– Jennifer Garner wouldn't let husband Ben Affleck direct an episode of Homeland, so he made Argo instead.

– NBC has moved this week's 30 Rock to tonight, which your DVRs are NOT prepared for! So go get them ready.

– And in La La Land, Kourtney Kardashian and Patrick Bateman Scott Disick are planning a televised engagement and wedding. Hey, if it worked for Kim ... (the marketing of your wedding for big $$, not the actual marriage, of course.)

Letterman and Fallon: Braving the storm (NBC, CBS)

The only problem? Neither Jimmy Fallon nor David Letterman had a live audience--a first, in both their histories--to laugh at their jokes. But what could have turned into that creepy David Lynch episode of Louie was actually an amazing bit of performance art as the two jokesters performed to the dead silence of a mostly-empty room. *Yanks collar* "Tough crowd!"

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (with Seth Meyers and Robert Zemeckis as guests):

The Late Show with David Letterman (with Denzel Washington):
http://youtu.be/Mq2UDYVjz8Y
http://youtu.be/8NPiYyssX7Y
http://youtu.be/Hab8YTGWOhg
http://youtu.be/AWRRSX6ihTg

Is it kind of weird that both shows were promoting the movie Flight? That movie's PR machine just won't quit!

"I get energized when I'm campaigning," said Ms. Obama. "Touching people, talking to people, it gets me focused on what we're doing and why we're doing it."

After Jodi Kantor's book The Obamas, released this year, alleged that Michelle Obama had an aversion to campaigning, but Ms. Obama has been a focused media representative of the campaign so far this campaign season, appearing on both The Late Show and Jay Leno's Tonight Show, The Daily Show, CBS This Morning, The Ellen DeGeneres Show. In the near future, she will appear on Rachael Ray's and Dr. Mehmet Oz's daytime shows.

"You know, we've been here almost two years, done five hundred speeches probably, never happened before, right?" Mr. Axelrod told Mr. Letterman. "And I can only think of one thing: Witchcraft."

Updates here, video below:

Earlier: Video: President Obama's Podium Breaks at Fortune Summit

Outside the fortified walls of the Ed Sullivan Theater, a full moon hung in the sky. Mr. Letterman must have been tired. For the past several weeks, not only had he been pushing back, he’d been putting his back into it, straining against an apparent outbreak of villainy. Along the way, he had helped concoct a secret sting operation against an alleged blackmailer. He had publicly confessed to having sexual relationships with several of his employees at The Late Show. He had apologized for indulging his own animal impulses, and had repeatedly shown a video clip of a monkey sneezing.

“It’s fall here in New York City,” said Mr. Letterman. “I spent the whole weekend, raking my hate mail.”

It was time to perform an earnest apology. “My wife, Regina, she has been horribly hurt by my behavior,” he said. “When something happens like that, if you hurt a person, and it’s your responsibility, you try and fix it.”

The audience applauded.

Life was cyclical, Mr. Letterman had learned. Decades earlier, he had moved to Los Angeles with his first wife, Michelle, to try and make it in comedy. His career took off, and his marriage fell apart. As it turned out, comedy clubs put Mr. Letterman in too close proximity with too many beach girls from San Diego State.

“It was embarrassing and superficial,” Mr. Letterman later said of his behavior, according to The Late Shift, by Bill Carter. “It was just me being a dork: Hey, young girls!”

And, now, here we were again. This time around, just to spice things up, life, that bitch, had given things a new twist—namely, the ominous arrival of a man named Joe Halderman with a big ego, a quick temper and a graying goatee, who came armed with photographs, emails and (in a retro plot twist Jane Austen would approve of) diary entries allegedly detailing Mr. Letterman’s furtive indulgences. “The whole thing is surreal,” said Mr. Letterman on the Late Show. “Normally when I’m shaken down for money, it’s my relatives.”

HOW HAD MR. Letterman, our late-night daddy, gotten entangled with this bozo?

Men often meet each other through their hobbies. Play street hockey long enough, and eventually you’ll meet every would-be puck-head on the Lower East Side. David Letterman and Joe Halderman shared many things. They both rose from obscurity to the top of their fields. They both collected paychecks from CBS. They both spent weekends gorging on the fruits of Connecticut. But most importantly, they both shared a pastime—namely, the periodic bedding down of co-workers, colleagues and subordinates.

