who is the managing editor of National Lampoon?
National Lampoon was a ground-breaking American humor magazine started in 1970, originally as an spinoff of the Harvard Lampoon. During National Lampoon’s most successful years, parody of every kind was a mainstay; surrealist content was also central to its appeal. Almost all the issues included long text pieces, shorter written pieces, a section of actual news items (dubbed “True Facts”), cartoons and comic strips. Most issues also included “Foto Funnies” or fumetti, which often featured nudity. At its best, the magazine’s humor was intelligent, imaginative and cutting edge. However, the Lampoon simultaneously promoted its brand of crass, bawdy comedy[1], and it often pushed far beyond the boundaries of what was generally considered appropriate and acceptable. As co-founder Henry Beard described the experience years later: “There was this big door that said, ‘Thou shalt not.’ We touched it, and it fell off its hinges.” The magazine reached its height of popularity and critical acclaim
Although Britain has enjoyed a long tradition of looking to its colleges for humor, the crossover from collegiate to professional humorist in America has for the most part been much less conspicuous. A notable exception, however, was a group of students at Harvard in the late 1960s who went on in 1970 to found the National Lampoon, which enjoyed two decades of circulation before effectively ceasing publication in April of 1992. It is quite possible that the National Lampoon might never have come into existence but for the astonishing success of some undergraduate collaborations by Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney while they were on the staff of the venerable Harvard Lampoon, the college’s century-old humor magazine: parodies of Time and Life, which went into national distribution and sold well, followed by a J.R.R. Tolkien spoof, Bored of the Rings, which ran to numerous printings after its publication by Signet in 1969. After graduation Beard and Kenney found a backer for their proposal
