The National Lampoon began in 1970 as an offshoot of the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine. Its heyday was the 1970s, when the magazine regularly skewered pop culture, the counterculture and politics with recklessness. The magazine also spun off an off-Broadway hit ("Lemmings"), a series of popular record albums and a line of motion pictures, most famously "Animal House" in 1978.
