Indeed I did! That came at the end of more than 15 years of thinking about Lampoon, which I probably shouldn’t have been thinking about at all. I was born in 1969—The Onion is my generation’s magazine, with original writers all around my age. But all print humor since 1970 is in conversation with The National Lampoon—The Onion, SPY, of course Bystander itself.
Thanks for reading The American Bystander's Viral Load! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
My mother had a Lampoon subscription when I was a boy—I remember this issue, because we were a Stevie-worshipping household, and this is an excellently art-directed cover. But Mom hid her issues when she discovered I was getting the sex jokes. This of course was part of the appeal—like Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, I didn’t have much of a latency period—but Lampoon’s hold on me was also rooted in how it constantly referenced Boomer history and culture. I grew up with a strong sense that something quite great and important had happened, but I’d just missed it.
