REVIEWER DISAPPOINTED IN LAMPY'S GRADUATE NUMBER

Either something has happened lately to humor or something has happened to the Lampoon's alumni. The Graduates' Number, just off the presses today, surely is no feather in the old-timer's straw hat this spring.

Lampy, as she stands in her current number, has been despoiled of the wit that made her. Alumni humor, it seems, runs rather to reminiscence than "nut stuff," and right now it is "nut stuff" that has the vogue. But the fault, Dear Ibis, is not your staff, but in your graduates, who have grown beefy.

A third angle we think of is that perhaps the reviewer's taste it is that's been altered. Perhaps the alumni's contributions are as fine wit as Lampy ever filled her pages with. Perhaps it is a too-young Arnold (Matthew, not Benedict) that flays this stuff that oldsters offer. But if it is, so be it. We would rather have a regular number from the fountain pens and India ink of the Sophomores than this special spring oddity that the graduates have thrown together.

We will, though, pin a rose of Mr. Wheelwright's offering. But as for the others, it would seem that the further back they were graduated, the more they have been removed from The Stuff That Goes these days. The more the class numerals display their recency, the more do the contributions come near to being what the Lampoon now accepts. But even the best offerings could come much nearer to wit.

James Montgomery Flagg played a mean trick on Lampy. All he drew for it was his signature. The rest of his stuff was an editorial that looked funny in the Lampoon because it wasn't.