With the college guide parody, though, the rest of us get to be in on some of the inside jokes, which is a nice change. For instance, part of the parody college roommate questionnaire on page 120 reads, 'I want a roommate that is considerate, flexible, amiable, open-minded and Natalie Portman.' Which is extra funny to us, because Natalie Portman goes to Harvard. Get it? And while Harvard comes in first in the rankings parody, Yale finishes at 10,347. Du-huh. That warm feeling you get reading a joke in the guide and knowing that you get it so much more than someone who doesn't go to Harvard - that is what it feels like to be on Lampoon all the time.

The bit about Natalie Portman, however, also points to a more troublesome feature of the Lampoon book: probably inadvertently, the writers forgot that more than half of entering college first-years are not heterosexual men. This is not surprising, given the Lampoon's demographics: only one of the nine editors who helped write the book last summer was a woman. Page 10: 'The life of a Math Teamer is paradise. Wake up, sleep through class, then go home and have sex with hot girls.' Parody of a National Honor Society charter, next page: 'If you see someone say something rude to a lady in the cafeteria, you should kill this person. The girl will then be your chattel.' It stays pretty much like that for the rest of the book. Maybe the Lampoon's market research showed that only insecure heterosexual men with poor social skills would buy a college guide parody book. But probably not. This humor, more than likely, came straight from the heart.

No Lampoon product would be complete without a mention of Thomas Pynchon, and the Guide to College Admissions obliges (see p. 148, and maybe others that I missed). The Lampoon's collective obsession with Pynchon is bizarre, and probably beyond my ability to explain. Pynchon the novelist is inaccessible, just like the 'Poon. Very few people make it all the way through his books, just like very few people can read an entire issue of the Lampoon. And people who do read Pynchon get to feel like they're part of a special intellectual club - just like the Lampoon thinks it is.

Referencing obscure authors seems to be a part of the Lampoon's larger overall strategy, evident in this book, to base their humor on allusions so arcane that almost no one will understand them. To the magazine's credit, more of the latest Lampoon effort than usual is funny on its own. But to get some of the gags you would have to take the same classes at Harvard as the students who wrote the book. The boys at the 'Poon certainly know what they're doing, though: making obscure references the basis for their humor inoculates them against the common charge that they are just not very funny. But, they can retort, the incomprehensible article in five-point type of the last issue was simply hilarious if you've read Gravity's Rainbow. You haven't read it? Well then, it's you own fault that you don't get it. So there.