Word: lampooner
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...late spring 1901, for instance, just a few days after FDR's election to the paper, disaster of a sort struck--The Harvard Lampoon issued it first-ever parody of The Crimson, a stinging sheet playing on the stolid greyness that was the paper's hallmark in its early days. The lead story discussed in excruciating detail the replacement of one oarsman with another; buried beneath it was a one-paragraph item headlined "A Dangerous Attempt." A passerby, the item informed readers, had noticed a lighted fuse attached to Memorial Hall; at its end was enough pieric acid not only...
...later wrote that at the time "there was much feeling owing to the fact that one of our editors was largely responsible for the Lampoon's outrage, but this was also a decided crumb of comfort, and the joke was too good to leave any ill will." Forty years later, when a group of Lampoon grads reissued the parody and sent the White House a copy, Roosevelt replied, "I myself, still a freshman, had been elected an Editor of The Crimson two or three days before, and my rage at the hoax was only equalled by the rage...
Amidst the general tumult, we would like to get our two cents in, for we feel a special bond with FDR. He was, in the spring of 1903, the president of The Crimson, presiding over the fortunes of our paper through a stormy period that included the first Lampoon parody of the paper. By all accounts, he did a steady, sturdy job for The Crimson, presiding over the paper's move to new quarters and producing 107 issues of Cambridge's Only Breakfast Table Daily...
...find his niche at Harvard: publications. Although dropped--along with Lippmann--from the socially conscious Crimson, Reed, with much writing and publishing experience, found little difficulty gaining staff positions on the Harvard Monthly and The Lampoon. Both served as an outlet for quick imagination and facile wit. The writing was fun, but rarely serious. Too much was written seriously, without revision or even serious editing. Yet, largely for his contributions to these publications, Reed's name became a familiar one to the undergraduate community. Achieving the position of Ibis on the Lampoon, Jack could boast to his mother in Portland...
...with a fluency that went unnoticed in his postgraduate period. Gary Pearle and Mary Kyte's galvanic direction aids the songs when it whispers and distorts them when it shouts. Sans extraneous props, the quartet of soloists, MacIntyre Dixon, Joy Franz, Jonathan Hadary and Donald Corren, embody the Lampoon spirit of Tomfoolery and if at times they breathe too hard, it is not their age but the material's. Tom Lehrer "admits to 53, but prefers to think of it as 11 Celsius...