Mr. Halderman’s first wife was a coworker. According to sources at CBS, so was his second. He was known among current and former colleagues at CBS as a relentless flirt. “Ironically, given his blackmail threat to Letterman,” the Daily Beast recently reported, “Halderman carried on extramarital romances both in the office and on the road, colleagues say, and didn’t do much to hide them.”

Mr. Letterman, for his part, was no stranger to conspicuous interoffice affairs. For roughly a decade, ending in the 80s, Mr. Letterman dated Merrill Markoe, who was then head writer on his show. Earlier this year, Mr. Letterman married his longtime partner, Regina Lasko, a former staff member. On Friday afternoon, following Mr. Letterman’s initial revelations, Ms. Markoe wrote on her blog that “this is a very emotional moment for me because Dave promised me many times that I was the only woman he would ever cheat on.” Later, she responded to comments from her readers with a toast to them: “May none of you ever wake up one morning to find your name and photo included in a montage full of interns and personal assistants.”

There are currently no female writers on staff at The Late Show. But almost overnight, any woman who had ever worked for Mr. Letterman was cast into the game of did she or didn’t she. On Friday morning, one of Mr. Letterman’s former assistants promptly jumped on Facebook and updated her status: Jennifer “swears she only fetched coffee.”

The Late Show and 48 Hours Mystery, where Mr. Halderman worked as a producer, occupy separate and distinct worlds within CBS. What they have had in common over the years is a steady trickle of young, fresh bodies, interns and pages, who occasionally pass between the two TV shows, looking for a good place to start a career. Eventually, Mr. Letterman and Mr. Halderman’s devotion to water-cooler skirt-chasing led them to the same woman.

Mr. Letterman discovered Stephanie Birkitt first. He plucked her out of the post-collegiate hordes and put her on TV (a nice perk, which, in addition to the modicum of fame, comes with a paycheck for each appearance). An affair blossomed.

At some point, during her early career explorations, Ms. Birkitt also did a stint working with 48 Hours correspondent Erin Moriarty, who at the time regularly teamed up with Mr. Halderman. Introductions were made. And a second office romance eventually kindled.

Thus began a TV love triangle worthy of Melrose Place.

Within 24 hours of Mr. Letterman’s first, on-air confession, on Thursday, Oct. 1, the Internet was awash in YouTube clips of Ms. Birkitt performing bit routines on The Late Show. In the most memorable one, Mr. Letterman goads his lithe blond friend into making fun of the dancing style of her former boyfriend—some guy she had apparently dated for a couple years as an undergraduate at Wake Forest University. While Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra played a Rod Stewart tune, Ms. Birkitt, wearing a powder blue shirt and jeans, performed a dippy-looking dance, and Mr. Letterman chortled. It was a recurring routine, which tickled Mr. Letterman every time. “I love thinking about the boyfriend being steamed,” said Mr. Letterman, smiling. The segment was called “Would You like to Eat a Sandwich in Dave’s office?”

WHAT ELSE WAS Dave feasting on backstage in the hushed solitude of his private office?

If the question haunted Mr. Halderman in recent months, he could be forgiven. After ostensibly breaking it off with Mr. Letterman a few years ago, Ms. Birkitt had started dating Mr. Halderman, and they had eventually moved in together. Not long ago, however, the relationship had begun to dissolve. According to various press accounts, it was at this point that Mr. Halderman learned of Ms. Birkitt’s past affair with Mr. Letterman. Was it possible that Mr. Letterman and Ms. Birkitt were still romantically involved?

Such is the plight of a jealous lover. The imagination wanders, the stomach turns, the blood rises. And there, anytime the TV was on, was Mr. Letterman, laughing. “People commit crimes over sex, money and religion,” Jonathan Alpert, a New York–based psychotherapist, recently told The Observer. “A lot of the time, it’s irrational.”

Mr. Halderman, by all accounts, was facing money problems in addition to his romantic woes. He owed roughly $6,000 a month in child-support payments to his ex-wife, and held a series of mortgages. According to the Associated Press, he was making somewhere around $214,000 a year from the network—the same network that was enriching Mr. Letterman to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year for telling jokes from the safety of a studio. What did that say about our society? Was that fair? Mr. Halderman had risked his own life in war zones for CBS countless times, and seen close colleagues injured. And for what?

