Word: lampooning
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...drop out of the comic's traditional adversary relationship to power and, instead, parade an anarchic childishness. Their banner might have read HELL, NO, WE WON'T GROW UP. In Britain, Monty Python's Flying Circus tossed music-hall bawdry into a Dada format, and at home National Lampoon updated sick humor with a stinging Wasp edge. They were vicious; they were silly; they couldn't care less. And now someone had to shatter the lulling cadences of stand-up too. Who better than the child of Disneyland and Wittgenstein...
When Byerly Hall gave him the go-ahead, Guterman decided to defer the offer for a year instead and travel to Israel and Egypt. Then, once at Harvard, he decided to comp the Lampoon art board and learn Arabic, both of which he did with great aplomb. Sinai explains, "Larry is extremely broad-minded politically, and he's always conscious of political issues--that's an important part of him. It's hard to find someone so willing to listen to anybody else...
...after we finally arrived at this old, famous and important place, we wanted, like just about everyone else, to fit in and do well, to be a part of this 350-year-old monolith. We wanted to join The Crimson or The Lampoon, to make the hockey team or the Dins, to learn something in school and write the greatest thesis since Henry Kissinger's gargantuan exploration of Bismarck's foreign policy (yes, everybody still talks about...
...year after I wrote that piece, I got to read a virtual rewrite of that essay, now entitled "They Flee from Me," in a Lampoon parody of the What. To add insult to injury, a good friend of mind unwittingly complimented me for writing the Lampoon's parody, saying it was the best piece I had ever written. One freshman girl even took the parody so seriously she called me up to complain about...
Slowly, we built an audience of people who thought we were either doing a stupid Lampoon prank, or that we were independently stupid. We decided to get out of the mail business, and moved 50 feet down the street to the public phones...