LAMPY’S CASTLE

Immediately after the last Labor Day of the 1960’s, two recent Harvard graduates moved to New York to work on a new magazine called the National Lampoon. Unlike many recent graduates who went to work on magazines, Henry Beard and Doug Kenney came in as the chief editors. Unlike many magazines that have recent graduates as chief editors, the Lampoon had backers committed to the tune of $350,000 (a lot of money in 1969), a deal negotiated by a fellow student who was still finishing up his last term. Six years later, they would each be 2-and-a-half million dollars richer. Five years after that, one would have found a measure of equilibrium by keeping a low profile while the other, having blazed a comet-like trail of highly visible successes, would tumble into the Pacific off the coast of Hawaii.

Along the way, the National Lampoon triggered a chain reaction of talent that would spread to theater, records, radio, television and movies, confounding conventional wisdom by making satire and subversive humor synonymous with, instead of antithetical to, commercial success. It was a pebble thrown into a pond, ultimately generating such significant comedy ripples as The Simpsons, The Late Show with David Letterman, The Onion, This is Spinal Tap, and American Pie. Satirists and humorists emerged out of the woodworks (and even Canada) in amazing numbers to bounce off each other in ever-shifting groups and combinations, generating considerable heat, occasional light, and not a few dramatic explosions. The Lampoon and its offspring reflected, defined, and enhanced an iconoclastic sensibility which would emerge as the dominant style of a decade otherwise notable for its lack of distinguishing characteristics.

They also mirrored and anticipated a shift in the attitudes of successive waves of the nation’s youth; from idealism and an identification with the marginal and dispossessed to an ironic resignation that doubted equally the likelihood of change and the good intentions of the established order to an outright cynicism and complete disengagement from civic life which manifested itself either as a determination to get to the top of the greasy pole however many people had to be stepped on in the process or as a resentful passivity and self-conscious embrace of the trivial and transitory. At the same time, no age group is a monolith and, as much as its audience, the Lampoon encompassed a variety of viewpoints (though not colors or, with a couple of grudging exceptions, sexes); at one time or another between 1970 and 1980 its contributors ranged from beatnik anarchists like Michael O’Donoghue to socialists like Sean Kelly and Tony Hendra (neither American-born, I hasten to add) to ACLU liberals like John Weidman to heartland Republicans like John Hughes to, representing the largest segment of the Lampoon audience, those whose primary political philosophy was You’ve Got To Fight For The Right To Party, like Chris Miller.

Those who in the 60s had fought for (or at least been fairly supportive of) profound social and economic domestic perestroika and had run up against both a power structure determined to dig in its heels and the limitations of their own commitment ended up either nostalgic and unbearably self-righteous or, particularly in the case of those who had been less fervent in the first place, with a wry, rather philosophical outlook. Their younger brothers and sisters who came of age in the Nixon years absorbed these attitudes as a sense of the futility of struggle before such struggle had even been attempted. Co-existing with this unearned cynicism was a feeling that, however impossible, change was imperative if the world was not to continue going to hell in a handbasket (unlike the scrubbed Reagan Youth of the 80s, who set out on the stage of life under the misguided impression that a sandbag was not heading down towards them from the rafters.)

Such gloom was understandable when one considers the prospect of growing up in a climate of leisure suits, Nixon adulation, an economy on the skids, and hit songs by the Partridge Family. Initially, the Lampoon provided an alternative to both the banalities of the status quo and the outdated rhetoric of 60s activism. By the end of the decade it had become a true harbinger of Things To Come, taking on targets that were either totally insignificant or else joining in with the attack on the weak and/or dissident. In the early 70s the Lampoon’s perpetrators – including those working in theater and radio as well as print –were more interested in making trouble than in making big bucks, although this was due more to the perceived unlikelihood of their brand of humor gaining mass acceptance than to any particular aversion to substantial bank accounts; by the end of the decade it had become an institution built on iconoclasm. Such an oxymoron could not exist for long and one by one they fell, either into relative obscurity or conspicuous yet unthreatening success. Originally identifying with guerrillas and outlaws, several of the former bad boys ended up as pillars of the showbiz community: entertaining, popular, and completely predictable.

But for a while they were able to combine commercial success with true creativity, a feat something like surfing: you have to have the talent to stay on the board in any case, but you’ll get a lot farther if you’re in the ocean when a big wave comes along instead of too soon or too late. The mark of a really big wave is that it washes a lot of lucky lesser talents up on the shore along with those who would have gotten there in any case. Rock music in the 60’s was such a wave. In the 70’s, improbably enough, it was satire. As the wave receded towards the end of the decade, some were able to swim back out and ride in the next wave of less alienated 80s comedy while those whose bone-deep bad attitude made them unable to adapt were left gasping on the shore.

At the risk of drowning the reader in aquatic metaphors, hugely successful cultural phenomena (or, to use the more modern and to the point terminology, products) are big rivers fed by many obscure, often underground, streams. The tributaries feeding into the mighty Lampoon/Saturday Night Live flow included improvisational comedy troupes such as Second City, early experimental video groups like TVTV, underground comics, and the Harvard Lampoon, humor organ of the august university and, at the time, as unlikely a source for future television comedy writers as could be imagined. But much as the Blues came up the Mississippi from New Orleans, the Lampoon brand of humor came down the Charles from Cambridge, and in time the Harvard Lampoon would be known as a major spawning ground for budding screen and television comedy writers, all because it was here the tyro editors Beard and Kenney got their start.

As rife with Anglophilia as the other Ivy League schools, Harvard had, in the Lampoon, provided an unusual breeding ground and refuge for one of the more palatable of the legacies it imported from the British ruling class, aristocratic eccentricity (though the home-grown variety never managed to equal the full-tilt oddballs produced by the English). As it was, of the Big Three universities, Harvard was traditionally more tainted by eccentricity, most visible in a suspicious encouragement of intellectualism. Yale you could count on for solid citizens, Princeton for assets to the dance floor and 19th Hole, but Harvard men – well, they always seemed to take their studies a little more seriously than was quite gentlemanly.

Georgian where the other two are Gothic, Harvard’s brick buildings accented by cupolas and columns suggest the Founding Fathers’ combination of neo-classic ideals and solid American practicality. The University hides its massive endowment beneath a mellow veneer of old-money shabbiness, inculcating in impressionable youth a taste for wood paneling, worn leather armchairs, and faded Oriental rugs, valuable even with lingering traces of previous terms’ cheap red wine. The prevailing aesthetic of the undergraduate campus is an 18th Century tribute to order, harmony, rationality, and beauty. In the middle of this discreet charm of the haute bourgeoisie sits, on a triangular spit of sidewalk, an elaborate and charming architectural joke, home to the Harvard Lampoon.