He had won a bunch of Emmys. He had written and directed a critically acclaimed documentary for Showtime, called Three Days in September, about Chechen rebels occupying a school full of hostages. He’d earned the respect of his news division. And yet. Who had ever heard of Joe Halderman? One of the casual injustices of television news is that the people who do the most work on breaking stories often get the least amount of public credit. “I don’t think a lot of people go into foreign news producing to attract women,” Marisa Guthrie of Broadcasting & Cable recently observed on MSNBC’s Countdown.

And what about those who do?

“I think being the boy Friday to an anchor star can be kind of castrating,” she added.

The love triangle gone horribly awry is a reliable staple of 48 Hours Mystery, the show Mr. Halderman has worked on for the past several years. As any casual observer of the series would know, there are many things that can make a love triangle combust, that can set one male primate against another in an ugly battle for domination. Feelings of impotence, and a belief that your lover’s other lover is feeling superior to you, pretty much spell trouble.

At some point, Mr. Halderman must have taken measure of Mr. Letterman. Take away the camera, and who the hell was this guy, really? An overpaid dude who put too much value on his own privacy?

Things exploded.

IN THE AFTERMATH of Mr. Halderman’s arrest on Thursday, Oct. 1, on charges of attempted grand larceny, suddenly everyone at CBS News was a wannabe 48 Hours producer—sorting through the facts of the case, formulating possible motives, weighing conflicting evidence and marveling at the sheer madness of the human condition. Everyone had a theory about the alleged crime.

One popular belief was that the same sense of confidence and invincibility that made Mr. Halderman a great war producer had also allowed him to try and allegedly blackmail the late-night star of his own network, despite the seemingly horrendous odds of pulling off such a crime.

Here and there, people talked of the problematic archetypes of the business. One source who has worked at all three network news divisions said that the cocky, swashbuckling hard-news producer who is a genius out in the field and something of a menace back in the office is a common type in TV news. Daring bravado can be a huge asset in a war zone and a major headache when applied to a less volatile atmosphere. Like, say, an office Christmas party. The professional upside tends to justify whatever messes get created along the way.

“Network news divisions have a high tolerance for assholes,” said the source. “They can be incredibly useful. But also creepy. And everyone knows exactly who they are.”

In years past, the demand was particularly strong at the networks for gung-ho, fearless producers to work in the overseas bureaus. Who better to drop into a war zone on a moment’s notice? But as news budgets have diminished and overseas bureaus have atrophied, more and more of the cowboys have been coming home from the front. Give them too much downtime, goes the theory, and problems inevitably materialize. Golf, which Mr. Halderman enjoyed playing, is an imperfect sedative.

There was also a lot of chatter among the CBS diaspora about the fake check. On Sept. 30, a lawyer for Mr. Letterman, working in conjunction with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, met with Mr. Halderman and handed over a fake check for $2 million—a check that Mr. Halderman promptly deposited in his bank account. Afterward, he was arrested. Who ever heard of someone conducting blackmail by check?

The district attorney’s office was of little help in clearing up the mystery. Whose idea was the fake check? A spokesperson for the DA’s office declined to comment to The Observer. Had the DA’s office ever issued a fake check to a suspect in the past? Again, no comment.

Mr. Halderman’s lawyer was similarly opaque. On Monday morning, Gerald Shargel appeared on NBC’s Today, where he indicated their legal strategy would be to put Mr. Letterman’s behavior under the microscope. “It’s not only the motive, intent and conduct of Joe Halderman, it’s the motive, intent and conduct of David Letterman,” said Mr. Shargel. “I look forward to cross-examining David Letterman.

“David Letterman didn’t give his side of the story,” he added. “David Letterman gave what he wanted the public to know. … He’s a master at manipulating audiences. That’s what he does for a living.”

So what was Mr. Halderman’s version of the events? Was it possible that Mr. Letterman’s affair with Ms. Birkitt had continued through her relationship with Mr. Halderman (as the New York Post reported on the morning of Oct. 6)? Was it possible that Mr. Halderman had found out about the affair and confronted Mr. Letterman? Was it possible that Mr. Letterman had led Mr. Halderman to water? During his media blitz, Mr. Shargel, the lawyer, played coy. He offered few details. His protestations of innocence seemed foggy at best.

