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.