Word: causticity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PREMISE: A black comedy set in the thouroughbred racing world of the American West, Simpatico is a play of betrayal and caustic wit. Pulitzer Prize-winner Sam Shepard uses his biting humor to expose the sleazy society of the high rollers and their hilarious confrontation with the world of white trash...
...Bring the Pain's most talked-about bit was Rock's searing riff on "black people vs. niggas." It was a caustic comic commentary that contrasted the values of upwardly mobile blacks with those who had given in to a kind of gangsta nihilism. "There's like a civil war going on with black people," Rock declared. "There are two sides: there's black people, and there's niggas. And niggas have got to go." Niggas, in Rock's view, were a source of ignorance, violence, family dysfunction. It was a riff that resembled traditional stand-up comedy...
Every epochal moment in Pirates of Silicon Valley (June 20, 8 p.m. E.T.), TNT's smart new movie about the birth of the PC industry, comes complete with a similar backdoor irony. Pirates' writer-director Martyn Burke (who co-wrote HBO's caustic The Pentagon Wars) plants his story in the fertile ground of the baby boomers' art-vs.-commerce conundrum. "Steve Jobs' garage is the starting point of an entire culture," Burke says. "It got going in the early '70s, when the campuses were being occupied by antiwar protesters, but these guys--Jobs, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak...
...accompanies a brilliantly bleak history of New World colonization, slaughter and disease ("Columbus sailed for India/ Found Salvador instead/He shook hands with some Indians and soon they all were dead/They got TB and typhoid and athlete's foot/Diphtheria and the flu/Excuse me--Great Nations coming through!"). The song's caustic end: that "some bug from out of Africa" might destroy America "like the great nations of Europe in the 16th century." You are permitted to gulp in horror as you hum along...
...diary originally published by her father, but the recent critical, unexpurgated edition has moved millions more by disanointing her solely as an emblem of innocence. Anne's deep effect on readers comes from her being a normal, if gifted, teenager. She was curious about sex, doubtful about religion, caustic about her parents, irritable especially to herself; she believed she had been fitted with two contradictory souls...