The Harvard Lampoon itself, which had a pretty stellar run in the '60s.
I became a pedant of the form. I did my graduate work in art history and particularly in the history of French satirical cartooning. And that made me aware of what a rich and resilient tradition this seemingly scabrous sacrilegious magazine still represented in French life.
The Lampoon started in 1970, and I began writing freelance for them around the end of 1971, and then all through '72. They hired me in '73, and I left early in '81. I did everything from low puns to being editor-in-chief.
I take Charb's point, but at some point has Charlie Hebdo been trying to have it both ways because some of what they do is not funny.
Charlie Hebdo was and is not The Onion or "The Daily Show." This is a different kind of satire. Might I put it this way - less politically correct.
I must have read every issue of 'Punch' published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour - that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like 'Three Men in a Boat.'
Charlie Hebdo mocked everyone. They mocked the left. They mocked the right. They mocked, above all, the extreme right, the extreme right of Le Pen's. If anything could identify their politics, they were kinds of anarchists.
Charlie Hebdo were the licensed anarchist clowns of the society.
I remember reading Dave Barry for the first time and being like oh my God I can't believe you can do this. Watching Mel Brooks and Monty Python and SNL and all that stuff really informed me as a writer and then at high school I started a satire magazine and the college like The Lampoon really introduced me to like you know a lot of very like-minded people who really wanted to like comedy was the center of their lives.
Lampoon ran out of steam in the early '80s, and wasn't able to reinvent itself because it ran out of talent. People who wanted to do this kind of stuff could suddenly make $100,000 in Hollywood right out of college.
