“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.
How things have changed, and for the so much better. If comedy is your career goal, the Harvard Lampoon is the best path to remaining in comedy well beyond your years in college. Colin Jost, B.J. Novak and Conan O’Brien are just a few of the many former Lampoon staffers still making people laugh for a living. Considering just a few television shows of note, the writers’ room for The Simpsons is dense with former Lampoon staffers, same with Family Guy, and same with HBO’s very-much missed Veep.
Which is the very happy point about economic growth. Growth is what unearths talents and jobs formerly suffocated by a lack of it.
Alongside the growing interconnectedness of workers and machines around the world, productivity has soared. It’s a reminder that human beings and machines don’t represent jobs taken, rather they’re an input. The more hands and machines connected, the more growth, and the more jobs that don’t feel like work.
When we’re working together, life’s necessities become foregone conclusions. Same with the world’s former awe-inspiring luxuries. To name but one former luxury item that is now common, it wasn’t too many decades ago that the site of someone walking down the street (usually in Beverly Hills, and eventually its equivalents around the U.S.) while talking on a wireless phone was the stuff of long pauses defined by shocked stares. Translated, if they had a wireless phone they were either rich, famous, or both.
The proliferation of former phones that are now pocket-sized supercomputers rates mention in a piece celebrating the Harvard Lampoon’s 150th birthday, along with its prominence as a pipeline to post-collegiate work attained in comedy. As production soars (economic growth), the range of ways that we can work and showcase our unique skills explodes.
Call it Tamny’s Law. It was pretentiously featured in my 2018 book The End of Work, which was more aptly titled The End of Laziness when submitted to the publisher: “Laziness decreases as prosperity increases, expanding the range of work options so that every person can do the work that most accentuates his individual talents.” The book that sadly went mostly unread argued that the “next” American economy after the “service economy” would be the “entertainment economy” as a growing number of people get to do what they’ve always loved doing for work.
It’s happening. While the Harvard Lampoon used to be where bright Harvard students went to “escape Harvard” (Michael Frith, Harvard 1963), now it’s where they go to get a job once out of Harvard. Sorry, but this is beautiful. And we’ve only scratched the surface.
As AIs and robots proliferate, “work” will transform for the much better. Work ethic and genius await today's “lazy and stupid" who are neither. In Harvard Lampoon’s Happy 150th we can see this certain truth.
