Word: mocks
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Perelman's cosmopolitan imagination had a definite surreal twist to it. In "low dudgeon," he viewed the world's quirky moving parts as threats to his safety, sanity and solvency. Acres and Pains was a 1947 collection of mock-Thoreauvian japes inspired by the author's four dec ades of semirustication on 100 stony acres in Bucks County, Pa. His definition of a gentleman's farm: "An irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city...
Little in these stories could warn you that their author had a flair for the mock-epic that shaped his full-length works, The Ivankiad and The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. These tales are small-scale, under-written, you might even say unambitious--but only if you were willing to argue that portraying fairly simple characters economically and sympathetically is an unworthy ambition...
...aren't all bad, just 92 per cent bad" ring hollow, worshippers of Texan jargon strike oil in Whorehouse. But you can find choicer idioms in the glorious novels of Peter Gent and Dan Jenkins. Those novels aren't pretentious; this play is. It strains to hard to mock every Texan myth that the effect is laughable, more than laudable. So see it and laugh--after all, John Connally may be the next president. And John Tower reportedly liked it. Hot damn...
This alternation of the mock-epic and the earthy proved an ideal technique in Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Graham Chapman's snooty King Arthur deserved to have shit flung upon him. In Jabberwocky, a 1976 bomb starring two Python members, the mock-epic dropped out entirely and left the cast wallowing in a cesspool of gore and unbearable toilet humor. Life of Brian returns to the successful formula of Holy Grail, spoofing a genre of film and its directorial cliches with both skillful imitation and derision...
...Sweet's album. The song "Wildwood Saloon" describes the travails of a woman of questionable reputation, and two other songs--"Pin a Medal on Mary" and "Stranger in the House," written by the infamous womanizer Mr. Elvis Costello--glorify adultery, which threatens to rend our societal fabric. The mock country-and-western music of these songs only makes them more deceptive, like a wolf in sheep's clothing...