Although called the Castle, the mock-Flemish building is in fact an Edwardian folly (in the sense of a small whimsical structure), castle-like more in concept than in actuality as it’s only three stories tall and about the size of a small barn. However, it does have a tower with a pointed roof (atop which perches the Ibis, the organization’s frequently stolen mascot) and vaguely medieval detailing such as emblazoned wooden doors and leaded glass windows. On the ground floor are cozy, den-like rooms that, in true secret society tradition, have been given arcane names like the Narthex (a little circular library stocked with books of humor and satire, mostly dust-covered), all perfect for huddling, hanging out, hiding, scheming, sleeping, and even studying. In the 60s these were decorated with books, piles of stray papers (a hodge-podge in which aspiring candidates’ auditions mingled with Harvard Student Health Services pamphlets on “Sexually Transmitted Diseases”), beer cans, and left-over food, all pervaded by the aroma peculiar to the rooms of young men, a melange of dirty laundry, stale pizza, and nameless dread.

Upstairs is The Great Hall, a big room which looks like a Hollywood version of something called “The Great Hall” down to its vaulted ceiling and magnificent 16th Century Elizabethan fireplace, suitable for smashing plates and glassware against (the building comes complete with a maintenance staff to clean it up). It is here that the weekly formal dinners are held. The walls along the staircase that winds up the tower are covered with framed covers of Lampoon projects dating back to the founding of the organization/publication in 1876.

“It’s not clear whether the Lampoon is a social club or a humor magazine,” observed Michael Frith, a Harvard Lampoon veteran later creative director of the Muppets and something of a trailblazer for Kenney and Beard in terms of exposing the outside world to the Lampoon sensibility. “At different points in its history it’s been one or the other and sometimes both. Most likely it’s neither very successfully and probably a combination of the two.”

Ostensibly, The Lampoon publishes its own magazine approximately five times a year and intermittently produces parodies of other publications. The organization has a number of quaint traditions besides the aforementioned dinners, most of them involving pranks, japes, and practical jokes (a tradition continued in the 80s by former ‘Poonie Kurt Anderson when he started his humor magazine, Spy). John Updike described his fellow 50s ‘Poonies as “quiet and sedate – librarians manque.” This sedateness did not prevent them from insisting the future National Book Award winner pose in public as a blind beggar while his brother ‘Poonies, disguised as priests, tossed him fish instead of alms. Another larval literary light, former Lampoon president George Plimpton (‘48), distinguished himself by putting a goat in Widener, the Harvard undergraduate library.

What is to date the Lampoon’s most daring prank was inspired by an editorial written for its parody of the Saturday Evening Post in 1936. “Some morning we may wake up to find a Communist flag waving from the staff of our greatest public buildings,” the mock-editorial fulminated. Sure enough, shortly thereafter the Soviet hammer and sickle was discovered at dawn billowing from the flagpole of the Supreme Court. Lampoon honor demanded that a copy of the magazine be left near the scene of the crime, like the Mark of Zorro. Credit was thus quickly given where credit was due, to three intrepid Lampoon editors, but not before a Texas Congressman had rushed off to inform the House that the Red Flag’s appearance was the signal for a socialist coup. The Supreme Court’s security chief was also not amused. “The Supreme Court of the United States is no place for Harvard Socialists to have fun,” he said.

The Lampoon had a penchant for making the Russians unwitting co-conspirators in its jokes. One year they presented the Soviet ambassador with a punchbowl stolen from The Crimson, the well-respected (except by the Lampoon) Harvard student newspaper. Actually, this was not so much part of an involving-the-Russians tradition as the endless get-the-Crimson’s-goat tradition. To further torment the embryo journalists, the Lampoon publishes at least one Crimson parody annually. These are for the most part an impenetrable morass of Harvard in-jokes, such as the 1968 parody which featured front-page photos of Sen. Barry Goldwater and South Vietnamese Dragon Lady Mme. Nhu under the headline “celebrated fascists picked to give William Jackson Turner lectures.” The Crimson would invariably retaliate by stealing the Ibis, but the newspaper was at a distinct disadvantage. The Crimson couldn’t decide whether to get into the feud or remain above it, recalled ‘Poonie Peter Gabel (‘68), “because they were a serious organization of political expression and ideas whereas we were a bunch of assholes.” The founders of the National Lampoon realized early on the value of having no political credibility to lose.

Lampoon membership hovered around 40 or 50, although the number actually involved in putting out the magazine was usually less than 10. One could attempt to join as a writer or as part of the business board. The criteria for the latter was supposed to be how many ads the aspiring candidate sold, but in fact many people were appointed to the business board because they were fun to be around or because they had a number of friends and roommates already on the Lampoon. Indeed a number of candidates were appointed to the editorial board on this basis, thus teaching the students an important lesson about the relative value of connections as opposed actual talent that would serve them well in their future careers.

Nevertheless, a number of Lampoon members proved to be hopelessly creative in later life, among them Robert Sherwood, Robert Benchley, novelist and New Yorker television critic Michael Arlen, actor and Munster Fred Gwynn, the philosopher George Santayana, and John Reed (who salvaged, legend has it, the brassware that adorns the Great Hall’s mantel from the storming of The Winter Palace in Leningrad). More recent alumni who have gone into the humor business include Conan O’Brien, Andy Borowitz (creator of the internet’s premier site for topical humor), and vice-presidential daughter Karenna Gore. A few, such as William Randolph Hearst, stayed in publishing on the business side. Most, fortunately, came to their senses and became doctors, lawyers, and Secretaries of Defense, Commerce, and Health, Education, and Welfare in Nixon administrations (Elliot Richardson, ‘41).

By the time Michael Frith joined in 1959, the fortunes of the Lampoon were at a low ebb. “The circulation was tiny and the magazine had become ingrown and rife with debt,” he recalled. “We were amazed to hear that other college humor magazines divided up their profits among the staff – we paid dues!” The dues mostly went towards the formal dinners. Any profits from sales of the magazine went back into publication. As Frith pointed out, the temporary nature of college life mitigates against a college publication building up any momentum so that “by the time anyone begins to vaguely understand the potential of the thing they’ve already graduated.” With no ongoing staff, the character of the magazine is thus completely a reflection of whoever happens to be on it. In a remarkable departure from tradition, three or four of Frith’s more masochistic contemporaries were unusually devoted to actually producing the magazine, putting out an unprecedented nine issues a year.

One result of all this energy was a revival of the Lampoon magazine parodies. From 1917 until World War II, the Lampoon had put out a magazine parody virtually every year, skewering Vanity Fair, the Saturday Evening Post, Town and Country, Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and the New Yorker, to name just a few. Some were victimized once a generation. Then in January 1961 an era came to an end when the Lampoon put out a parody of the Saturday Review, a paradigm of unadventurous intellectual respectability, which proved to be the last parody of the 60s whose circulation was limited to the University and environs.

