Originality is seldom wasted in poking fun at competitive athletics, but going on the assumption that the only good joke is an old one, the Lampoon's Harvard-Yale Game issue kicks the Old Grad and the pigskin squarely and sometimes humorously. Eighteen photographs supplement the parody on sport sidelights and interviews with Grand Old Men of Football. Perhaps Lampy's switch to photography is a last gasp effort to beat the cartoon nemesis--it may not succeed.

"College Football--The Reason Why" is one of the reasons why the current Lampoon is again a humor magazine. With exaggerated ex-football player language, the unsigned author rambles authoritatively, "Playing football makes a man a better football player, and hence a better American, and hence a better man."

Another good reason is the completely ridiculous compilation of "interesting and out-of-the-way anecdotes about the Yale-Harvard series." Applying Louella Parsons' "funny little happenings" technique to football side-lights, the anonymous author writes quite an amusing three columns.

Unfortunately, the other three prose attempts do not measure up to the first two. Taking a poor third, is one of those Daisy-turned-Gridder things that can be funny only at high school football banquets. And then there's "The Peanuts Myth" that uses the reductio ad absurd to no great advantage. This particular one involves nineteenth-century Ivy athletes playing football in motorized wheelchairs. Hindmost in the magazine and in humor is "Informality at Yale," an ironic title because John H. Limpert says that the Yale men "Gothic town" do not have much informality. An "Old College Song" sings sharply of social pressure at Yale, and is notable as the one poem in this Lampoon.

"Evolution of Football as Yale" is an uninspiring transition cartoon showing player, official, and spectator in three phases since 1893. While Updike's cartoons bolster some pieces, the sketch of "Peanuts" in his wheelchair adds little to that story.

Writing funny captions for the photographs must have been a tedious procedure, because very few of them are clever. A typical picture is one of a ragged little dog labeled Trixie, first and fiercest bulldog, supposedly demonstrating the dauntless spirit of the dogged Blue eleven. But the cut lines do the best with meager material, in a mock, curt, newspaper style.

In all, the worst stories in this issue would rank with the best in one of the Lampoon's lean years. And the novelty of the "Picture History of Harvard-Yale Football" is refreshing though the article is not consistently well-done.