<p>Ah. The good old days of the Lampoon/Crimson rivalry. Unfortunately, it’s actually rather tame these days. The best thing the lampoon came up with when I was there were prank emails. </p>
<p>The lore of the good old days is quite incredible. Everything from stealing the Lampoon ibis and presenting it to the Soviets to the theft of The Crimson president’s chair to the kidnapping of lampoon president John Updike…etc</p>
<p>I just stumbled on this! Sounded like crazy (but fun) times indeed! :D</p>
<p>(The New Yorker)</p>
<p>
Indeed, the whole debacle has a tone of collegial prankishness turned sour. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that Jeff Zucker and Conan O’Brien really were college rivals during their Harvard years. In the mid nineteen-eighties, Zucker was president of the Harvard Crimson and O’Brien was president of the Lampoon, both publications with long-standing historic rivalries. In a 2001 Talk story, Tad Friend wrote about how these two very different men clashed as undergrads—Zucker even going so far as to call the police on O’Brien after one incident:</p>
<p>** Early one morning fifteen years ago, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the entire press run of the Harvard Crimson disappeared from the front hall of the newspaper’s offices. Jeff Zucker was the president of the paper at the time, and he vividly remembers his reaction: “I was ****ed. I knew it was Conan who had stolen it, of course. So I called the police.”**</p>
<p>Friend goes on to detail some of the other pranks the Lampoon pulled on the Crimson during that period:</p>
<p>** Lampoon editors stole the Crimson’s prized collection of caricatures of its past presidents and mailed them–for reasons too obscure to go into here–to Duluth, Minnesota. They disabled the Crimson’s phones. They published a number of wounding Crimson parodies and an issue of the Lampoon that included a fake phone-sex ad with Zucker’s dorm-room phone number. Zucker did not find any of this particularly hilarious. **</p>
<p>In the piece, Friend asked O’Brien, then host of “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” how he felt about the rivalry fifteen years later:</p>
<pre><code>“I occasionally stand outside the ‘Today Show’ window and press my face against the glass,” O’Brien said, “Jeff scowls at me and calls the police. It’s still pretty much the same pattern: the coyote and the sheepdog.”
<p>Read more: [Back</a> Issues: Late-Night Pranks: Back Issues : The New Yorker](<a href=“Back Issues: Late-Night Pranks | The New Yorker ”>Back Issues: Late-Night Pranks | The New Yorker )
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<p>My Harvard interviewer was Conan’s classmate :D</p>
<p>Crimson - Lampoon rivalry still goes on… albeit no ibis-level pranks in recent years (I’m very doubtful that one will ever be topped).</p>