The Harvard Lampoon itself was almost a doomed publication by this time, circulation having sunk to an all-time low of 900. But truly it is always darkest just before the dawn; a young staffer at Mademoiselle, a fashion and lifestyle magazine for young women, thrust the SR parody into the hands of august editor-in-chief Betsy Talbot Blackwell. Mademoiselle had traditionally had a miserable summer circulation, so when giving the July issue of the magazine the Lampoon treatment was proposed as a possible shot in the arm, Blackwell “harrumphed and coughed and wheezed,” recalled Frith, “and when she stopped she said yes,” and offered the amazed Lampoon editors an honorarium of $5000, which seemed to them a princely sum.

One might think the rowdy pranksters might feel somewhat constrained by producing the Mademoiselle parody in conjunction with the professional and ladylike staff of the magazine, but this was not the case. On the contrary, Frith said, “we really enjoyed them. What a bunch of eccentrics!” He remembers particularly editor-in-chief Blackwell, a large woman with a terrible cough and an office adorned with tiny models of shoes. Editorial meetings would go into a state of suspended animation, pencils in the air, while Blackwell’s speeches were interrupted by coughing spells. One such meeting almost triggered a near-fatal attack when a new, very serious Lampoon staffer earnestly remarked that, in order to make the parody work, it would be essential to “get a real suppository of ideas,” whereupon, recalled Frith, “I thought we’d lose Betsy T. Blackwell.”

One might have thought a group of college boys turned loose with access to models might not keep their minds wholly on their work but, Frith claims, “there was relatively little fraternizing with the models and we were relatively professional about it. In any case, the schedule was insane. We’d go days and days without sleep. Sometimes we’d have to drive all night to get back to Cambridge to take an exam,” (the parodies were written during the school year.) The boys almost didn’t get the chance to broaden their horizons. When the small editorial contingent left for New York, their ever-supportive Lampoon brethren put sugar in the gas tank of their car, which proceeded to stall about every 15 yards. They were forced to push the car virtually all the way from Cambridge to New York. “It was an unforgettable night,” said Frith, laughing ­– now. Nevertheless, it turned out to be worth the effort. Mademoiselle’s July circulation was given a shot in the arm by the Lampoon’s unorthodox approach and the Harvardians were invited to edit the July issues for the next two years running. How quickly youth grows blasé; by 1963 they were already bored with parodying Mademoiselle. and amused themselves by using the July 1963 issue of Mademoiselle to parody Esquire, thus creating total confusion.

The Esquire-Mademoiselle also gave the Lampooners the opportunity to unleash one of their most treasured in-jokes on an unsuspecting world in the form of a parody of an ad for Canadian Club whiskey, which at the time was using a he-man campaign recounting “true-life” adventures in the wild. This particular adventure involved bagging “the vicious Merino sheep.” Typifying the haphazard birth of much of the Lampoon’s most enduring material, the Merinos began as a page filler. A Lampooner intent on doing a silly bestiary suggested to Frith and a Lampoon colleague named Chris Cerf, another major bridge builder between the Lampoon and the real world, that they “just open the dictionary and come to a picture of an animal and make up a silly verse about it.” Happening on a picture of a sheep he declaimed: “See the Merino standing there/With his long shaggy hair.” That did it. Soon Cerf and Frith were off, writing “See the Merino, Stan Ding, there/With his long shaggy hair”; “See the Merino standing there/With his long shaggy heir” and so on. These terminally silly puns were considerably enhanced by Frith’s rather charming accompanying illustrations. But still.

Besides increasing the Harvard Lampoon’s subscription list by several thousand names, the success of the Mademoiselle parodies made the ‘Poonies reconsider the size of their potential audience. Access to the superior production facilities of the Hearst organization had opened Cerf’s eyes to the parodic potential of being able to reproduce a format exactly and his ambitions grew. “All of a sudden we were putting out a national magazine and working with models and photographers,” he said. “We didn’t feel confined to only putting out the Harvard Lampoon.” Today Harvard Yard, tomorrow the world!

Compact and dynamic where Frith is lanky and laid-back, Cerf is a born instigator, given to setting wheels in motion but not claiming the corner office and in the summer of 1962, fresh from the second Mademoiselle issue, he got what turned out to be a rather large ball rolling when he teamed up with Frith to write a parody of the adventures of President Kennedy’s favorite fictional character, James Bond. The parody, dubbed Alligator, was then folded into 20,000 copies of the fall Harvard Lampoon.

So accomplished was Alligator that it might easily have been mistaken for the real thing were it not for the giveaway context (thus anticipating the tightrope act between parody and serious intent the films based on the Bond books would walk). Alligator’s villain, one Lacertus Alligator, a short megalomaniac with “a massive head the size of a football...tiny pupils completely surrounded by the whites...pointed teeth made of burnished steel....”, pet alligators, and a penchant for spraying everyone who comes within arm’s reach with a purple aerosol spray, is only slightly more outlandish than the average Bond baddie; Bond’s capacity for remaining unaffected by substance abuse (“he had quickly showered and dressed, tossed down seven double martinis... and swallowed fourteen benzedrine tablets”) or physical pain (“the beast tore itself away from B*nd, bringing with it a substantial portion of his foreleg and, B*nd realized thankfully through senses clouded by agony, the ropes that bound his legs. He now was free to move about”) only slightly exaggerated; and the hero’s instructions for the preparation of food and drink (“ ‘A bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich,’ he said. ‘The bacon must be crisp, not, however, over-cooked. Lettuce from the inside please, but not the heart. The broad, pale leaves just under the outer covering are best. Do not peel the tomato but wash it thoroughly in very hot water then chill it for at least seven minutes in a bowl of ice.’ “) only slightly more elaborate. Indeed, with his total dedication to his job, his cool ruthlessness, his exacting standards of cuisine and other sensual pleasures, and his encyclopedic knowledge of whichever brand exemplifies the highest quality in any given consumer item, 007 stands revealed in Alligator in his true colors – a proto-Yuppie.

Not surprisingly, Alligator was an enormous hit with other proto-Yuppies, becoming required reading in New York’s social/literary circles and receiving glowing reviews from Newsweek and other former subjects of Harvard Lampoon parodies. Chris Cerf’s father, Bennett, in addition to being a minor television celebrity as a regular panelist on What’s My Line was the moving force behind Random House. Bennett Cerf thought he could bring Alligator out in hard-cover and, Frith recalls, “wrote Ian Fleming a nice letter that said, ‘Dear Mr. Fleming, wouldn’t it be wonderful if ...’.”

