Newsweek is a magazine that doesn't need parody. But since the "top collegiate comics" who conjure up the monthly Lampoon appear to be up to their navels in negotiable securities, the sixty-five pages of shiny, smooth paper lying around local newsstands this week is an impressive, if sometimes humorless, article.
The mechanics of a parody are to take off in the structure of an established, respected institution, and reduce it to the absurd. The Lampoon editors have used this formula, but only half-way. Their Newsweek cover is only distinguishable from the original magazine by the modest announcement: "A Harvard Lampoon Parody." The type, the pictures, the features and the make-up are a perfect facsimile. But the contents are about as humorous as Newsweek's own weekly output of printed matter, which can glean only smiles of agreement in a parlor-car to Chicago.
If you have any friends who are Lampoon editors, you'll recognize them in the photographs which spot the magazine. They're as funny as Lampoon editors can be, in their quaint alcoholic attitudes. The drawings of Maria de Medici and the parody of Grant Wood's "American Gothic" are excellent. The advertisements are exciting, and for twenty-five cents, this Lampoon parody is a worthwhile souvenir of the game.
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