Word: lampoon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Harvard Lampoon, an institution that finally made it back up to par in parody...
...best thing they've published in, like, two years. And their latest LP, "The Surprising Sheep and Other Mind Excursions," is a remarkable musical feat that's even been getting air play on Boston radio. All this in spite of the fact that the Lampoon had run upon hard times recently...
Hard times means that the Lampoon didn't make the killing they expected to on their Life parody last fall. As my paternal grandmother used to say about my father, "their eyes were bigger than their stomach." Just before the Life press run, they jacked up the number they would print from 400,000 to 650,000. They could only sell half of them, and the rest are rotting in warehouses from Sheboygan to El Paso. They lost $15,000 on the $200,000 deal. That's big business...
...Lampoon has been big business ever since the fall of 1966 when they made over (over!) $100,000 profit from their parody of Playboy (who, by the by, printed it for them and helped them get ads from their own regulars). To say that the Lampoon has been in collusion with the corporate complex of this country's industrial power brokers would be a waste of idealistic breath...
This umbilical chord to the establishment adds a fine touch of irony to their issue on the confrontation. Another is why they did this issue in the first place. After all, the Lampoon had published just a single issue during the first nine tenths of this academic year--the only exception being the "movie worsts" issue (which is not a regular issue, as such, and whose publicity was so pre-ordained that radio station WRKO carried the winners of this year's awards in its headline news...