The urbane novelist, who apparently did not share with the film version of his hero a sense of humor about himself, replied to Cerf’s suggestion with a furious letter heaping scorn and calumny on the Lampoon parody. This reaction came as a shock to the parody’s authors, who had thought the Bond books were supposed to be funny. “We were surprised to learn Fleming took them very seriously,” Frith said. A nervous Cerf (pére) said the Lampoon could publish an additional 100,000 copies after which the rights would revert to Fleming, who was about to do a children’s book (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) for Random House. All the additional Alligator copies sold out immediately, and this looked like it might only be the beginning. “We had movie offers, somebody wanted us to do a Broadway musical...” Frith sighed, but the collegiate authors were legally unable to further exploit their notoriety and it was left to Woody Allen and Mike Myers to fly the flag for Bond parodies.

Fleming’s ire extended beyond the grave. After he died, the people who had obtained the rights to continuing the series approached Frith and Cerf and asked them to write the further adventures of James Bond. The collaborators accepted, but a routine check with Fleming’s English publishers revealed a codicil had been added to the late author’s will which prohibited in perpetuity Frith and Cerf specifically from writing any posthumous Bond books. Not even over his dead body would Fleming let his hero fall into the parodists’ clutches a second time.

Meanwhile, another small wave was coming in from across the sea; the Harvard undergraduates weren’t the only young satirists making a splash in the early 60s. Three Cambridge graduates – Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett, along with Dudley Moore (an Oxonian) – had brought their London hit Beyond The Fringe to Broadway in October 1962 where it received a rapturous reception and a year-long run.

Though Beyond the Fringe is credited with starting England’s so-called “satire boom” of 1961-63, the perpetrators were, like the creators of the National Lampoon, more inclined towards anarchy than satire, aiming at being funny rather than reforming. “None of us approached the world with a satirical indignation,” Miller said. “We had no reason to. We were all very comfortably off and doing very nicely.” The banner of burning indignation and subsequent alienation was being borne at the time in England by Angry Young Men such as playwright John Osborne, and in America by Beats such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. By contrast, Miller, like the ‘Poonies, “was slightly nettled by things, but that,” he said, “was because I was amused by them rather than really outraged.”

Nevertheless, Beyond the Fringe seemed radically innovative and daring because of its minimal sets and costumes (which gave it a somewhat Brechtian feel) and because hitherto sacred subjects such as religion, patriotism, war –even The Great War – and the royal family were now suitable subjects for mockery. It seems incredible now, but this was truly shocking at the time. Evading all labels, the show did not take an easy liberal line; Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was lampooned, but so were African politicians. Writing in The Observer, Kenneth Tynan called Beyond the Fringe “anti-reactionary without being progressive,” a description which could apply to the yet unborn National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live with equal justice.

Even as a student, Cook, an actual satirist as opposed to an anarchic humorist, had wanted to open a club along the lines of European political cabarets; by the fall of 1961, thanks to the success of Beyond the Fringe’s London run, he was able to do so. This was The Establishment, a membership organization patronized mostly by the upper middle class whose values it satirized. It offered drinks, jazz, and satire and was the only place in England where you could see Lenny Bruce, until the Home Secretary prevented him from reentering the country. Capitalizing on the New York success of Beyond the Fringe, Cook brought over the club’s resident company, also called The Establishment, and established them in what used to be the smart-set hangout El Morocco in the summer of ‘63.

The Establishment’s success at the El Morocco led to an offer from hunched mainstream television host Ed Sullivan, who had never actually seen the show (which probably accounts for the offer.) They were to create a satirical television show for broadcast in May 1963. However, although the writers assiduously avoided naughty language, when Sullivan came to rehearsals he finally realized the enormity of what he’d done and paid off the English satirists to go away quietly.

In London, The Establishment’s resident company uneasily shared quarters with a new satire magazine called Private Eye. With roots even deeper in boyhood memories than the National Lampoon’s, the editors of Private Eye had met at a British prep school. They then started a humor magazine called Mesopotamia at Oxford, and, after a few months of post-graduation dabbling in real life, started publishing Private Eye on an offset litho press in October of that seminal year, 1961. By 1962 the magazine had gained a following of 18,000 readers but was limping along financially until Cook, rapidly becoming the Godfather of Satire, bought a majority interest in April of that year. The magazine has never really stopped limping along financially (hardly surprising considering it carries virtually no advertising besides classifieds), but this has not prevented it from gaining an ever-more prominent niche in the public mind and being taken seriously enough to incur several large judgments for libel.

It seemed as if England in the early 60’s was witnessing cultural phenomena that would bloom in the United States a few years later on the huge American scale, acting as a sort of cultural New Haven to America’s Broadway. As the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” was shooting up the English charts, Britain was coming to terms with the realization that the Empire was not what it used to be. The time was ripe for a satire boomlet; while a generation that has grown up with power and seen it reduced may cling to the past and become reactionary, the next generation, aware of the gap between the glorious past and the not-so-glorious reality, responds with irony. One generation’s imperial legacies are another’s out-of-date pretensions.

In an America yet untroubled by thoughts of diminishing influence, the ‘Poonies caught Beyond the Fringe’s act in Boston before the Broadway opening. Recognizing kindred spirits, they invited Cook and Moore to the Castle, where the British team had to be given large amounts of coffee before they could leave to do their show. After Alligator had appeared and Beyond the Fringe had opened, a Broadway producer came up to Cambridge to ask Frith, who was tall and dark like Peter Cook, and Cerf, who was short and played the piano like Dudley Moore, if they wanted to do an American Beyond the Fringe. Although Frith declined, it seemed to him “very natural” that they would get an offer. “As soon as I graduated from college in 1963, I was being interviewed for things like appearing on television panels,” he said, “and my attitude was ‘Oh, all right. I hope it doesn’t take too long’.”

By the time the Esquire parody appeared in July 1963, it wasn’t just the success of the English shows that had created a favorable climate for lightly satirical comedy. President Eisenhower, while undoubtedly a man of many admirable qualities, was never known as a million laughs. President Kennedy, on the other hand, frequently displayed flashes of wit, and Harvard wit at that. A record making good-natured fun of the Kennedy clan, Vaughn Meader’s First Family, became a hit album. A former ad man named Stan Freeberg was exploring the possibilities of audio parody on radio and records. A comedy team from Chicago, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, mined a rich vein in the new widespread interest in Freudian analysis. On television, Ernie Kovacs was injecting surreal comedy into primetime before death robbed the airwaves of his presence, and a cartoon show called Rocky and Bullwinkle, which depicted the eternal struggle between an All-American squirrel and two Soviet agents, Boris Badenov and Natasha, was grafting hip adult humor onto a program ostensibly for children, even then twisting the minds of impressionable future National Lampoon editors.

