The Harvard Lampoon is an undergraduate humor organization founded in 1876 at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its erratically-produced magazine, The Harvard Lampoon, was originally modelled on the former British satirical periodical Punch, and has outlived it to become the world's longest-running humor magazine. The organization also produces occasional humor books (the best known being the 1969 J.R.R. Tolkien parody Bored of the Rings) and parodies of national magazines. Much of the organization's capital is provided by the licensing of the "Lampoon" name to National Lampoon, begun by Harvard Lampoon graduates in 1970.
Notable Harvard Lampoon alumni include John Reed, William Randolph Hearst, George Plimpton, Fred Gwynne, John Updike, Conan O'Brien and innumerable writers and producers for The Simpsons, Futurama, Late Night with David Letterman, Saturday Night Live, News Radio and many other television comedies.
The organization is housed a few blocks from Harvard Square in a small mock-Flemish castle with a copper statue of an ibis on the roof.
The Lampoon has a long-standing rivalry with Harvard's student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, which describes the Lampoon as a "semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization which used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine". A noted event in the history of the Lampoon–Crimson rivalry was the Crimson's 1953 theft of the Lampoon Castle's ibis and presentation of it as a gift to the government of the Soviet Union.
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