The Lampoon, of course, encourages such speculation: the editors want very badly for you to wonder what goes on behind their yellow and purple doors. Lampoon editors I have known share three obsessions: Yale secret society Skull and Bones, Harvard's own tight-lipped Porcellian Club, and notoriously secretive author Thomas Pynchon. (The organization claims that Tyrone Slothrop, a fictional Harvard graduate in Pynchon's Gravity Rainbow, was a Lampoon editor.) The Lampoon really, really wants secrecy to be the organization's hallmark. Only invited seniors, enterprising Crimson editors and the select few undergraduates who pass the Lampoon's rigorous comp have ever seen the castle's upstairs sanctum.

With the publication of The Harvard Lampoon's Guide to College Admissions, though, we at least have a clue what they did last summer. A team of nine writers under the direction of former Lampoon president Matthew C. Warburton '00 holed up in the castle to turn out this 165-page parody of college guides. Published Sept. 1 by Time-Warner to coincide with the release of the U.S. News rankings and the start of the college admissions game for thousands of the high school seniors, the book satirizes everything from writing admissions essays to picking a major.

First, it must be acknowledged that the guide is funny. Beginning on page five with a parody of the admissions test at the Dalton School for the Academically Gifted, the book is a witty and occasionally even incisive look at the admissions process. The Lampoon, in this book and in general, is at its funniest when its satire has the bite of social commentary; this is the case at a few points in the college book. The book pokes fun at the advantages for the rich in the admissions process and what it calls "the standardized testing racket" the parody SAT is probably the funniest part of the book (former Lampoon editor and former Crimson editor Michael Colton '97, co-author of Up Your Score: The Underground Guide to the SAT, is listed as a 'special contributor').

Sadly, though, the guide too often falls back on the staples of Lampoon humor we're used to: self-referential inside humor and masturbation jokes, and sometimes even a combination of the two (which may help us account for at least some of what goes on within the Lampoon's walls). For instance, page 78's entry for The Etten Family Home Schooling College named, of course, after 'Poonster Kevin Etten '00, who presumably wrote the section includes a category for 'onanism': 'From masturbating to masturbating with your parents in the next room to masturbating quickly when your parents go out for groceries, most EFHSC students masturbate roughly 3.8 times a day' Etc, etc. Each Lampoon editor seems to have been given his or her own allotment of self-referential and dirty jokes, and used them liberally.