Despite these glimmers of irreverence, American culture remained relentlessly wholesome. The motto of the music world was “Do Not Disturb” with the radio dominated by the soothing likes of Mantovani, Patti Page, Perry Como and, for the young folks, Bobby Rydell, Pat Boone, and Paul Anka. Elvis was around, but had emerged from the Army de-rocked. Annette and Fabian frolicked on filmic Beach Blankets. Marlon Brando had taken off his leather jacket and James Dean had lived fast, died young, and left a beautiful corpse.

Freed from having to set an example for the Empire’s natives, the English were acquiring a most uncharacteristic reputation as “swinging”. At the height of the satire boom, the country had been rocked by the Profumo scandal, a racy affair involving a Cabinet minister, call girls, nude swimming, and a Russian agent, which did a lot to shatter the image of the prim English gentleman. (President Kennedy was valiantly providing Americans with plenty of material for racy scandal of their own, but unfortunately his efforts went unappreciated at the time.) The young Brits were turning up in stripes, polka dots, collarless jackets, narrow pants, patterned stockings, mini-skirts, and God knows what else. No chinos, button-down shirts, penny loafers, crew neck sweaters, circle skirts or circle pins for them. Their hair was creeping over their collars if they were boys and becoming very short or very long if they were girls. Worst of all, they seemed to be having more fun, largely because they were also producing a seemingly inexhaustible flow of great bands.

While American bands were blanding out, the British were rooting their music firmly in the African-American traditions of blues and R&B. But across the Atlantic, radio stations’ playlists were effectively segregated and record labels reluctant to spend advertising dollars on “race” music. It was no wonder that mainstream America was unfamiliar with its own black artists. Still, starting around 1961, some young white people were getting exposed not only to the music of the blues but to the real thing when they found themselves looking at jails in Alabama and Mississippi from the inside. Blacks who had been marching for civil rights along with the white students were in the jails too, of course, but the nature of the Southern judiciary was not quite as much of a revelation to them. In 1962, 53 youthful members of a little-known organization called Students for a Democratic Society emerged from a conference in Port Huron, Michigan, with a statement setting forth guiding principles for something they called the New Left, a proclamation which went virtually unnoticed by the world at large. It was not lost on the world at large that August 1963 brought 200,000 Civil Rights demonstrators to Washington, D.C., where they heard Martin Luther King dream of a similarly integrated nation. Then came November 1963, and nothing would be quite so wholesome again. Even though no one was able to find it, many Americans smelled a rat – a big rat, a rat big enough to keep them writing books and making movies for decades trying to find out which floorboard it lay under.

Fair Harvard was for the most part still unruffled by the winds of change but a typhoon was on the way. When John Weidman, a future National Lampoon contributing editor as well as a future librettist for musicals including Assassins and Pacific Overtures (not to mention a future writer for Sesame Street), came to Harvard as a freshman in 1964, he found the campus “more like Harvard in 1944 than it would be like 1968 when I left. The change in those four years was enormous.” In 1963, when buses going down to Mississippi bearing the Harvard contingent of voter registration workers left from the Lampoon doorstep, the ‘Poonies came out in black tie and toasted the departing Freedom Riders with champagne. It was this kind of behavior that encouraged the rest of the university to perceive them as elitist dilettantes more concerned with merinos than marching. When Weidman went on a campus tour in 1963, the tour guide, he recalled, “made a point of stopping in front of the Castle and sneering.”

Still, in its own detached way, the Lampoon started to reflect this metamorphosis. It devoted its May ‘64 issue, the “Antebellum Number”, to civil rights. “How many of us really realize that the Negro is a sick man – that Negrosis is a disease like any other.” one writer argued. “If he begins ranting about ‘equality’ or ‘our heritage,’ the disease is in its terminal stage and the victim should be removed from society. If your community is forward-looking and has a law permitting mercy-killing, your problem is solved. Otherwise, you will have to resort to ad hoc measures.” This modest proposal was not, in fact, written by the ostensible author, one “D. Fritz Overholt Jones-Oglethorpe, of the Memorial Hospital, Birmingham,”, but by the almost as absurdly named George William Swift Trow, president of the Lampoon and another future National Lampoon contributing editor, Trow was a HL anomaly in that he had considerable standing as a campus literary light and already had a conception of himself as a professional writer.

Trow was an anomaly as well in that he embodied a certain WASPy prep style that would become less and less typical of the Lampoon. “Affect (oh go ahead) POVERTY!” Trow wrote in 1965, little dreaming some of Harvard’s most gilded youth would be taking his advice five years later. “While all your pedestrian middle-class friends scream and shout about the Waring Blender they’re going to get for Christmas, you steal the show in eye-catching rags.” But you wouldn’t catch Trow trading in his blue blazers for rags, eye-catching or otherwise.

The prep school influence, however, did not loom nearly as large at the Lampoon as it did at other Harvard sub-societies. Harvard disdains fraternities, which any mere athlete can join after all, but instead has final clubs which are peopled largely by boys from backgrounds not too unlike those of the heroes of novels by Love Story author Erich Segal (not himself the kind of person who would be asked to join a final club); old money, old school, and old family preferred. Even within clubland, there are distinctions. At the top, the Porcellian leans toward old New England names like Cabot and Saltonstall, while the Fly enlists flashier New York types like Franklin D. Roosevelt. Definitely not at the top of the club tree is the Spee Club, to which many of the Lampoon members belonged. The Spee had a distinct literary-intellectual tinge, and once you start valuing brains over background, why any nobody can get in.

According to Peter Gabel, a Harvard Lampoon contemporary of Weidman’s though not a future professional satirist, non-preppies looked on the Lampoon as “elitist, artsy-fartsy types” and maintained “the slightly hostile distance characteristic of people’s attitudes toward the clubs,” but the Lampoon’s exclusivity had a different cast to it. “The Harvard Lampoon was not as if you took five characters from Brideshead Revisited and dropped them onto the Harvard campus in the mid-60s, sort of detached and aristocratic and epicurean, sipping sherries,” Weidman said. “There was a certain element of ‘we’re special and we’re better because we’ve got a stuffed bird’, but in the 60’s the Lampoon wasn’t particularly elitist. However, people did think they were wittier and smarter and having a better time.”

There were other crucial differences. For one thing, unlike the clubs, the Lampoon had a project beyond reinforcing privilege and networking; this was to put out a magazine, however desultorily. For another, the Lampoon had different role models. “You felt connected to the culture of satire, to people who did pranks and wrote funny things, “ Gabel said. “On the high culture side, you were connected to literary people like Santayana, Sherwood, even George Trow.” These connections were more than in the mind. Chris Cerf was already an editor at Random House, succeeded at the Lampoon by his younger brother Jonathan, also a piano player. Weidman’s father, Jerome, was a playwright, novelist, and New Yorker contributor and Gabel’s mother, Arlene Francis, joined Cerf’s father as a panelist on popular television quiz show What’s My Line?

