Lame of Thrones

April 15, 2020
George R.R. Martin's sprawling saga comes in for a satire not worthy of the Cracked cutting-room floor. Martin has made a considerable fortune and built a massive following with his long-running Game of Thrones franchise, which makes him and it fair game for the parody served up here by the editors of the Harvard Lampoon. "I'm, how do you put this delicately, really goshdarn fucking rich now," the presumed Martin of this slender volume begins, adding snootily that HBO has turned his books into "the preeminent softcore porn series" of its day. The book--the one you wish Martin would write, according to the cover copy--proceeds by sounding the depths of the lowest common denominator, which is pretty low indeed. Remove 90% of Mel Brooks' brain, including the parts that control humor, and this is what you would get. "Once again his inability to read had prevented him from reading," goes one gag, an extremely faint echo of the joke trope that Groucho Marx started with, "I'd like to stay, but that would prevent me from leaving." Most of the remaining shtick is built around characters with sophomoric names like "Ratpiss," "Asserhole," "Fucknugget," "Yomomma," and "Cervix Bangsister" ( ), characters who witness and/or commit some pretty nasty stuff. There are lashings of violence, too, which is faithful, at least, to some of the more extreme elements of Martin's original: "Dog Shit unsheathed his sword and began making his way toward Whoremund....Whoremund began to launch into an impassioned speech about how this was a historic day for Mildling rights, one sentence into which his throat was cut by Dog Shit." It's not worthy of the National Lampoon of Douglas Kenney's day, which was just as dumb and sex-addled and pun-crammed but with one difference: It was funny. The operative word is "lame."

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April 27, 2020
Fans of George R.R. Martin’s blockbuster A Song of Ice and Fire cycle will recognize many of the tropes in this lowbrow pop-literature parody from the Harvard Lampoon editors (Nightlight; The Hunger Pains). The book is rife with dragons, zombie armies, slit throats, and incest. Framed as a last-minute piece of hackery churned out by a wealthy, distracted, deadline-plagued Martin—the author himself pops in while vacationing in Cabo and pounding Bellinis—the story is a frantic mess of extravagantly named characters vying to rule the land of Westopolis from the Pointy Chair. But in satirizing Martin’s penchant for Byzantine plotting (there is a reference to the “Valleys of Infinite Adventure and Endless Plotlines”), the authors have created a book-length non sequitur: given Martin’s complex story, the satire is far more difficult to discern than in Lampoon satires such as Bored of the Rings, whose R-rated antics were designed to puncture Tolkien’s self-seriousness. Here, the authors are mostly content with poorly punned naming (“Queen Mommy Cervix Bangsister”), endless battles, and lavishly detailed scenes of excreta and sex. The result is a convoluted volume of middle school humor.