On the Shelf

The last Lampoon of the year is now out on the stands and a quick flip-through will give the prospective buyer the best that the magazine has to offer: its cartoons. There are two or three in the current issue which could conceivably appear in "The New Yorker" during its annual mid-summer slump and one, entitled "La Mouche," is probably the best the Lampoon has printed this year.

The gentry who attempt the magazine's printed matter-freshmen, members of the various Harvard clubs across the country. Boston newspaper reporters, rival collegiate magazines, and the postal department-must have full confidence in the Lampoon's strangely bloated reputation as a humorous magazine. (A small but effective survey just concluded by this department has revealed that the majority of people who consider the lampoon to be funny have neither read it nor seen it. Few people questioned admitted to not having heard of it, however, though some were under the impression that it was the University's daily newspaper.)

All but one of the stories in this latest issue are either laboriously told gags which, if funny, are so only in the concluding paragraph, or else college stories which will amuse primarily those whose college life they so really reflect. This group, which might roughly be called the Club Set, will possibly be amused to see one of its more notorious wits (reputedly the only paying customer to have terrorized the staff if Hayes-Bickford as to be permanently black balled by that establishment) painstakingly immortalized in the story "How I Blew My Lunch Money." If this small clique-claque is the audience for which the Lampoon is written, then this story of a champagne picnic in a rented dump-truck, should hit the spot. However, as humorous writing, it just isn't.

That is true of most of the other stories, as well. First, the writing in itself is not funny and too often the plot, which could be secondary in a good bit of humorous writing, isn't worthy of telling. And, second, there is little pleasure to be found in the mere style of the various contributors. The writer of this issue's editorial and a past contributor to the "At the Pleasure" series, is an exception to this latter, however.

One story, entitled "The Box Lunch duck," is clearly the work of a devotee of Miss Shirley Jackson's author of "The Lottery" and other macerating tales. Again, it was only a sense of duty which prevailed over this reader's lack of interest in the story. Though its ending is momentarily stunning, the author attempted to make it appear brilliant by writing the preceding paragraphs with pen dipped in dishwater. There may be some question as to whether or not it belongs in a "humorous" magazine, as well.

The most successful article is one written in the manner of Potter's gamesmanship-or How to Win Without Actually Cheating." It is called "Test-manship" and gives some various practices which may be employed in "the art of taking exams without actually knowing anything." This piece of drollery, along with the cartoons, and an advertisement announcing that the lampoon is offering a prize of 3 dollars "to the sophomore who stands lowest in the class at the end of the year without actually being expelled," are the only contributions to humor made this month by the Bow street rakes. There may, indeed, be some truth to the report that the idle clerks in Roger Kent have taken to "ghosting" for the Lampoon in lien of rent.