Word: mordant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Kaufman rightly objected to being called a comedian. But he was, perhaps, a mordant self-satirist, perpetually in touch with, loving and loathing, his inner child, the lonely little Long Island boy, consoled by his obsessive interest in the trashiest manifestations of pop culture. It was his luck to come on the scene in the '70s, just as a generation that had been shaped--blighted--by the same pop materials was arriving at self-consciousness. The natural impulse of the members of that generation was to nostalgize pop culture and their own innocent response to it. On the other hand...
With her pixieish smile intact, Ernestine manages to dart out of the thicket and rejoin her husband. Now he can play tour guide--a mordant commentator who wants us to know he finds this ritual, like so many other campaign rituals, faintly ridiculous. "All right, well, this is the church," he says. "These trees are tulip trees. And as you can see, it's one of those great stone churches." He tells us how his father, a bank president who suffered from calcified arthritis of the spine, used to "sit and look out at this churchyard, and it gave...
Twenty-five years ago last Sunday night, there were thousands of people in Lafayette Park, eager witnesses to the final act of Richard Nixon's tortured presidency. Many of them were weeping, others cheering. Dan Rather was sitting on a chair, under spotlights, in mordant tones announcing the end of a political world...
Movies may glamorize mayhem while serving as a fantasy safety valve. A steady diet of megaviolence may coarsen the young psyche--but some films may instruct it. Heathers and Natural Born Killers are crystal-clear satires on psychopathy, and The Basketball Diaries is a mordant portrait of drug addiction. Payback is a grimly synoptic parody of all gangster films. In three weeks, 15 million people have seen The Matrix and not gone berserk. And Carrie 2 is a crappy remake of a 1976 hit that led to no murders...
...mordant" social commentary referred to in the dust jacket doesn't get very far. The Internet is judged to be addictive. Drugs are seen as the modern equivalent of slavery. Television hypnotizes people. Consumption of Big Macs is morally reprehensible. No one needs to read a novel to figure these things out; one needs only to look around...