Although Britain has enjoyed a long tradition of looking to its colleges for humor, the crossover from collegiate to professional humorist in America has for the most part been much less conspicuous. A notable exception, however, was a group of students at Harvard in the late 1960s who went on in 1970 to found the National Lampoon, which enjoyed two decades of circulation before effectively ceasing publication in April of 1992.

It is quite possible that the National Lampoon might never have come into existence but for the astonishing success of some undergraduate collaborations by Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney while they were on the staff of the venerable Harvard Lampoon, the college's century-old humor magazine: parodies of Time and Life, which went into national distribution and sold well, followed by a J. R. R. Tolkien spoof, Bored of the Rings, which ran to numerous printings after its...