INSIDE THE SECRETIVE HARVARD LAMPOON - JUST KIDDING!

Sunday's "60 Minutes" Profile Includes Lampoon Alumni and "Veep" Executive Producer David Mandel, "Simpsons" Executive Producer Al Jean and Longtime "Saturday Night Live" Writer Jim Downey

The inner sanctum of the Harvard Lampoon's legendary headquarters remains un-breached. Staff of the satirical magazine would not let 60 MINUTES beyond the library of the mini-castle the magazine has occupied since 1909. But the library was where the action was: 60 MINUTES was allowed in for an introduction to the Lampoon's selective membership ritual, the first step for many toward a career in comedy. Jon Wertheim also gets a firsthand account from a staffer of being threatened by Donald Trump's personal lawyer after the Lampoon pulled an epic prank on Trump when he was still a candidate. Wertheim's profile of the 142-year-old Harvard institution that's become a wellspring of American comedy will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, April 8 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

The Lampoon boasts such illustrious alumni as John Updike, George Plimpton and William Randolph Hearst. Wertheim speaks with more recent alums who write for such programs as "Saturday Night Live," "The Simpsons" and "Veep." Their careers started with the very selection process 60 MINUTES witnessed, one in which Lampoon hopefuls must prove their competency in humor. The process begins with "compers" telling stories and trying to make magazine staffers laugh.

But the real test for compers comes with the submission of six pieces of humor writing, in a funny-or-die competition that saw just three out of about a hundred make the cut one semester last year. Once admitted, new Lampoon members get a key to the castle and, after graduation, a good crack at a career writing comedy.

The Harvard Lampoon has become a pipeline feeding comedy writers' rooms in America. It began in the '70s, when Lampoon veterans started the spin-off magazine The National Lampoon, collaborated on classic film comedies such as "Animal House" and "Vacation," and wrote for "Saturday Night Live" and "Seinfeld." In Harvard Yard, however, the Lampoon is not quite as influential. Just five issues are printed a year, nearly all for campus consumption. "There's a sense here that we are writing the magazine for ourselves and that no one is reading it," says current Lampoon president Liana Spiro. "And that, I think actually, is one of the most beautiful things about the Lampoon. That we feel like no one is watching and we can just dance however we want."

The not-so-serious magazine is perhaps best known for its pranks, which are often aimed at the university's sober daily student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. In 2015 the Lampoon fooled the presidential campaign of Donald Trump while posing as the Crimson. It was a stunt that got Lampoon staffer Tom Waddick an angry call from Trump's personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen.

Waddick had recruited some Lampoon conspirators to break into Crimson headquarters and steal the paper's famous president's chair. Then, pretending to represent the Crimson, Waddick contacted the Trump campaign and offered up the student newspaper's endorsement. He asked: "Would Mr. Trump like to pose for the accompanying photo in the Crimson's chair?" The answer from the Trump camp was a swift "yes," so Waddick and his fellow Lampoon staff members raced to New York City and carried the chair into Trump Tower. Once inside Trump's office, the candidate himself greeted them and, after Trump's hair was styled, it was time to capture the moment. Trump sat in the Crimson's chair while Lampoon staffers gathered around him. "Donald Trump had said, 'Everyone do the thumbs up,' so we're all doing his sort of signature thumbs up around him," recalls Waddick. "And I was just like, 'We got it.'"

But it wasn't that easy. As he was preparing to publish the photo, Waddick got a call from Cohen. The Trump camp realized they'd been had. "[Cohen] says, you know, 'I'm going to come up to Harvard. You're all going to get expelled,'" remembers Waddick. "'If this photo gets out, you'll be out of that school faster than you know it. I can be up there tomorrow.'"

Wertheim also interviews Lampoon alumnus David Mandel from the class of 1992, a former "Seinfeld" writer now running HBO's comedy "Veep"; the 1974 graduate Jim Downey, who wrote some of the most memorable political satire of the past 40 years for "Saturday Night Live"; and Al Jean, class of 1981, who now runs "The Simpsons."

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