Where the Lampoon diverged most noticeably from the clubs was, by 1965, in the ethnic background of the membership. Several members had been non-Protestant preppies, an experience which provided a fertile breeding ground for the insider-outsider perspective characteristic of the National Lampoon. “We were almost all Jewish and Catholic,” said Conn Nugent, another late-60s ‘Poonie who would eschew satire as a career. “It was a real urban melting pot--very New York influenced. Some members’ parents were actually Democrats.”

While such distinctions may seem arcane and insignificant in the larger context, they loomed large in the mind of Doug Kenney, a clever sophomore who gave little indication of becoming one of the guiding forces behind the National Lampoon when he joined in the spring of ‘65. The subject propelled Kenney’s Harvard Lampoon debut, a parody musical libretto called “Backside Story” (the flim version of West Side Story having swept the previous year’s Oscars.) It is the saga of the Preps (played by Anthony Perkins, Dwayne Hickman and Laurence Harvey) and the Townies (Sal Mineo, Paul Anka and – where were Kenney’s usually acute antennae? – Mick Jagger.) The preppies enter singing:

“When you’re a prep you’re a prep through and through

From your Brooks Brothers suit to your Bass Wee-Jun shoes

When you’re a prep a plebian’s a louse

You have Preppies around, you’re in Eliot House

You don’t have to be a ‘Choatey’ or an ‘Andey’

(Bomp-Bomp! )

As long as you have some penny loafers handy

And hair that’s sandy.”

While Kenney may have arrived at Harvard prepped out to the max, that doesn’t mean he was quite the real thing. According to Nugent, both he and Kenney were “Irish Catholics from social-climbing families who went to prep schools generally considered mediocre,” in Kenney’s case a Catholic prep school in Ohio called Gilmour Academy. But Kenney’s pose was hardly seamless: “Doug could go out and buy a white linen suit and get his hair cut and look as preppy as anyone I’d ever known,” a friend said, but while Kenney might buy white linen suits, “then he’d sleep in them.” Moreover, Kenney was hardly alone in assuming preppie trappings. “We all assumed the preppie persona in and out,” Nugent recalled. “The Lampoon was a place where one developed one’s poses – preppie, hippie, social activist, literary type – and sometimes they ran amok. We simultaneously thought that we were great stuff and that our essential fraudulent postures would be found out.”

Gabel saw Kenney as “a combination of a boy from the Midwest and embryo preppie. He was elusive as a person, in some way always performing, trying things on all the time.” But, Weidman maintains stoutly, “Doug didn’t posture and he didn’t pose. He went through a lot of evolutions. There were good Dougs and bad Dougs and stoned Dougs and all different kinds of Dougs, but there was nothing false or faddish about him.” Whatever changes Kenney may have put himself through, his friendships stayed constant.

Perhaps the distinction to make is that Kenney didn’t assume different styles alien to his essential identity for superficial reasons. Rather, the identity itself was fluid and the style followed. Alix Garcia-Matta, a college girlfriend who subsequently became his wife for one year, compared Kenney to an onion. “You would get down to what you thought was the core and there would be another layer, like so many masks to take off,” she said. Kenney may have been unable to pick a social persona and stick with it through thick and thin because he was always aware of the inherent ridiculousness of that particular image. If nothing else, his field trips into different milieu enabled him to satirize them all the better for having been there. “In one way he could be perceived as a social climber,” a HL colleague said. “On the other hand, he very clearly expressed his contempt for the whole thing and was very funny about it. His satirizations of clubbies and preppies were right on the mark.”

Kenney was not the only ‘Poonie who found the internal social dynamics of a closed society like Harvard (or high school) an endless source of inspiration. Nugent took a poke at his fellow jocks when, in a guide to the difference between Wonks, Jocks, and Clubbies, he wrote “Jocks: You’ve got to let yourself go. You know, catch some bennies down by the Charles, clip your horns with some tail from Whelock [a nearby ladies’ college], chug a case or two, bag some z’s’ on the rack, punch somebody out, belch, gross out the crew in the dorm, do the Jerk. You know.” Like Trow, Nugent could not have guessed his little joke would turn out to be Words To Live By for a future generation of students. He also had some advice for Clubbies, as a propos today as when it was written: “Clubbies should remember that they’re better mannered, better groomed, better schooled, better looking and richer than anyone else.”

These were not cries for reform but rather for admittance. “Any of us who joined a club were into social-climbing,” Nugent declared. “We cared about things like whether a tweed jacket was nice or hideous. If we were liberal it was mainly because liberal implied sophistication. There wasn’t much sense of social mission at the Lampoon,” he said. “We thought of admitting black people and so one got in [Elvin Montgomery in ‘69] but that’s as far as our consciousness went at that time.”

Nor did the other burning issue of the day intrude on their consciousness unduly, since in 1965 Harvard freshmen and sophomores were in no immediate danger of being called up. Some Harvard men were going to Vietnam, but as volunteers, not draftees. Whoever was being drafted probably hadn’t gone to Harvard, unlike several of the architects of the policy that sent them to South East Asia. There was on the whole a gentlemanly opposition to the war but this may have been as much due to a snobbish reluctance to be lumped in with the likes of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon as genuine conviction. In any case, these liberal sympathies were not put into action, at least on an organizational level. The Lampoon, Weidman feels, “was neither political or aggressively non-political or even apolitical. Individual members were involved or not.”

The prevailing attitude towards politics around the Castle, said Nugent, was that “no sincerely stated statement should be safe for more than 15 seconds and boundless enthusiasm was generally symptomatic of ignorance.” Issues of major importance such as nuclear annihilation were not on the Castle table. “The Lampoon encouraged one form of rebellion only,” he said, “thumbing your nose at propriety, establishment values, the whole Pollyanna schtick. There was no refuge from the high irony of the place,” and so the most frequently heard adjectives were “boring” and “tedious”. Under this rubric would fall not only God, Motherhood and the Flag, but also the Peace Corps, the War on Poverty, and other manifestations of mid-60’s idealism.

The rebellion of the self-consciously disenchanted usually took the form of practical jokes, stealing things, embarrassing people, and a general prankish disrespect, undertaken with the idea that they were immune from any serious consequences. One mid-60s prank nearly shattered the illusion of immunity. The ‘Poonies had obtained keys to the Geology department, from which they were going to filch some moonrocks of a rarity beyond price. The plot was foiled when it turned out they were missing the key to the last of several doors which guarded the extraterrestrial artifacts. Jim Rivaldo, Weidman’s roommate who was on the business board, feels this was just as well. “These things get their own momentum, “ he observed. “No one perceived what the consequences would have been. I don’t think anyone would have laughed when they found the moonrocks missing.”

