IN AN IDEALLY-CONSTRUCTED university community, there would be a place for an ideal Lampoon. There are many days when it's not so great to get out of bed and realize you're alive in Cambridge--days when the Massachusetts sky dumps its cheerless load of snow and misery onto the frozen ground, when fingers numbed by cold try to hammer out the five tutorial papers due by dawn, when the sparkly conversation of a Lesley College charmer is not quite enough to make a satisfactory night's entertainment. On those bleak days, an ideal Lampoon would appear at the corner newsstands. And like a speech by Al Vellucci or a chance meeting with a Yalie, it would make Harvard students forget all their minor problems and look at life with wry benevolence again.

Needless to say, there hasn't been an ideal Lampoon for as long as anyone in the world can remember. The problem isn't the chronic lack of belly laughs in a typical issue; wisely deciding that Daffy Duck type humor is best left to the Brattle, Poonies have aimed for something a little more subtle. But as the latest Thanksgiving number shows, the emphasis on subtlety can go a little too far--like when it blots out anything funny.

It's not that there's no humor in this month's issue (at $.50, the Lampoon has at least as many laughs as 5 issues of the New York Times, though it's not as good for starting fires), or that every bit of subtlety inevitably leaves a trail of squashed jokes behind it (as the more-tasteless-than-ever Audio Lab ad on the back cover graphically shows, there are times when an appeal to animal emotions gets nauseating). But there does seem to be an inherent confusion of purpose in the Lampoon's approach to its role as "humor magazine." In most of this month's pieces, clever Poonies work from the assumption that if they imitate any kind of over-used literary genre, the result will be funny. Often it isn't.

The first and last pieces in the Turkey issue show the two poles of the current Poonie identity crisis. A purported ad placed by "Gershon Rolnick" is at the end, protesting the Lampoon's anti-contraception march last month. Even though the whole thing smacks a bit of self-congratulatory free publicity for clever pranks, the ad is funny, and one suspects that the Poonies' hearts lie with this kind of straight-joke appeal.

UNFORTUNATELY, that kind of unashamed directness is missing from the rest of the issue. The opening "Vanitas" piece by Nick Pilavachi is the most obvious example of the flaw that pervades nearly all the pieces. For most readers, Pilavachi's piece may be the only example of anything in the issue, because it's mighty hard to read much further after finishing this one. The piece has the right premise: by lightly ridiculing the idea that "there is really nothing at all funny about this sordid world," and suggesting a special committee to investigate evil "completely and without incompetence," someone like Russell Baker might make us is really nothing at all funny about this sordid world," and suggesting a special committee to investigate evil "completely and without incompetence," someone like Russell Baker might make us forget the assorted woes of the world. Under Pilavachi's heavy hand, however, the whole plan backfires. By the time we get done with it, we've forgotten our minor worries, all right. We've forgotten them because now we're saddled with such gut-busting laughers as napalm raids and hungry Africans and political assassinations. Better to buy five copies of the Times.

The same kind of confusion hits several other pieces. Chris Hart's "Jumping John" is a nice little parody of the modern-sordid school of writing, but like James Dickson's "The Modigliani Face," it relies for its humor on the dubious assumption that any real-life trend will be funny if exaggerated enough. Now that may be a sure-fire key to effective political satire (e.g. exaggerate the horrors of war and people will get fed up with it), but it doesn't always make for a good laugh. Dickson, by plugging in tidbits of humor-in-microcosm ("Brackley...worked long and hard on certain aspects of the dissection of a fetal pig"), but overall the joke is strained. In the story, Brackley carves up his girl's face, but she becomes a model. Grotesque? Yes ("Camillia emerged from the bathroom wearing a slip and having a long, thin nose, a deep cleft serving as an eyebrow, one eye resting where her cheek bone formerly was ..."). Funny? Not really.

The new issue's visual problems are much easier to pinpoint than the literary ones. The drawings of David McClelland and James Rivaldo are gone, and they are a sore loss. Sam Vandam's caricature of Mayor Daley is properly Sorel-like, and his cartoons pop up throughout the issue, but it will be a while before he can match the bizarre beasties that crawled over McClelland's pages.