With the Vietnam War, black power, feminism, the Nixon administration, marijuana and LSD, student rebellion, and the sexual revolution roiling the country, targets for the newly launched National Lampoon were plentiful…
From Harvard Magazine:
Contrary to the romanticized image of a solitary artist forging brilliant creations in inspired isolation—Franz Kafka, say—most great works of art emerge from a group of creators who catch fire together. Renaissance Italy is probably the grandest example, but think of the Abstract Expressionists breaking new ground in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, or the Bauhaus of Germany in the 1920s.
Contrary to the romanticized image of a solitary artist forging brilliant creations in inspired isolation—Franz Kafka, say—most great works of art emerge from a group of creators who catch fire together. Renaissance Italy is probably the grandest example, but think of the Abstract Expressionists breaking new ground in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, or the Bauhaus of Germany in the 1920s.
The National Lampoon, founded in 1970 by three young alumni of the Harvard Lampoon—Henry Beard ’67, Doug Kenney ’68, and Rob Hoffman ’69, M.B.A. ’72—was not only unlike anything seen before (or since) in the realm of humor, but, in retrospect, was the wellspring for several streams of comic creation that irreversibly altered popular culture. Outside conventional TV sitcoms and formulaic Hollywood movies (pardon the redundancies), very little professionally wrought humor in America since 1970 has been untouched by the legacy of NatLamp, as its readers soon styled it.
