The Lampoon's 'Life'

SO WHAT HAS the Lampoon done? It has published a periodical which includes a couple of decent jokes, a shelf full of bad ones carved out of overworked motifs, a bunch of color photographs taken by the same guys who take pictures for Life, and five pages of Life advertising plus a mail-in Life subscription card.

The winner is Life Magazine, which gets the promotional equivalent (as they say in the advertising office) of 53 issues this year instead of 52. The Lampoon, its people say, breaks even on this one. And everyone else loses.

The only page of this parody which elicited a sustained laugh from me wasn't supposed to: it was Life's first full-page ad, boasting a two-inch deep, white-on-red Life logo, topped by the words, "A good ribbing?" Down at the bottom, it says, "Let it never be said that Life couldn't appreciate a good ribbing. If that were true, we would never have taken this ad. But now that you've had a few laughs, it's only fair that you also have the opportunity to enjoy the real McCoy."

Out of fairness to the Lampoon (and because they did well by me in the matter of food and drink at the parody's coming-out party), it must be said that the Poonies did not write that ad, and were unhappy themselves to find it in their magazine.

For the parody's other failings, however, the dozen or so Poonies who worked on the issue since last spring can be held accountable.

If I put out a newspaper which looks like the New York Times in format, and sprinkle through every story such phrases as "the New York Times stinks" and "Anyone who thinks the Times is telling him the truth is blind," I have not created a very sophisticated parody of the Times, if I have created a parody at all.

But this is exactly the tactic to which the Lampoon has resorted. Some examples:

* "Is there not some anesthetizing cliche, some lulling bromide to placate the chickenbrain who shells out thirty-five cents that he can ill afford to buy this idiotic picture-book?"

* "Collated and analyzed by Life researchers fresh out of Bryn Mawr poetry seminars, these scattered sightings of UFO's..."

* "Well, far be it from Life Magazine to imply that you're a drivelling cretin with scarcely the mentality to spoon through the mush we feed you from week to week..."

I THOUGHT THE IDEA was to show what mush it was that Life fed its readers; the parody settles for announcing the menu in cold type.

The Lampoon, in fact, spoils its best effort in the issue with more of this overkill. The last page of Life, as you may or may not know, is entitled "Miscellany" and consists of a captioned photograph, usually of some cuddly animal in some clever pose. The Lampoon parodied it nicely--offering an anguished little girl, left hand over her eyes, right hand holding a gun pointing down at a dead white cat which lies in the street in its own blood. The whole is entitled "No Hard Felines." But, almost as if the Poonies felt this was too subtle a dig for its prospective readers (a subset of the readership of Life?, they talk in another part of the magazine about Life's "cute miscellany snapshot of somebody's noxious cocker spaniel wearing a lampshade on its head."

There are some good things which can be said of this parody. In layout, it is remarkably like Life, and its insipid color photographs of nature's wonders are a fine exaggeration of Life's tendencies in that direction. While not much of the copy is consistently funny, the essay on the mobile heart transplant team that plucks 'em while they're hot from accident victims whose eyes are closed is an excellent one.

But there is so much more that is bad: the hastily-done "End of the World" cover story, the Mad-magazine style letters to the editor, the tiresome use of such self-contained witticisms as "It all began in the beginning."

Life magazine may have shown it can take a ribbing. But it was not, as their proud ad states, a "good ribbing."