“In college, you had certain career paths. There was law, medicine, that kind of thing. You didn’t get on the Lampoon in order to have a career in comedy because there were no careers in comedy.” That’s how Michael Arlen, Harvard class of 1952, described career options for himself and other past writers at the Harvard Lampoon, the undergrad comedy publication that Arlen was a part of.
While the Lampoon’s elite members have produced brilliantly for 150 years, for a majority of those 150 years comedy wasn’t a career path. Which means comedy writing is what Harvard Lampoon writers did in the seemingly carefree years of college before being mugged by a post-collegiate reality that involved “real jobs” in law, medicine, Wall Street for certain, along with “business” of other stripes.
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