Word: ironist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...voyeurism could aid his performing career in the early '70s. Always a supreme ironist and imitator, a fan of Monty Python and Dr. Strangelove, Elvis began to kid his early songs. Near the end, in the kind of Bible Belt town where he had first gained fame, Elvis even gave away expensive jewelry to win over an audience that failed to appreciate the 255-lb. monster parading as Presley...
...audience. This is not new. All humor is a detached analysis, an autopsy of the society's dreams and demons. As the sit-down iconoclast Friedrich Nietzsche put it, "A joke is an epitaph on an emotion." The post-funny comics go a step further by taking the ironist's step back. By making fun of the obsequiousness and desperation found in the lower circles of show-business purgatory, they are chiseling epitaphs on epitaphs. They haunt cemeteries of frayed hopes and failed jokes; they rob graves of moldering bits of business; they read the requiem for popular...
...American audiences this may sound rather obscure. But Director Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds, Kanal) is a subtle and often witty ironist. He is also a wise and compassionate artist who never allows a political message to dominate the human story. Though they never meet, the man and the woman become, in effect, antagonists. Each represents the idealism of a particular moment. The crusading journalist must reveal the "secrets" of an evil system; he must resist, as he al ways has, the disaffection implicit in self-awareness and worldliness. Better to bury himself in the bitter anonymity that she succeeds...
Davidson spent many months interviewing her old classmates Susie and Tasha. She is often an acute observer and ironist. When the radicals Susie and Jeff decided to get married, the bride's mother, Mrs. Hersh negotiated the affair upward until it became a reception for 200 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. On her wedding night, Susie suffered an ethical crisis over whether to wear a lacy nightgown her mother had packed...
...England's intellectual aristocracy. Thomas Henry Huxley, the great biologist and proselytizer of Darwin's theories of evolution, was his grandfather. Poet Matthew Arnold, the apostle of sweetness and light, was his mother's uncle. On one side, the traditions of scientific humanism; on the other, the melancholy ironist and culture critic who foreshadowed his grandnephew's own tussles with cynicism and faith. Aldous was a natural-born two-culture man at exactly the time when the wedges of agnosticism and technological specialization had just driven those cultures apart. He would probably have been a scientist like his brother Julian...