In the meantime, Mr. Halderman was out on bail, ducking the ravenous media. And likewise, Mr. Letterman was back in the Ed Sullivan Theater, defending his staff from the vulturous press. On Monday night’s show, Mr. Letterman said that it was the newspaper and radio and television reporters who were now “pounding his staff”—not him. Those days, he suggested, were behind him.

“Right now,” said Mr. Letterman, “I’d give anything to be hiking on the Appalachian Trail.”

fgillette@observer.com

Monday: The Late Show With David Letterman

All eyes will be on the big guy tonight, the first show since Dave Letterman’s announcement last Thursday sent the world into a weird whipped up frenzy (Friday night’s show, with Larry David, was taped before the scandal broke). Call us crazy, but as far as what Mr. Letterman does in his private life, who cares? We’re actually more impressed at how badass he was while handling being extorted: straight to the authorities, a wire-tap, a phony check, and then airing his dirty laundry in front of his millions of viewers. Do not mess with the Letterman. Tonight’s guest is old friend Steve Martin, who will no doubt bring some dignified wit and silver fox charm to the whole shebang. We heart you, Dave! [CBS, 11:35 p.m.]

Tuesday:  Hannah and her Sisters

People love to talk about Annie Hall and Manhattan as the crème de la crème of Woody Allen films, but for our money 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters deserves to be uttered in the same breath. This movie tells the hilarious and often heartbreaking tangled up tale of three sisters (Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest—could there be better casting?) and a wonderful Michael Caine as a befuddled man in the midst of romantic turmoil. Mr. Caine and Ms. Wiest both won Oscars for their work, but everyone is terrific. Keep an eye out for young turns by Carrie Fisher, Daniel Stern, Richard Jenkins, Lewis Black, John Turturro, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus—and for some extra creep factor, a very young Soon-Yi Previn appears as an extra at Thanksgiving dinner. We know, ick! But, trust us, it’s a movie that's as poignant now as it was over two decades ago. Wow, we’re old.  [IFC, 3:35 a.m.]

Wednesday: Role Models

Role Models is always sort of unfairly lumped in with Apatow-factory releases like Pineapple Express or Forgetting Sarah Marshall (though we totally get why, not the least of which is Apatow regular Paul Rudd, who co-stars here with Sean William “Stifler” Scott and co-wrote the script). But this film, directed by David Wain—about two young men sentenced to 150 hours mentoring troubled kids—is actually quite different those boys-will-be-boys yukfests. It secretly has a very soft underbelly, and no matter how funny a movie it is (it is!), it’s also very touching, too. Look for Glee’s Jane Lynch to steal just about every scene she’s in. [Cinemax, 10 p.m.]

Thursday: Private Practice

Okay, we’re coming out of the closet of shame on this: We totally love Private Practice! And secretly, this little spin-off from Grey’s Anatomy, has been kicking its big sister’s ass when it comes to over-the-top soap opera melodrama (as Grey’s watchers know, this is no easy feat). Take the cliffhanger that started this season off: Violet (Amy Brenneman), hugely pregnant and not knowing if the father of her baby was hottie Tim Daly or sweet and awkward Brian Benben, was attacked by a crazy patient who drugged her and cut open her belly and stole the baby! Last week, we tied up those loose ends (phew), but tonight’s episode will revolve around Violet’s (totally understandable) PTSD.  [ABC, 10 p.m.]

Friday: Ghost

Let's all raise a glass and toast the late, great Patrick Swayze. While we may personally be more of a Point Break/Roadhouse/Outsiders-Swayze fan, there is no denying all that hoopla when he starred opposite Demi Moore and her oh-so-cute haircut in 1990’s Ghost. Sure, it’s hard to imagine a movie being green-lighted today that would have Whoopi Goldberg playing a psychic and conduit for a make-out session with another lady, and as New Yorkers, that loft Demi Moore likes to weep in has us distracted trying to calculate how much rent has gone up in the last 19 years, but whatever. Special shout-out to Hollywood scion Tony Goldwyn, who does one hell of a cameo as sweaty, twitchy bad best friend Carl. Limbo looks bad! Hell looks worse! And heaven apparently has tons of tiny white people-lights waiting for you (ack!). [WE, 8 p.m.]

In the last year, Anna Wintour, the typically private Vogue editor, has submitted to a 60 Minutes interview; given a talk at the 92nd Street Y about her charity work; courted White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers at Monkey Bar and boldly announced at a CFDA town hall meeting that she has friends in the White House. Just last week, Ms. Wintour devoted a few minutes to each reporter who had lined up along the red carpet at the premiere of The September Issue, a documentary by R. J. Cutler about her magazine, smiling and gracefully answering questions.

