The Joker's Motley Garb

A long time ago the editors of the Lampoon ruled out the exploitation of sex as a source of humor. In so doing, they finessed the happiest of human misadventures, and were faced with the problem of a substitute.

The current issue of Lampy provides the Bow Street answer to libidinous impulses--an existentialist sense of humor. Themes in "The Battle of Hastings Memorial Issue" range from assassination and divorce to nightmare and heart attack.

John C. M. Brust, the Ibis, leads the parade with a dialect behind-the-scenes of recent events in Little Rock. His story involves a trio of Arkansas king-makers who send their boy to the State House, and then are forced to shoot him through the head when he integrates the schools. "Like I said," boasts the narrator, "I'm more broadminded than most, but, hell, I guess you gotta keep niggers in their place."

And the sadistic tone is set. In another story Mrs. Perrington, a heavy woman with an asthmatic nose, falls dead of a heart attack. "You can tell she's dead because her nose has stopped bleeding."

W.A. Hawkins wanders through a bargain basement jungle and holds forth with humorless impunity against the bourgeois idiom and the "rude, smelly shoppers."

In quick succession, E.C. Tarlov renders a mixer romance with unique sensitivity, the Jester pummels the Crimson with sledge-hammer subtlety, and J.D. Stanley relieves the long gray columns of tedium with spasmodic cartoons.

There is a scattering of light verse by E.S. Stewart, who hails Leonard Bernstein as Lampy's hero of the month, and then masticates Cole Porter's All of You:

I'm hot to melt the ice of you

And lick the sugar and spice of you,

And I'd think it very nice of you

To let me chew a slice of you.

Stewart also contributes the only creative work of the issue, a sort of opium illusion called "A Mango For Emelina." Magnolia-mashed Colonel Ashcroft ("a memento of a dead nation's long ago Armageddon") stalks to a garden rendezvous with his boyhood love, Emelina. As he bends to kiss her:

"... the green eyes opened wide and glowed green, and her mouth spread and uttered a sound--not a word, but a guttural hissing--and he saw that she had not teeth. The glistening lips came to meet his and attached themselves to him wih a suction stronger than death, and her shawl dropped, revealing no arms, but a long, coiled, viscous body, the tubular shape of a tapeworm, eagerly welcoming him into its embrace."

All of which is very embarrassing to the news-stand reader looking for a chuckle of escape between the New York Times and the radio broadcast. This is Lampy's comedy ethic--to laugh at the aberrations of modern man.

In such a somber time the mission is dubious. Stewart's morass of words and symbols might have helped the Advocate more than the Lampoon. Brust's unhappy tale of the decadent South will manage to offend all of Harvard's geographical distribution who chance to read it. And Hawkins' pilgrimage through the bargain basement universe will confirm Bostonian suspicions that Harvard Yard should be a separate state.

The days of yore, when sacred cows were sizzled on their sticks, are gone and dead. The Lampoon hesitates between offensive iconoclasm and dull despair. If the reader is burdened with the journal's sadism, think of the staff which produces it. as the poet observed upon emerging from the Game Cock one November evening in the 18th century.

The saddest jokes are those that wear

The joker's motley garb.