September / October 2007
Harvard's Laugh Track
The university is funny. No, really.
The university is funny. No, really.
It was 30 years ago this September that I first entered Harvard. So much has changed since then. The ivy is gone. The new president of Harvard is a woman. The old president is a busboy at Grendel’s.
But the most amazing change is that Harvard has become one of America’s leading producers of comedy writers. Among recent graduates, it is the number two career choice, sandwiched between “soulless money-grubbing hedge fund creep” and “heir.”
The Harvard of my youth was a very serious place. Back then, the funniest people to come out of the school were Robert Benchley, the guy who played Herman Munster, and Henry Kissinger. The only way to beef up this sad, sad list would be to use 02138’s trick of underlining random names. Suddenly, Groucho Marx, Mark Twain, Molière, Bullwinkle, and Chong, are all Harvard alumni. Jesus, now that’s an impressive roster.
When I graduated college in 1981, I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. As an English major, I had picked up so many employable skills: I could make a bong out of an apple. I could open a beer with a diploma. I’m sure there were more.
But I have always been able to find humor in all things, except the humor column of the New Yorker. And so, with a heart full of dreams and a suitcase full of books from Widener, I headed out to L.A. Los Angeles, I would later learn, is a Spanish term, meaning “Satan’s colon.”
In the eighties you could have counted the number of Harvard comedy writers on one hand. You can still do that today, but it has to be some freaky monster hand with hundreds of fingers. You should really have that looked at.
According to Wikipedia, Harvard alums dominate the staffs of The Daily Show, Letterman, and Saturday Night Live. Also, according to Wikipedia, Frank Sinatra killed John F. Kennedy, Celine Dion is a man, and Dick Cheney “is a tool, and he’s gay and he has no friends.”
I myself have spent the past 19 years working for The Simpsons; indeed half our writers are Harvard graduates. This is a natural fit, since The Simpsons and Harvard have so much in common. The Simpsons is America’s longest-running TV show; Harvard is its longest-running university. The Simpsons slaps its name on a lot of cheesy, overpriced merchandise; Harvard has the Coop. And the Kennedy School.
It’s been a treat watching jokes I’ve written for The Simpsons turn up in church sermons, in political debates, and on “Family Guy”. Now there are even universities teaching courses in The Simpsons. I think this is a very good sign. Of the apocalypse.
The perception of Harvard has changed so much since I was a freshman. Back in the seventies, Harvard Comedy was considered an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp or Fox News. Today, many people think that Harvard must be one hilarious place. You and I know better. Is Harvard funnier than it used to be? Well, on the list of funny places, I’d rank it somewhere between Fallujah and Tikrit. So, yes, it’s come way up.
MIKE REISS IS A PRODUCER AND WRITER OF THE SIMPSONS.
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