On the masthead of the seventy-fifth anniversary issue of The Lampoon there are 31 business editors. In the issue as a whole, there are 31 pages of advertising. This demonstrates simply that Lampy's business board has finally achieved the rejuvenation of the magazine and has put out what is probably the first self-supporting issue in history.

Furthermore, many of the ads are well-written. The Life Magazine graph of Harvard tastes is provocative, to say the least, and Jordan Marsh's cartoon might easily be considered a highlight of the issue.

In the 23 pages, which Lampy saw fit to squeeze in among the ads, he has rung in a group of his old editors to entertain, to instruct, and to compliment. In one of these are they notably successful, though they do try hard. Their humor for the most part does not evoke a spontaneous "heh-heh" or even a "haw-haw-haw"; it is of the "well, when you come to think of it this is pretty smooth doggerel" variety.

The poetry is probably the best part of the issue, though it is spotty in the extreme. "Continental Lyre," by Clement B. Wood '47, is a lively and clever account of the tribulations of the traveller in Europe, it probably contains the least-force humor of the issue. David McCord's dissertation on Kieller's Marmalade and Nathaniel Frothingham's wistful complaint about Governor Dever's Great New Highway System are pleasant if you happen to be interested in marmalade or roads at the time, but both drag terribly on route.

The rest of the poems are lifeless treatments of relatively trite topics. Thomas Ybarra '05, for example, throws in Latin Words that can fit into context either by their meanings or sounds and comes up with an unfunny "Lay of Ancient Rome"; Porter Wilcox '43 makes some observations about televised hearings that everyone else has undoubtedly figured out for himself by now.

In the prose regions of the Lampoon, it is again a recent graduate who has done the most creditable job. John P. C. Train '50, in a semi-Liebling-like analysis of Mexican newspapers, displays again the effortlessness and sophistication which make most of his stuff easy and delightful to read. There is a story by Oliver Allen '43, concerning a social climber's campaign to ease himself into the New York Harvard Club, which should appeal to members of that organization, if no one else. The rest of the prose works fall really flat, especially a drawn-out parody by Nathaniel Benchley '38 of the Etruscan equivalent of Boston's Watch and Ward Society. Even such greats as F. van Wyck Mason '24 and Robert E. Sherwood '18 are not up to what presumably is their best.

Nor do the cartoons rescue the issue, being a shade lower in quality than the average production of the undergraduate editors. Dahl has an unfunny one on the Watch and Ward, and there is an illegibly signed cartoon that picks off another one of television's sitting ducks. A couple of drawings seem to have appeared in the issue either by whim or mistake: a gnome creeping toward a toadstool which has a naked woman lying atop it, and a poorly-drawn baseball pitcher winding up on page 28 to throw to an unequally uninspiring batter on page 19.

But the worst of the lot is a drawing by James Montgomery Flagg showing a jester jabbing his pen into the rear end of an evil-looking person labeled "Hypocrisy." The caption is, "1951--Lampy--Still doing his stuff." If Mr. Flagg is seriously implying that the Lampoon is a puncturer of the balloons of insincerity and inconsistency which clutter up the atmosphere of society, then he should examine more closely the recent copies of the magazine.

Or he can turn simply to the closing sentence of the three-page eulogistic history of the 'Poon prepared for this issue by Mike Arlen and Lew Gifford. "Whatever the case however, it has always printed what it wanted to, and, as far as we are concerned, that is about all one could ask for." If "one" is a present or past editor of the Lampoon (and judging by this issue there is a little need to separate the two) then this is a valid generalization. But for the majority of us, Lampy is too concerned with patting his own dogma to worry about exposing others.