It is unclear whether Ms. Wintour is trying to soften her image, solidify her legacy or please boss Si Newhouse with this mountain of publicity—or all three—but whatever the reason, it came to an apex last night on CBS's The Late Show, on which she appeared to promote the documentary.

Despite reports that she was strongly advised to leave her sunglasses at home, the Vogue editor entered the stage to Madonna’s  "Vogue" in large black shades, a black-and-white floral, knee-length dress and a heavy necklace of yellow gems. She took the glasses off once she got to her seat. She was wearing heavy blush, dark eye makeup and deep pink lipstick.

“I see you have very interesting socks on,” she told host David Letterman, who wore a suit that was short enough to reveal white socks and black loafers. “There is a designer you should look into called Thom Browne. He cuts pants like really short so you can focus entirely on the socks.”

“Really?” asked Mr. Letterman. Ms. Wintour appeared serious, though Mr. Letterman seemed to think, understandably, that she was toying with him.“Yes,” she replied.

Ms. Wintour sat perched right on the end of her seat, legs crossed and hands neatly clasped. Her tense, forward posture said she was nervous, but for each question Mr. Letterman asked, she replied with quick, prepared answers that were funny and self-deprecating. She laughed at Mr. Letterman’s jokes and she laughed at herself. She laughed even when the comedian’s probing seemed to irk her.

He asked about her reputation. “I read in The New York Times this week that I’m an ice queen, a Sun King, I’m an alien fleeing from District 9 and I’m a dominatrix,” Ms. Wintour said. “So I reckon that makes me lukewarm royalty with a whip from outer space, what do you think?”

“Good gig!” Mr. Letterman replied.

He asked about The Devil Wears Prada, which was met with a slight eye roll. “Well, I seem to remember that the movie was fiction and we really like fiction at Vogue.”

“Right, right,” said the comedian. “Have you ever put anybody in a headlock?”

The lips parted and she shook a bit with laughter. “Maybe you?”  

Mr. Letterman asked if it took money to be fashionable. Ms. Wintour used the opportunity to plug the Fashion’s Night Out shopping event on Sept. 10. But could someone be fashionable on a budget of, say, $20? Mr. Letterman asked. “Well, you can buy lipstick!”

The host gave up and decided to focus on the film. He said he was impressed that in the documentary, certain spreads were being re-shot less than a week before the issue went to press. Is this typical? he asked.

“Absolutely,” Ms. Wintour. replied. “As it is for a TV show. I mean, you guys didn’t even call me till Friday!”

“Wow. It takes you three days to get ready? Big deal!”

Ms. Wintour laughed at this, too, even though her smile went tight and not quite as toothy.

Mr. Letterman was also surprised that the main characters in the film were his contemporaries. “Vogue is not only run by senior citizens,” joked Ms. Wintour, essentially admitting her age (59). “We have a lot of younger people working at the magazine but the director in his wisdom chose to focus on the more mature people working there.”

Mr. Letterman’s next guest was Yankee first baseman Mark Teixeira . Before Ms. Wintour left the stage, Mr. Letterman said that they would hit some balls. “Oh, we are?” she said, and laughed some more. But she didn’t stick around.  

Fans of the actual Unknown Comic, that groany staple of Chuck Barris’ Gong Show, were probably disappointed upon seeing the 6-foot-4, ginger-topped host. (That’s what he looks like under the brown bag?) But at the Cambridge, Mass., headquarters of The Harvard Lampoon, Mr. O’Brien was anything but unknown.

Mr. O’Brien (class of ’85), wrote pieces for the magazine like “Conflict: The Sitcom” and a series of comic strips featuring Abe Lincoln. He served as president of the organization twice (just like Robert Benchley, ’12). In 1984, Mr. O’Brien and a few accomplices (one dressed as the Penguin) stole Burt Ward’s Robin costume from the original Batman series. After graduating, he went on to write for Saturday Night Live, including a skit called “Nude Beach” in which the word “penis” was spoken over three dozen times. He then jumped to The Simpsons, where he wrote “Marge vs. the Monorail,” an episode that managed to incorporate a parody of The Music Man and a cameo from Leonard Nimoy.

