Harvard alumn range from dedicated, but humorless scholarship students to snooty rich kids like the Winklevoss twins, who were actually bigger douchebags in real life than The Social Network portrayed them as.

Yeah, my uncle taught at Harvard and my brother is a Yale alum but it always seemed to me that the creators of Animal House were just writing out their fantasies of going to a school like mine instead.

Way back I used to work at Harvard for a couple of years. If anything, the snobby ivy league preppie stereotype you see in movies is understated. Any non-rich kid there on a scholarship came off as a home schooled social invalid. Any inbetween of the two extremes was fairly rare.

Imagine an entire school and local bar scene of Niedermeyers. A little less outright sneering and scenery chewing, and a little more banal.

Madison had that too for sure. The local hang was the Kollege Klub.. yeah they called it that in the mid 2000s and I'm willing to bet that it's still there. You can imagine what the affectionate name for the KK was. I worked the dishpit my freshman year and it was pretty much like Animal House but from a service industry point of view. I wanted to drop out so much but I moved off campus and then everything was great.

which leads me to my job which pays 11.25 an hour.. oh wellz

I read a lot of old National Lampoon when I worked at a record store (I'd say at least half of the issues from 1970-73) and they were great. By the 80s they weren't.

As far as I can tell, Animal House and Vacation were flukes, because I can't think of another movie with their name on it that's watchable.

Actually, I liked Electric Apricot quite a bit (much to my surprise) but that doesn't really count since they only picked it up after it was completely finished and having distribution problems.

Oh, and I worked in Harvard Square for years at various places, as well as 7 years for a late 90s dot com startup owned by Harvard alums and I can confirm that, with a tiny handful of exceptions, the characterizations above are accurate.


Brown is the same way, although their faculty are generally worse.


A friend of mine around 2000 worked at a sex shop and sold a 0 full male chastity belt to a tenured Harvard professor between classes, who wore it out under his clothes to his next class.

National Lampoon definitely sucks. Counterpoint: most of the early Simpsons writing staff came from Harvard. Okay, maybe not most, but there was a huge presence.

Heh.. I wrote most of my papers in college after work in a fuckshop my housemate worked at because the one library that was open 24 hours was really loud; it was treated more like a student union and nobody seemed to care. And this was in the early days of wifi and the store picked up really good wifi from an experimental free node. Plus it was quiet! Just silent fucktapes in the background and a few customers. But it was fun to run into my professors who didn't think their students might be behind the counter at 3 in the morning. Nothing as interesting as a chastity belt, mostly just toys and movies but I'd get looks from them in class the next day.. maybe that's why I got such good grades!

Only fucked up story was when the comp lit department was basically shut down because the head of the dept was caught in a sting involving AIM messages to a then-13-year-old boy. A cop took over his account and set up a sting in a subway sandwich's parking lot outside of Madison. It was a huge scandal and I almost wasn't able to graduate at all. And my parents wonder why I don't go back to graduate school!

(then again if I was grading this I'd probably give it a C at best; sandwiches cannot possess parking lots). :)

Hey egghead, sing Fair Harvard

I don't think Harvard Lampoon has any real affiliation with National Lampoon. I don't know much about Harvard Lampoon, but it's thanks to them that I met James Brown so I can't really hate.

Well, "Met" might be too strong but I nearly bumped into him, said "Oh hi there James Brown!" and then left fast while he was still confused because that just seemed like the best way to meet James Brown.

Foto Funnies were pretty good for most of the 70s. The 1973 "Death" issue lived up to the quality of its cover if I remember.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c1/Natlamp73.jpg
In general the first three or four years (at most) the covers were great and the content ranged from passable to excellent, just like the Onion. Just like nearly everything that came out of the 60s, it was a shameful, hollow shell of itself by the end of the Carter administration.

I have it on VERY good authority that grade inflation is so bad at Harvard that at least one professor gives out a second, unofficial "real" grade so students can actually have a fair assessment of their performance and learn from their mistakes. A real C is equivalent to an official A-.

I forgot to add the worst thing about Harvard: they pretty much own the entirety of central Cambridge and holy fuck is their real estate office evil. They were constantly buying up and closing down apartment buildings to convert into more dorm while evicting the tenants, even getting people to spy on any tenant efforts to take petitions to the city government. Not that it would have mattered, no way is the city going to dare piss off Harvard.

I can only imagine how much worse they've gotten today.

Only good reunion movie I can recall is Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion. I unapologetically love that movie. My 15 year high school reunion is coming up, if they have those, but I got transferred to 3 high schools because I played the Bassoon and arts funding was really weak in the 90s. I just wanna get drunk and tell this one girl how much of a crush I had on her is all.

You'll be sorry.

It's certainly dumb, but II'm finding it to be sort of pleasant, just the thing for turning off my brain at night. By the way, did anyone mention that John Hughes wrote it?