Mr. Fuller Criticises Lampoon

Ten years ago two class-mates of mine "Out" for the Lampoon, used regularly to devote a portion of each day, rain or shine, to helping each other think up jokes. Apparently times have not changed, not the ways of candidates or editors in them. Yet jokes, like poets, are born, not made. Humor means, if anything, an irrepressible, sensitiveness to incongruities, and contradictions in things, unspirited, be it added, by any immediate desire to correct them. Its expression is a revelation to itself, a, sudden unexpected sparkle and flash refracted from some absurdity. College humor, moreover, should be provincial in accent. The joke-in-general is a last despairing cry. The latter requirement, however, demands more than the humorous eye: there must be oddities-rough edges in tradition, custom, manners, personalities to catch it. Here it is that the Lampoon is at a disadvantage. Life with us is too decent orderly, conventional, grown-up man- nish, and of the world worldly. There are few persons who of their won selves write caricature, merely ex-officio, in salt without meat. Again, very little that is ridiculous happens, and when it does, we are apt to regard it only in its ethical aspect, and solemnly approve or disapprove. Now and then, to be sure an event screams through the decorous stillness: witness the last Brooks House afternoon tea, which took the form of an "informal memorial, service" to the late bishop. But such oddities are rare, either pass, unnoticed, or, as in this case, are much as to render caricature in bad taste.

One must not, then be too serve with Lampy's habitual failings. If jokes are to appear once in so often, one cannot wait for them to "just grow" like Topsy; they must be manufactured. If there is little to suggest them, they must be forced. If there is dearth of local picturesqueness, they must go afield to life in general. Moreover, it is only fair to the present number to admit that there are some good touches among the wealth of the commonplace. "Phrases from Novels" (p. 200), the dernier cri of the Freshman's welcome home (p. 206), the limerick about the Freshman's quandary at Boston dances (p. 208), the bit about Harvard irreligion (p. 209), make one laugh from natural impulse, and not from college spirit, or friendship with their editors. We wish, however, that Lampy could be persuaded to dismiss the slave and wring the Ibis's neck. It would spare us and him much in point of soliloquies about his menage, which we doubt not sounds as dull in his warn as in our own.

To turn to the drawing, the cover is a very excellent design, somewhat of the style of Maxfield Parrish, as it seems to us, but its coloring is a failure; the green is too poisonous, deadly so when laid in the purple. The rest of the drawing is mediocre. Perhaps the best of the illustrations is that to "Passing his Exam" (p. 209), which has considerable character and life. One cannot, to be sure, look for expert illustrative work in a college paper. But it would seem that, with some study and imitation of good models, far better results might be attained. One feels, for example, that Lampy might study the method and technique of the drawings in, say Fliegende Blatter and Le Rire, with considerable advantage to himself