"National Lampoon's Animal House," directed by John Landis, is set in a college called Faber in 1962. But it is not by backdating comedy that one gets away with bad comedy. This comic-book frat-house farce goes WHAM! EECH!! at the expense of a system that self-evidently fosters invaluable intelligences. The picture gives us much facetiousness about a fat undergraduate who steals food (ZOWIE!!) and a professor who apologizes because "Paradise Lost" is a long read (SPLAT!!!!)…. One's ribs are nudged until they ache. The witty hard truths about American college education in the early sixties scarcely inhere in guffaws about beer-drinking and about rather Germanic pranks and about the taking of "diet pills" during exams. Some of us—a lot of us—were there at the time, and the pith of any good lampooning would surely lie in showing the straits of a privileged class of young people with...