But as a scholarship student Rivaldo might have had trouble entering into the proper spirit of irresponsibility. He is plagued by other retrospective scruples. “When I think of having lobster food fights and filet mignon food fights...” he said, remembering the Thursday night black-tie dinners. Even today, the Lampoon has to overcome scholarship students’ reservations. “We do get problems with new members from poor backgrounds,” a 1986 member admitted, “But you just lift their wrists, force them to drop the plate and they squeal with delight. Somebody’s going to clean up anyway, so a couple more pieces of glass aren’t going to matter.”

The mid-60’s crop was similarly insouciant. “It wasn’t mean-spirited or even unconscious,” Rivaldo recalled. “Somehow it was just another absurd thing, part of being removed from what the rest of the world was experiencing. Everything you did as a member of the Lampoon was some kind of absurd statement in behavior or attitude. When you walked into that bizarre castle you had a responsibility to act different and think different and be different.” Even so, it was getting harder to keep their skirts above the water: by the end of 1965, the U.S. presence in Vietnam had increased by 61,000 troops and the first draft card had been burned. That August, the first of several urban riots saw the Watts section of Los Angeles erupt into a burning clash between blacks and an almost exclusively white police force which left 34 dead, 4000 arrested, and millions nervous.

By April, 1966 the war and the official obfuscation surrounding it had come to the Castle’s attention at least to the extent of providing grist for the mill in “The Great American Guinea Pig,” a long essay by one Henry Beard, a junior from Connecticut soon to become the editorial rock of the National Lampoon. “The recent misplacing of a fully armed hydrogen bomb by the U.S. Air Force…” the piece began, referring to yet another profoundly disturbing but quickly forgotten incident of the atomic age, “calls to mind a strong but curious trait in the American character which appears whenever an American wishes to display to a foreigner the inherent rightness, goodness, or harmlessness of something he has done. Without resort to the messy statistics and confusing facts for which his country is so justly famous, he cuts through the web of ignorance and false knowledge known to abound in the mental antics of foreigners and offers himself as guinea pig in a highly dramatic and meaningful display of his unshakeable belief in the fundamental qualities and positive attributes of goods which appear to those same, uninformed Europeans as absolutely lethal,” wrote Beard, who subsequently learned to use shorter sentences.

As examples, he noted that Americans “eat atomic tomatoes ... to illustrate the favorable effects of a good dose of U-235 on vegetables and the village economy; they brush their teeth in radioactive water to prove it reduces cavities; and they stand around a great deal just breathing to prove that air nicely sprinkled with plutonium is quite safe if not positively bracing.” Later on, operating on the same principle, they would drink water from Love Canal and milk from near Three Mile Island. Beard suggested the value of applying this principle to foreign policy. “When the furor was raised months ago over American use of non-lethal gases in Vietnam, why didn’t General Westmoreland calmly stride through a load of the stuff eventually emerging with his ‘come on in, the gas is fine’ smile.” Of course, if he had, the General might well have ended up suing the makers of Agent Orange instead of CBS. Also, Beard proposed with apparently timeless relevance, “those red-handed interventionists in Latin America would have looked a great deal better if we had let the Cubans stage a Bay of Pigs of their own in the Chesapeake with exile Republicans to prove that interventions of that sort are enjoyable.”

If Kenney was an ersatz preppie, Beard was the genuine article. It was easy to imagine Beard, a quintessential ectomorph very much in the Aldous Huxley mold, wearing the shabby regalia of the English Lit grad student, complete with pipe and tweedy suits from birth (Beard would late describe himself as the owner of “a lint suit that picks up blue serge”). Far from trying on different identities. Beard was known for the consistency of his persona, which Nugent described as “anachronistic, literary, ironic and perpetually bored,” and he soon became as much of a fixture in the Castle as its resident custodian, Elmer Green. “The Lampoon was what Henry was about,” Weidman recalled. “He was the Lampoon guy. Everyone else had girlfriends and was banging around but you went to the Castle and Henry was there, or his extraordinary presence was.” Consequently, Weidman said. Beard “was treated with a certain kind of deference. He could really do it. He could put paper in the typewriter and wail.”

A capacity for hard work and a lack of extroversion were also the distinguishing characteristics of Rob Hoffman, a 1965 addition to the business board, “but he was never the businesslike pompous drudge,” Rivaldo said. “Everyone deferred to Rob’s financial judgment while having a great affection for him. It was clear from the beginning that he was going to be a multimillionaire entrepreneur,” and indeed Hoffman would make his first million before he was 24 from engineering Kenney and Beard’s National Lampoon deal with the magazine’s publisher.

Hoffman had originally seen himself as a Crimson kind of guy. However, his first week at Harvard a ‘Poonie peddling subscriptions to the magazine ($2 p.a.) came to his door and before the term was out he found himself on the Lampoon, where he soon became the Treasurer.

The Treasurer was also known as the “negative president.” “The President has no fiscal authority,” Hoffman explained, “so if the Treasurer said ‘I won’t pay the bill,’ the President couldn’t do what he wanted.” Not that Hoffman was likely to throw his weight around in such a heavy-handed fashion. Fortunately for the literary lights of the Harvard Lampoon, he was the kind of financial manager every artist should be paired up with at birth; hard-headed enough to wrestle the market to the ground but with enough sensitivity to genuinely appreciate the creative work for its intrinsic merit as opposed to just its potential marketability. Nevertheless, with an ambivalence arising from the same tradition of chaos and aristocratic indifference to money that had left the Lampoon deep in the red, the wild and crazy creative types had mixed feelings about Hoffman’s expertise even while appreciating his artistry in his field. “Rob would get a lot of shit for being practical,” Nugent recalled. “He was the thick-skinned, intelligent guy who could do the organizational work the poseurs didn’t want to do.” Despite his central role, Hoffman was not a leading figure because, while he joined in singing around the piano, he did so quietly and the limelight at the Lampoon stayed on the boisterous merry pranksters who claimed center stage.

Singing around the piano had become increasingly central to Lampoon life. One of Nugent’s fondest memories is of Chris Cerf’s brother Jonathan accompanying “Doug Kenney and about 10 other people singing songs – some of them old Chris Cerf songs, more of them Beatle songs and Stones songs and Animals songs” and other selections from the early 60s’ bumper crop of great party songs like “Hang On Sloopy, “ “Gloria,” and the immortal “Louie Louie” which cry out to be sung in a state of inebriated camaraderie, full of an exuberant cheerful energy conducive to rowdy group singalongs, in contrast to the swirling moodiness of the psychedelic music which followed.

