Crimson, distributing Trump for Truth T-shirts, [20] and interviewing with Right Side Broadcasting, New York Post and Associated Press, faking a Crimson endorsement of Trump, at a Trump campaign rally in Butler, PA, at the same site where a gunman tried to assassinate Trump in July. [21] [22]
Frederick Hubbard Gwynne was an American actor, artist and author, who is widely known for his roles in the 1960s television sitcoms Car 54, Where Are You? and The Munsters, as well as his later film roles in The Cotton Club (1984), Pet Sematary (1989), and My Cousin Vinny (1992).
The Harvard Crimson is the student newspaper at Harvard University, an Ivy League university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The newspaper was founded in 1873, and is run entirely by Harvard College undergraduate students.
Michael Colton is an American screenwriter and former journalist. With writing partner John Aboud, he was a regular commentator on Best Week Ever and other VH1 shows, including I Love the '80s.
Harvard College has several types of social clubs. These are split between gender-inclusive clubs recognized by the college, and unrecognized single-gender clubs which were subject to College sanctions in the past. The Hasty Pudding Club holds claim as the oldest collegiate social club in America, tracing its roots back to 1770. The next oldest institutions, dating to 1791, are the traditionally all-male final clubs. Fraternities were prominent in the late 19th century as well, until their initial expulsions and then eventual resurrection off Harvard's campus in the 1990s. From 1991 onwards, all-female final clubs as well as sororities began to appear. Between 1984 and 2018, no social organizations were recognized by the school due to the clubs' refusal to become gender-inclusive.
The Yale Record is the campus humor magazine of Yale University. Founded in 1872, it is the oldest humor magazine in the United States.
The Harvard Advocate, the art and literary magazine of Harvard College, is the oldest continuously published college art and literary magazine in the United States. The magazine was founded by Charles S. Gage and William G. Peckham in 1866 and, except for a hiatus during the last years of World War II, has published continuously since then. In 1916, The New York Times published a commemoration of the Advocate's fiftieth anniversary. Fifty years after that, Donald Hall wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "In the world of the college—where every generation is born, grows old and dies in four years—it is rare for an institution to survive a decade, much less a century. Yet the Harvard Advocate, the venerable undergraduate literary magazine, celebrated its centennial this month." Its current offices are a two-story wood-frame house at 21 South Street, near Harvard Square and the university campus.
Rakesh Khurana is an Indian-American educator. He is a professor of sociology at Harvard University, a professor of leadership development at Harvard Business School, and the dean of Harvard College.
Daniel Greaney is an American television writer. He has written for The Simpsons and The Office. He was hired during The Simpsons' seventh season after writing the first draft of the episode "King-Size Homer", but left after season eleven. He returned to the Simpsons staff during the thirteenth season, and remains involved with the series into the present day.
Kenneth E. Reeves is an American politician who served as the mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, from 1992 to 1995 and again from 2006 to 2007. Reeves is the first openly gay African-American man to have served as mayor of any city in the United States.
Henry Nichols Beard is an American humorist, one of the founders of the magazine National Lampoon and the author of several best-selling books.
The Harvard Lampoon Building is a historic building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is best known as the home of The Harvard Lampoon, and for its unusual design.
The Zamboni is a student-run humor publication at Tufts University. It was founded in 1989 and comes out with six issues per year, or once per month. It contains satirical articles, cartoons, and photos. It is known as "Tufts University's Only Intentionally Funny Magazine" and its motto is "Cowering Behind the First Amendment Since 1989." The Zamboni is fully funded by the Student Activities Fee as allocated by the Tufts Senate.
On Harvard Time is a Harvard College student-run Internet comedy news show. Modeled after The Daily Show, it presents, comments, and satirizes Harvard College news in a comedic fashion. It has been considered one of Harvard Undergraduate Television's flagship shows since its founding by Mia Walker, Kristina Dominguez, Derek Flanzraich, and Michael Koenigs, in 2006.
The Harvard Undergraduate Council, Inc., colloquially known as "The UC," was the student government of Harvard College between 1982 and 2022, until it was abolished by a student referendum.
The Hunger Pains is a 2012 novel by The Harvard Lampoon and a parody of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games. It was first published on February 7, 2012, through Touchstone Books, and a cinematic book trailer was released in March of the same year.
Charles Robert Apted (1873–1941) was for 39 years a Harvard University official in various capacities, for much of that time chief of the Harvard Yard police ("Harvard Cop No. 1", the Boston Globe called him) and superintendent of Harvard buildings. His Boston Globe obituary called him "both feared and beloved by undergraduates during three university presidential administrations".
Alan Michael Garber is an American physician and health economist, currently serving as the 31st president of Harvard University since January 2024.
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