The Press: Yes, We Are Collegiate

On bleak Gallows Hill, where Salem (Mass.) used to hang its witches’, the staff of the M.I.T. Voo Doo had some good, clean fun last week with Harvard’s Lampoon. Anybody who bought the magazine, they decided, was surely bewitched. So they tried the Lampoon (in absentia?) for witchcraft, hanged it in effigy, burned it atop a pyre of barrels and went home feeling as triumphant as the M.I.T. men of an earlier generation who soldered up Harvard’s gates and painted John Harvard’s statue a bright red.

The campus humor magazine, hibernating during war’s long winter, had come back to life with all its old razzmatazz. It had the familiar cigaret ads on the back cover, some amateur art work out front and the raveled raddled he-she jokes among the ads. Sample (from the revived Ohio State Sundial):

He: “I suppose you dance?”

She: “Oh, yes, I love to.”

He: “Great. That’s better than dancing.”

Collegiate editors have been stealing such gags—and even worse ones—from each other since the 1870s, when the Lampoon and Yale Record were born. These college magazines reached a heyheyday in the hip-flasked, short-skirted ’20s, when John Held Jr.’s flat-chested flappers were all the rage and Judge and the old Life were the thing to copy. The jokes had not changed much since, but the imitative style had. In the depression, many became introspective, proletarian, or both; others took to aping Esquire and got suppressed for it. This year most campus editors seemed to have set themselves the goal of being local New Yorkers.

Comeback. Of the hundreds of prewar college humor magazines, only 40 had lasted through the war. By last week there were 200. Circulations were booming: at teeming Texas the Ranger had hit 14,000 and California’s Pelican was over 12,000.

Many a campus monthly pointed with pride to famed alumni (but few of the famed alumni point with pride to their campus work). Princeton’s Tiger boasts of names like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Booth Tarkington, Whitney Darrow Jr. The Yale Record printed Lucius Beebe, Stephen Vincent Benet and Peter Arno. Milton Caniff was art editor of the Ohio State Sundial. John P. Marquand, Gluyas Williams and the late Robert Benchley began on the Harvard Lampoon.

Two Manhattan admen have a corner on the national advertising that goes to college magazines. To Harvardmen Madison Sayles and W. B. Bradbury the most depressing thing about their business is not the tired jokes they encounter among their ads. It is the visits of shameless radio gag writers who buy up old copies as a source of swipeable humor.