Word: mordant
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...candor and commercial viability came with last season's best musical, Falsettos, which centers on a father who leaves his wife and son to take up with a male lover who dies of AIDS. While it sounds grim, the show is in large part a cheerfully neurotic comedy; its mordant wit in the face of death is yet another index of a gay aesthetic. The producers have shrewdly emphasized the show's celebration of families of all kinds in testimonial ads touting it as fit for rabbis and priests, Midwestern tourists and suburban firemen. Having long since turned a profit...
Fortunately, there exists another view of the post-colonial Caribbean, one beyond Naipaul's mordant wit and grim aspect, beyond Kincaid's condescension and Walcott's romanticization...
There was also no mistaking the feverish, often mordant speculation about what Brown would do to shake up the New Yorker. When Brown announced her departure to a devoted Vanity Fair staff, she dissolved in tears; but as she prepared to travel the three blocks to the New Yorker offices to meet her new editing cadre, she fretted privately, "They're going to hate me." She did what she could to reassure them, pledging that "the New Yorker will not be Vanity Fair...
...dream life of the '30s, remote from the privations of the Depression. But as he and his rich friends cruised the beauty spots of the world, he was listening to the rhythms of their speech and of the bands they danced to, transforming their fads and crazes into often mordant social comment. And into 500 or so of the best American songs ever written -- ballads, laments, sophisticated melodies, impudent scatter, chatter, smatter songs. The miracle of this four-CD set is that it makes a rich sampling of those songs sound so fresh and persuades the listener to hear...
...what are these shows really attacking -- the family, or simply TV's sentimentalized portrayal of it? For all the Bundys' biting sarcasm and Roseanne's mordant wisecracks, the one thing that is never questioned is the sanctity of the family. Roseanne's rebellious kids have something most of their real-life counterparts do not: two wise, empathetic, firmly in-control parents. Even the crass Bundys -- TV's broadest caricature of a "bad" family -- have a stubborn, low-down sense of togetherness...