A legend!

Through the door of that hallowed institution’s Mount Auburn Street Castle—a structure invariably dfescribed as “faux-Flemish”—the likes of Benchley, John Updike (’54), William Gaddis (dropout, ’45), George Plimpton (’48), Fred Gwynne (’51) and others who didn’t work in Munster makeup walked, and sometimes pogo-sticked, into the American consciousness. (Before the castle was erected in 1909 with generous funding from former business manager William Randolph Hearst, members like George Santayana were obliged to pogo-stick elsewhere.)

The Lampoon is a whimsical résumé garnish for some, content to be the funniest next possible Supreme Court justice nominee (we’re looking at you, Cass Sunstein). But for others it created the spark for a permanent revolution in American comedy (Trotsky jokes always being funny).

The National Lampoon (Doug Kenney, Henry Beard and Robert Hoffman), Saturday Night Live (James Downey, Pam Norris, among others), and The Simpsons (Al Jean, George Meyer and many, many others) all bear the mark of The Harvard Lampoon, a style SNL’s Mr. Downey described as “sophomoric in the best sense: educated people being silly and bloody-minded.”

Other former members, like the socialist journalist John Reed (class of ’10), had to content themselves with mere “real” revolutions like the creation of the Soviet Union, which, while failed, lasted almost as long as Saturday Night Live. If those poison darts aimed at older brother Lachlan finally hit their marks, James Murdoch (dropout, ’96) might someday take over News Corporation, and a member of The Harvard Lampoon will actually rule the world.

And so, as Mr. O’Brien embarks on his move to 11:35 p.m., it seemed like a good time to stop by the castle and meet the next generation.

A little over a week ago, eight droll young men (some in tuxedoes, which was odd at 2 p.m.) greeted the Observer in the Lampoon’s business office, a woody antechamber on the ground floor of the "Flemish" castle. (You call those mullioned windows? What would Hans Vredeman de Vries say?) The organization is co-ed, but no women were present.

“We write for ourselves,” said Robert Padnick (’09) of the (sort of) five-times-a-year publication the group’s put out since 1876.

“The Lampoon’s gonna go on whether we sell zero or a hundred thousand,” said Nathaniel Stein (’10).

“We can experiment,” added Garrett Schabb (’09). “We can write stuff that’s weird and different.”

“It’s like we’re animals in the zoo. They’re not performing, they’re just doing their own thing, they’re living,” said Christopher Schleicher (’09).

Several of them seemed not only to aspire to comedy, but also to embody comedic tropes: Mr. Schleicher, shades of Will Ferrell’s Blades of Glory, is a competitive figure skater with his younger sister, Molly. Mr. Padnick, who appeared in an episode of Seinfeld as a kid, has a bit of Sammy Glick’s hustle, offering a sales pitch for an upscale rum business he plans to start after graduation. Another member, Kyle Mack, is a Canadian.

A guest would not be invited deeper into the castle or be allowed to sit in the throne from The Dark Crystal (a gift from Jim Henson, father of the first female president, Lisa Henson, class of ’82-83) or thumb through the library’s Bible, personally inscribed by God (class of ’0).

Many of them were barely out of diapers when it appeared, but the Lampoon members were still smarting over a 1991 Rolling Stone article by Dan Zevin that revealed details of the organization’s “Phool’s Week” initiation. Less painful than being jumped-in to the Crips, in its own way Phool’s Week is as cruelly manipulative as the indoctrination scene in The Parallax View. Mr. Jean (’81) of The Simpsons said that while watching a 20/20 segment on fraternities, he had a small epiphany: “The initiation was exactly the same!”

The weekend before, hundreds of alums in black tie had packed into this building (breaking every fire code known to man) for a party celebrating the centenary of the castle. The night began at the Charles Hotel, where 350 members ate a formal dinner, sharing benches at long tables, which was a re-creation of the first dinner eaten at the Lampoon.
“Mastodon or something,” according to Mr. Downey, who said it was surprisingly good.

Mr. Downey (’74) played emcee, which was appropriate since he’s often cited as the man who laid the pipeline between the Lampoon and television. Breaking with 133 years of Lampoon tradition, no one threw anything at him, a fate even Updike couldn’t avoid when he spoke at an event in 1976. Mr. O’Brien addressed the crowd via video, Marshall Applewhite–style.