These songs had a restless drive that fit the rhythm of the young men’s experience far better than did contemporaneous Pop hits like “Love Letters in the Sand”. When Mick Jagger sang that he couldn’t get no satisfaction, he got to the heart of the matter with a directness the college students found infinitely preferable to the romantic allusiveness of mainstream music which by now had degenerated into the string-laden sentimentality of Jerry Vale and Dean Martin. Material prosperity and political stability had conspired to shield the pig-in-the-python generation from many aspects of harsh reality. Consequently, they had a passion for unmitigated experience which influenced their taste in all the arts. They provided the nucleus of the audience for a new development in film called cinema verité, where directors like D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock and Frederick Wiseman eschewed technicolor and fantasy for grainy black and white and unsparing documentation.

Some segments of the population had not had the option of leading sheltered lives, and the music they produced was a lot more earthy, visceral fun than the soothing syrup of easy listening. The protected generation embraced this raw, exciting sound their parents associated with the maid, if they thought of it at all. “It was not uncommon among members of my generation (the generation that grew up as wards of the meretricious adulthood of the 1950’s) for one to feel one’s first strong sense of reality through the agency of Negro music,” Trow wrote in his 1978 book The Context of No Context.

This was one aspect of what the rest of their generation was experiencing that the ‘Poonies did not pretend to remain above. The Castle didn’t get a stereo until ‘67, but the members listened to the Temptations and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles in their rooms, and enacted these groups’ choreographed routines around the Castle piano. Even more than the Motown groups, the names to drop were the true Soul Men like Sam and Dave and Otis Redding. “It was real important to my roomates and me to let people know we listened to black music so we were cool,” Nugent said. “Otis Redding was it even though we secretly listened to the Lovin’ Spoonful.”

Broadway and Tin Pan Alley standards tried to touch the heart; Soul classics of the time like “Knock on Wood,” “Respect,” and the ineffably suggestive “Hold On I’m Coming,” aimed a bit lower down. As America became the land of a thousand dances, white boys had to learn how to move their pelvises in public, a task many found mortifying and undignified despite the fact that Elvis had done it and prospered. But they persevered, and thanks to the efforts of these unsung pioneers today even young white male investment bankers feel free to unashamedly get down on the dance floor.

On the other hand, girls, who had always been permitted to appear frivolous and alluring, had no scruples to lose. They took to the Pony, the Jerk, and the Swim like ducks to water. After years of having to appear ladylike they were finally allowed to work up a sweat, and they started shaking their hips in all directions with enthusiasm. Possibly girls were celebrating the fact that they were finally able to breathe normally. Pantyhose had started hitting the market in the mid-60s and while to many boys they seemed merely nylon chastity belts and no great step forward (excepting that the demise of garters also made possible the rise of the miniskirt,) to girls this was one less layer of rubber between their bodies and the world. Bras, too, lost their padding and cantilevering. The quest for authenticity had been extended to lingerie – from now on underwear would conform to the body, not vice-versa.

Something else strange started happening with the girls. The Pill had become widely available and suddenly the popular maquillage featured dark-ringed eyes and white lipstick, the three-day-debauch look. Annette was out. Twiggy was in. Harvard Student Health Services began distributing contraceptives around this time and, Nugent observed, “something was definitely happening along those lines. It was clear you could get laid more easily than you could a few years before.”

Partially this was due to the hang-loose breezes blowing eastward from California, the country’s main producer of domestic, as opposed to imported, fun. Like the Brits, the Californians had their own exotic argot, exciting musical sound, and distinctive fashion image, bronzed and healthy as opposed to the pale and tubercular British look. Sales of Clairol’s “Summer Blonde” soared as girls buried in the depths of New England winters tried to look as if they had just come in from the beach because everyone knew boys wished they all could be California Girls (the girls could be, that is). The Beach Boys and other bands propagandized a laissez-faire lifestyle of fun fun fun and endless summers, and hedonists of all stripes flocked to the West Coast where the mild seasons made it easy to forget the passing years and live in an Eternal Now.

But despite the extremes to which Californians were going, when Natalie Wood came to the Castle in 1966, the ‘Poonies turned out to greet her in jackets and ties. For them as for the majority of students, grooming was still regular and ironing had not become a lost art. If 50’s standards of deportment did not disappear overnight, neither did 50’s standards of morality. Until his junior year, Nugent, for example, went to Mass where he agonized over “the French Kiss as mortal sin.” There was still “high nervousness about procuring condoms,” he said. Parietal rules were still in effect and coed dorms were undreamed of. Even though nice girls were starting to, most of the naked women the ‘Poonies saw had staples in their navels.

Not that they saw that many women, naked or otherwise. Harvard, having gone as far as heavy affiliation but not yet having gone all the way into an actual merger with its women’s college Radcliffe, was still officially an all-male institution and so were its clubs. No women were allowed in The Castle. “That wasn’t a tradition,” Chris Cerf explained. “It was a parietal rule.” Rules, however, were made to be broken, especially at the Lampoon when it so chose, and by the mid-60’s ‘Poonies were sneaking women into the building (which did not thereupon fall down) for social functions.

The women were definitely there as adjuncts, not participants. “There is a kind of Bad Person humor that breaks taboos which comes from men,” said Nugent, who obviously hadn’t spent much time in girls’ locker rooms (now, of course, thanks to HBO the whole world knows there’s nothing dainty about women’s humor.) Consequently, there were “relatively few women who share a belittling, sexually demeaning, raucous, and unkind sense of humor which I personally find hilarious. A lot of us could have said “chicks aren’t funny’,” Nugent declared, referring to an observation attributed to Doug Kenney. That women could possess a raunchy, aggressive sense of humor seemed as unlikely as their being able to cover a basketball game, a hilarious notion which provided the premise for Kenney’s contribution to a Lampoon parody (printed on pink paper) of the Crimson written on the occasion of the newspaper’s electing its first woman editor.

However, despite their low opinion of female humor-generating capabilities and the exchange of much male-bonding genitalia-oriented banter, the ‘Poonies were relatively speaking still your sensitive Harvard intellectuals more than your macho louts. The tough guy was just another pose, like that of the world-weary sophisticate. The question of which pose to assume in front of the girls was exacerbated by a dichotomy emerging in their lives. By day the Harvard students immersed themselves in the Judeo-Christian tradition which counseled duty, responsibility, and rising above our vile animal nature. By night they danced to songs that wallowed in our vile animal nature and urged them to, as one popular song put it so well, “Sha na na na na na live for today.”

So there they were in the Spring of ‘66, staunchly maintaining a pose of ironic detachment but getting down around the piano, dipping their toes into the steamy waters of the new hedonism without plunging in, and putting out a magazine which, as Rivaldo put it, “was a sleepy backwater for kind of irrelevant people who every now and then would make a splash here and there.” Then at the beginning of the summer of 1966, President Walker Lewis suggested doing a Playboy parody and everything changed.

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