From the authors of the New York Times bestselling parody The Hunger Pains , this fresh take on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is a hilarious send-up of Middle-earth, publishing just in time for the major motion picture release of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug . The sequel to the parody of the sequel to the prequel to The Lord of the Rings When Aaron Sorkinshield and his band of Little People embark on a totally feasible quest to reclaim the hoard of Academy Awards stolen from them by the lonely Puff the Magic Dragon, senile wizard Dumbledalf suggests an unlikely and completely unqualified accomplice: Billy Bagboy, an unassuming wobbit dwelling in terrorist-riddled Wobbottabad. Along the way, the company faces Internet trolls, moblins, one really big spider that must be at least an inch and a half wide, and worse. But as they journey from the wonders of Livinwell to the terrors of Jerkwood and beyond, Billy will find that there is more to him than anyone—Tolkien included—ever dreamed. Propelled to his destiny by a series of courageous adventures and indented paragraphs, Billy will set out on the greatest YOLO of all time . . . one that leads deep into the dark caverns hiding a mysterious man named Goldstein, who’s just trying to have a nice seder. "Yes, the rumors are true. I am the Harvard Lampoon." -- J.K. Rowling “This reminds me of The Hobbit .” -- J.R.R. Tolkien “I forgive them.” -- Jesus Christ “I could see this being a great three-minute animated short.” -- Peter Jackson “TL;DR." -- T.S. Eliot “Thanks, Mom. This book has finally bridged the growing gap between us.” -- your teenage son “I love the twist ending where it turns out that all along you were reading about sexy people.” -- E.L. James “Needs more Jay-Z songs.” -- F. Scott Fitzgerald The Harvard Lampoon debuted in February 1876 and is the world’s longest continually published humor magazine. Lampoon alumni include comedians Conan O’Brien, Andy Borowitz, Greg Daniels, Jim Downey, Al Jean, and B.J. Novak. Other alums have written for Saturday Night Live , The Simpsons , Futurama , Late Night with David Letterman , Seinfeld , 30 Rock , and dozens of other shows. The Harvard Lampoon is also the author of Nightlight and The Hunger Pains . Visit HarvardLampoon.com. The Wobbit I An Unexpected Trilogy In a hole in the ground there was stuck a wobbit. Not a stupid, useless, wet hole that you might dig at the beach because your parents drove all the way out here and your dad said that sandcastle set cost twenty damn dollars so you’re just going to have to make holes and you’ll like it, dammit, nor yet a desperate, useful, dry hole you might dig twenty-eight years later at that same beach because you were just trying to get your dad to respect your career choices and you can’t have this on your record just as they were about to move you off of beef-coloring duty at the local Taco Knell. No, this was a wobbit-hole, and that, dear reader, means various things depending on your Google Image SafeSearch preferences.I The hole had a perfectly round door like a doughnut, glazed like a doughnut, with a smaller, half-eaten jelly doughnut stuck in the exact middle. This was meant to replace the doorknob the wobbit had eaten in an unfortunate (but all too common) jelly-donut-doorknob-switcheroo. The door opened onto a tube-shaped hall, which was like an underground bowling lane, inclined and polished at just the right angle so that, having expended all his limited energy opening and/or eating his way through the door, the wobbit could simply roll himself down the hall in a prediabetic stupor and burp-bounce his way into any of the many round doors opening out of it. No going upstairs for the wobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, pantries, sitting rooms, kitchens, dining rooms, pausing rooms, breakfast nooks, mouthbreathing facilities, lunch-meat storage areas, sweating chambers, cheese lockers, and mirrorless Tempur-Pedic gorging zones—all were on the same floor. “Floors” was, in fact, an utterly meaningless term in Wobbottabad, ever since the city council outlawed stairs for implying an impractical amount of effort and escalators for basically being passive-aggressive stairs. Now, this wobbit was a very stuck wobbit, and his name was Billy Bagboy. The Bagboys had lived in the neighborhood of Wobbottabad for far longer than anyone could remember, while steadfastly retaining the shortest life spans of any of their neighbors. People considered the Bagboys very respectable, not only because they had a rather delightful job where they could take secret bites of everybody’s groceries, but also because they were almost completely immobile and, even better, unsurprising. You could tell what a Bagboy would say on any question without the bother of taking the mayo-cake out of his mouth, as the answer was almost invariably, “Yum. Mayo-cake.” The mother of our particular wobbit—what is a wobbit? I suppose wobbits nee