Patty / Sarah

Patty (top) and Sarah in College

Photo: E. J. Hagadorn

Photo: Alexandra Penney

Photo: Terry Tempest Williams

Patty Marx talks to Sarah Crichton about becoming the first woman member of the Lampoon.

If the role of a college is to prepare its students for their futures, Harvard-Radcliffe came perilously close to failing Patty Marx.  Patty was a little, skinny, enchantingly quick kid from the suburbs of Philly.  Her dream was to join the Harvard Lampoon.  But she didn’t understand that you couldn’t just walk up to the Lampoon Castle and offer your services.  And she also didn’t understand that it had never admitted a woman—in fact, it had only just decided that it would CONSIDER admitting women, and there were many there who declared (in language we edited out) that a woman would NEVER be accepted by the Lampoon.  When she got on, several walked out for good.  

Do we remember those guys?  Nope.  But Patty has become one of our great humorists, writing for Saturday Night Live and the New Yorker, and collaborating on books with the cartoonist Roz Chast, with whom she’s formed the incomparable ukulele band, Ukelear Meltdown.  They draw great crowds.  Some people walk out—but not (progress!) because they are women. 

Our time was a moment of many First Woman this, First Woman thats—a time of women struggling just to get the door to crack open.  What would have happened to Patty if she didn’t get on the Lampoon?  “Oh,” she says, “I guess I would have become a lawyer.”