Word: satiristic
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...committee representing numerous ethnic groups was upset about the Inauguration Eve concert in Kennedy Center. The stars include Actors John Wayne and Paul Newman, Actresses Bette Davis and Shirley MacLaine, Comics Elaine May, Mike Nichols and Redd Foxx, Athletes Muhammad Ali and Hank Aaron, Satirist Chevy Chase, Soprano Beverly Sills, Conductor Leonard Bernstein. Yet the Ethnic Cultural Inaugural Committee complained that the cast "doesn't reflect the ethnic and racial diversity of America." Most of the carping, however, centered on invitations and tickets. Some 300,000 "general invitations" on soft eggshell paper and colorful 16-page guides...
...religious faith as "Missionary lecternpounding Amenten-finger C-major chord Sister-Martha-at-the-Yamaha keyboard loblolly pineywoods Baptist" has not succumbed to ideological portentousness. Yet he clearly is serious−not because he is a closet conservative, but because he is an old-fashioned satirist...
...such moments the satirist turns reactionary. That is why Wolfe wiggles his eyebrows when he hears wealthy Easterners proclaim a distaste for fancy living and a love of the underprivileged: "Everybody had sworn off fashion, but somehow nobody moved to Cincinnati to work among the poor." That is why he deflates the comic-strip balloons that people who think they are humane so often utter: "Or as a well-known, full-grown socialite. Amanda Burden, said ... 'The sophistication of the baby blacks has made me rethink my attitudes.' " That is why he mocks the now pieties...
...survive, though, satire needs something more than clever carping: an urgent sense of how people should behave if they would only listen to the satirist and stop acting stupidly. It is this sense that still animates Swift's A Modest Proposal, two centuries after its original topicality. The moral certainty that once propped up satire has faded also. Wolfe is too canny to convey any advice except an implicit "knock it off." If he went further, he could easily spend the rest of his days on the chicken-salad circuit, pumping for apple-pie virtues. He would no longer...
...Though a satirist, Emett is a gentle one, with a high regard for human fallibilities and amenities, as well as for cats, birds, butterflies and flowers. What makes the Sussex Merlin all the more remarkable is that he can use a welding torch and glue. With tin, antique doorknobs, hip baths, umbrellas, bicycle parts, lamp shades, stained glass, saucepan lids, Victrola horns, ear trumpets, soup strainers, miles of wicker and wiring, he transforms cartoon fantasies into whispering, whistling, wheezing, whirring, gothic-kinetic machines that work, but mostly play. And mock...