Reader Cullum Rogers wrote to me recently to let me know about a project he’s been working on for about a year: A website devoted to magazine parodies called, straightforwardly enough, Magazine Parody. It doesn’t get much better or nerdier than this. Magazine parodies have been around for a long time—200 years, according to Rogers. The Harvard Lampoon famously has been doing them since the 1870s. National Lampoon did its share, too, and Rogers most recent posts include an exhaustive A-Z index and an overview dividing them into four types: inventions, genre spoofs, mutations and plain ol’ parodies. The site goes way beyond the Lampoon, but I’m sure many readers of this site will happily lose themselves in it the way I did.
I’ve since done a post on a very obscure NatLamp item from the mid-’70s; a parody of a Publishers Clearing House-type sweepstakes mailing. Most of it never appeared in the magazine.— VCR
Nice! Since I was a subscriber at the time, I don’t think I ever saw it. I do recall that their subscription materials were usually funny. I have a copy of a renewal notice written like a ransom note:
“You have ignored our previous two messages. We told you that your Lampoon would swim with the fishes if you didn’t renew your subscription.” etc.
Anyway, cool. Thanks for letting me know.