'Harvard Lampoon' and 'THR' Skewer Chalamet, Zendaya, Leo and More Hollywood A-Listers

Is nothing sacred? (Spoiler: Nothing is)

Dateline: Hollywood! (But in reality Cambridge, Mass., home of the venerable Harvard Lampoon humor magazine.)

Did Zendaya really ditch the Met Gala to play jacks with a humble Midwestern family? Is Leo DiCaprio offering sage advice to student pornographers? Does Timothée Chalamet plan to don the yellow hat for a Curious George biopic?

Those first two items sound made up for sure. With Timo, it’s tough to tell—dude’s got no shame. All three stories—plus funny takes on Ted Lasso, Euphoria, The Pitt, Christopher Nolan and Scarlett Johansson portraying a snail—light up the pages of The Hollywood Reporter’s spoof issue created by The Harvard Lampoon.

The Lampoon is celebrating its 150th anniversary. Countless producers and writers have cut their comedy teeth at the publication through the years. And the property specializes in parodies. So this team-up makes at least as much sense as Marty Supreme’s third act.

As for the idea’s genesis, “Hollywood takes itself too seriously and we simply need to make fun of it—even though we’d all like jobs there,” Lampoon staff writer Adrian Maydanich tells Muse. “I’d read THR every day during a previous internship and loved the style—the headlines that already sounded comical. They were the perfect target. Luckily, we happened to have a Lampoon ’03 alum (Julian Sancton) who was already working there, so we reached out in May.”

After that, the two pubs teamed up to deliver the lambasting entertainment A-listers so richly deserve.

“I sincerely, sincerely hope we don’t regret this,” adds THR editor-in-chief Maer Roshan. “THR has spent nearly a century chronicling this industry with rigor and authority. It might just take the Lampoon kids one issue to obliterate our credibility.”

With headlines like, “I Wanted It to Look Symmetrical: Wes Anderson Chops Other Leg Off of Man Already Missing Leg,” why worry?

So, it’s like The Onion. But different. Awesome!

Ultimately, “Ideas flowed on both sides from the beginning, and things scaled on both the editorial and the production side from there,” Maydanich says.

One such notion graces the cover: a cyber Marilyn Monroe, plotting, no doubt, to destroy humanity.

“We knew that we wanted to turn a celeb into a robot on our cover, as people are so worried about AI that they might actually think it’s a real photo. Well, a staff member was scrolling randomly and found that a certain Seven Year Itch photo was actually in the public domain (meaning we didn’t have to pay to use it) and that really appealed to us broke college students. Marilyn Monroe? The dress flying up to expose robot legs underneath? It felt perfect.”

“Our goal here was simple: write jokes that make us laugh. We really don’t do it for anyone else. But, we knew that when this opportunity presented itself, we had to put this out into the world and see if it sticks.”

Or, as Timothée Chalamet would never say, “I guess the question for me is, what’s behind the yellow hat? Maybe even more important: what’s beneath the monkey?”

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