I attended an orientation session in the Lampoon Castle, a stout, puckish building opened in 1909 that resembles a human face in a helmet. More importantly, it would bring me into contact with the culture that had birthed the vaunted National Lampoon ( NL), whose dominant run of comedic films in the late ’70s and ’80s, from Animal House to the National Lampoon’s “Vacation” series, was responsible for a high percentage of the catchphrases heard in my youth. It seemed to me that joining a 123-year-old publication that counted John Updike, George Plimpton, and Robert Benchley among its alumni would put me on that path. I had a yearning to write satire, but hadn’t yet approached it in any disciplined fashion. In any case, the wit and intellect of the Lampoon had consistently impressed me in the meantime. It was only my third semester in Cambridge the fact that I’d transferred in as a sophomore may mitigate - slightly - the inescapable annoyingness of stating I went to Harvard.
(Or, as the rivalrous Harvard Crimson newspaper habitually refers to it, “a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine.” Repressed striving and insecurity, with a split infinitive!) In the fall of 1999, my junior year, I decided to try out - in the Harvard parlance, to “comp,” short for either “compete ” or “competence,” an abbreviation that neatly captures the atmosphere of repressed striving and insecurity on campus - for my college’s quasi-bimonthly humor magazine, The Harvard Lampoon.