The Lampoon's
office is a castle settled between two streets in
Cambridge. The
castle is an architectural
oddity, made with a
hodgepodge of materials deriving from all parts of the
globe. Its
furniture was built inside and is too large to be removed. Its tables are so large that people
dance atop them at Lampoon parties. On top of the castle, there is a metal
ibis.
The Lampoon has an ongoing rivalry with the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's daily newspaper. (That rivalry is the reason the furniture is unremovable and the ibis is now welded down.) At the height of the cold war, the Crimson stole the ibis and gave it to the Soviet Union's Ambassador to the United States as a "gift from the students of America." The Lampoon was forced to make several calls to the State Department before an unhappy diplomat was sent to the Soviets to ask for its return.
For its part, the Lampoon once erected barbed wire around its perimeter and announced that it had seceded from the United States and would no longer pay taxes or abide by its laws. Again the State Department was involved when a representative was sent to inform the Lampoon that it would not, in fact, be allowed to secede.
The Lampoon funds its activities largely through royalties from National Lampoon movies and donations from alumni.