When you think about Harvard, you generally think of a high class Ivy League university. You expect doctors, lawyers and Wall Street businessmen to emerge after graduation. Hell, our president and first lady are graduates. That makes sense. What most people don't realize is that Harvard gave us a comedy institution, and while not all of it's members came from the famous college, The National Lampoon founders Henry Beard and Doug Kenney did.
I really didn't know much about the Lampoon as a magazine. For my generation, its legacy lies in movies such as
Animal House,
Vacation and even
Van Wilder. Those of us that grew up in the eighties or nineties were more prone to reading Mad or occasionally Cracked. I don't even remember seeing The National Lampoon at newsstands. That could have something to do with the tits. There were so many tits. See, before the internet, we had to find pictures of naked people any way we could. That probably sounds odd to a generation that has seen nudity leave Playboy, but in those days, it was a legitimate selling point. Oh, and they had funny jokes and parodies to go with all of that.