Mr. O’Brien is notorious for not hiring many Lampoon alumni, but members toil on the staffs of nearly all current scripted and talk shows. A prime example is The Office, which is produced by Lampoon members Greg Daniels (’85) and Michael Schur (’97), with B. J. Novak (’01) in front of the camera.

George Meyer (’78), formerly of The Simpsons, said Mr. Downey “really kicked the door open” to Hollywood. According to Mr. Jean, “If you did a chart like at the end of Godfather II, he’d be the top square.”

Satirizing his image as the man who helped the Lampoon drink Hollywood’s milkshake, Mr. Downey made a cameo in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood as a real estate broker who helped Daniel Day Lewis’ oil prospector grab prime land in the West.

If other comedy cliques have emerged in the last few years to threaten The Lampoon’s hegemony—in 2005, Variety’s Paul Cullum pointed out that “no Lampoon alumni in a decade has produced a breakout hit”—there seemed no reason to tamp down the festivities in Cambridge.

Sure, Judd Apatow (USC dropout, ’87) may rule movies. The Onion, largely staffed by University of Wisconsin alumni, owns print. (“That’s The Harvard Lampoon of today,” said Mr. Downey.) And Collegehumor.com, whose founders went to the University of Richmond, Wake Forest and the Rochester Institute of Technology, grabs most of the low-hanging fruit online. But The Lampoon shouldn’t be tossed in the dustbin of formerly influential groups like WASPS or neocons. Lampoon-staffed shows like The Office and 30 Rock are hits with critics, and sometimes even audiences—if they’re not on against American Idol or Dancing With the Stars.

In 2000, Mr. Meyer was portrayed in a New Yorker article by his friend and fellow Lampoon member David Owen (’78) as something of a comedic boddhisatva, the complicated twists of his mind rivaled only by those of his lanky, yoga-trained limbs.

Mr. Meyer wrote for The Simpsons from 1989 to 2004 and before that created Army Man, perhaps the most important ’zine you’ve never seen. (Don’t worry: Every comedian you like has.) Mr. Meyer’s koan-like aphorisms—“Hard-core is always funnier than soft-core”; “Clever is the eunuch version of funny”—are reverently shared among acolytes. If you’ve ever said “Yoink!” when grabbing a french fry off a friend’s plate, you have Mr. Meyer to thank.

After the party, Mr. Meyer, who now lives in Seattle and is working on a novel (“a modern-day Candide”), was heartened to see that “the spirit of The Lampoon was intact.”

“It’s like a martini,” he explained. “Most of it has to be surliness. And then geniality is the vermouth.”

To all the preprofessional young members (one of whom is already at work on a script he described as “Raising Arizona meets The Bird Cage”), Mr. Meyer has this to say: “The Lampoon is a place to work on your chops. Not get your résumé together.”

It’s also a place to meet your heroes—and not just in comedy. In 2008, the group invited Paris Hilton to accept an award for being “Woman of the Year.”

“It’s literally so exciting,” Ms. Hilton said as she accepted her spittoon-like trophy.

Ms. Hilton’s honor was not without precedent. In 1975, another fresh-faced ingenue named Linda Lovelace received a similarly meaningless prize at the castle. John Wayne was also honored, as was John Kenneth Galbraith, economist and Kennedy-era ambassador to India, who was named “Funniest Professor of the Century” in 1976. (He got a pimped-out purple Cadillac.)

In 1993, the members of Rush were named “Musicians of the Millennium” and awarded medium pizzas from Tommy’s around the corner. Surprisingly normal-voiced bassist Geddy Lee seemed moved, or hungry.

If you’re comfortable partying with porn and rock stars—not to mention economists—as an undergraduate, you’re practically ready for prime time. Or 11:35.

The day after the interview at the castle, a few Lampoon members were scheduled to appear as the opening act at a comedy show in Somerville as part of the Alt-Com festival, sponsored by The Boston Phoenix.

Rain was pounding outside and the management had no idea there was a comedy show planned. A quick count of the audience totaled eight people—three of them worked for the festival, one was a journalist, and another was the daughter of the headliner.

After a shaky start and some awkward paper riffling, the Lampoon’s president, Matt Grzecki, and his cohorts, Messrs. Stein and Schabb, got a few laughs out of the soggy, tiny crowd.

The Harvard Lampoon rises to the occasion, even when the occasion is a dud.