"The Most Vulgar Thing11

The author of the letter signed "A Radcliffe Mother" seemed to be bursting with indignation. The current issue of the Lampoon, Harvard humor magazine, said the letter, was "simply the most vulgar thing I have ever seen." Cambridge police agreed: two days after the issue hit the newsstands the cops banned its sale. For the first time since 1935, when it printed a burlesque of William Faulkner called "Desire Below the Mason-Dixon Line" and the whole staff was obliged to resign, the Lampoon was in headline-size trouble.

The current issue, called the Pontoon and intended as a parody of Midwestern university humor magazines, was indeed vulgar; at week's end the county district attorney was considering whether to bring formal charges of obscenity against the editors or not. As the Poonsters sweated ,it out, they had two good reasons to feel the irony of their situation: 1) the cartoons that they suspected had caused all the trouble were reprints from other college magazines, which had traveled safely through the mails; 2) the letter signed "A Radcliffe Mother" had appeared in the Lampoon's old intramural rival, the Crimson, had been written as a gag by a Crimson editor.

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