Georgie Porgie, Pudding and Fly,

Kissed a girl and smoothed his tie;

When her love began to pall,

Georgie Porgie let her bawl.

In 1931, the Lampoon again entered the much abused field of parody and satire of Harvard institutions with a remarkably polished publication entitled Mondays at Nine or Pedagogues On Parade. Paul Brooks '32 and T. Graydon Upton '31 contributed a great deal of consistently fine and funny light verse. Carl E. Pickhardt's '31 caricatures of famous professors of that era--Barret Wendell, Charles T. Copeland, Irving Babbit, George Santayana, and G. L. Kittredge--are excellent drawings in the style of Sir Max Beerbohm. Part of the verse that accompanies the caricature of Kittredge follows:

This is our farmer, stern and rather odd;

Although a mortal, yet he acts like God.

Behind him walks the world, no one before,

No living man precedes him through a door . . .

He lectures long on how to torture witches,

And hopes the happy days will come to pass

When men will burn for wearing hats in class. .

This type of writing, except for one or two decidedly anachronistic excresences, passed quietly away after the wane of Gold Coast Harvard. With the passing of a Harvard "type"--the well-dressed, "well-bred," socially conscious, prep-schooled, glib-talking, worldly, wealthy-son type of undergraduate, humor, both self-directed and outwardly directed, fell off sharply. Even today, a cursory glance at the kind of undergraduate publications at Harvard shows an overwhelming preponderance of the intense and earnest variety.

Of course, the Depression and the mounting of world problems, coupled with an increasing undergraduate awareness of the magnitude and immediacy of such problems, were not at all conducive to a humorous perspective. But this alone cannot explain the remarkably abrupt falling-off of the satires and parodies that were legion between the years 1910 and about 1930. It has been said that humor, or attempts at it, is the property of a particular sort of mind--a mind which is either frenetic or dormant enough to see the incongruity of situations or vocations. Humor, and especially satire and parody, requires a divorcement of the subject from consequence. In this respect, it is not an idle assumption that "learning at the College level" took on new importance to the typical Harvard undergraduate in the 30's. A new type the "learner," quickly infiltrated the student body and greatly influenced but did not wholly replace the old type, the "liver."

'Deadly Earnest' Period