Word: parodist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Parody may well be at its most uselessly enjoyable when the parodist is a century away from his subject. Since I bought this anthology I have grown very fond of Robert Benchley's Christmas Afternoon...
Wolcott Gibbs is a conspicuously less exciting parodist, and some of his work is too crude to observe anything but the most superficial aspects of his subjects; yet he does well enough with J. P. Marquand. "Outside my window the river lay opalescent in the twilight, but for a moment I saw it as a dark and relentless torrent bearing me on into the unknowable future, and I shuddered," is not remarkable for its wit, but the next sentence--"I didn't want to get married; I just wanted to go back to Harvard"--excuses the rest. I like...
...volume collection of parody published in the 1880s, which contained 86 versions of Gray's Elegy, 60 versions of Poe's The Raven, and 21 of The Charge of the Light Brigade. He has learned that the greatest are beyond parody: Shakespeare was himself a master parodist (of Nashe, Marlowe, Lyly), but no one ever capped that starry-pointing pyramid, though Shaw and Nigel Dennis have notably tried...
...Madcap Mac is balanced by Dour Donald. Parody, he makes clear, though a laughing matter, is serious. Writes Macdonald: "I enjoy it as an intuitive kind of literary criticism, shorthand for what 'serious' critics must write out at length. It is Method Acting, since a successful parodist must live himself, imaginatively, into his parody...
Fancy Needlework. Ernest Hemingway, unfortunate in that his vices have been imitated while his virtues remain his own, is perhaps most vulnerable of all to the parodist's pic. Under the muscular stoicism and the man-of-the-world expertise, there is a vein of provincial naivete, and the celebrated bare style is really an elaborate piece of purl and plain knitting, learned in part from that fancy needlework artist, Gertrude Stein. Far from being economical, it is in fact more prolix than, say, Thomas Mann's high mandarin, a fact proved some years ago by parodists...