Word: satirists
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...draping his motley over perishable structures, the satirist risks that they will some day collapse, taking his work down with them. A number of pieces in Guilty Pleasures are predicated on Richard Nixon, and their bite has already become gummy. One of the book's funnier stories (An Hesitation on the Bank of the Delaware) overcomes this loss through shameless slapstick. George Washington postpones his rowboat crossing until hearing whether Congress will continue to finance his personal extravagances. Speaking in an age when the printed s looked like an f, an aide informs the general that demands...
...excel lent example of the author's skill at packaging a bit of class in a good deal of excelsior. For Myron, he tricks out his peeves and hostilities with the malicious energy that has made him the best-if not the most original-of our hard-core satirists. Myra/Myron is the perfect mate for Vidal's cold-blooded gifts. If the caricatures, derision and raillery sometimes outpace the action-or the point -it is because even Vidal is not immune to the satirist's most common affliction...
...curiosity: a rip-off of a ripoff. It will be remembered that the original cartoon feature Fritz the Cat - largely the work of the animator Ralph Bakshi - so enraged Fritz's creator, the underground comic artist R. Crumb, that he disowned the whole movie. Crumb, a stringent satirist, had conjured up Fritz as a way to mock the poses of the pseudo hipster and to lay waste the giddy excess of the culture from which he sprang. Bakshi slicked Fritz up, cooled him out, and turned him into the perfect creature of everything Crumb had put down...
...Lenny Bruce, the Dr. Johnson of four-letter words, continues. Seven years ago, Bruce died a junkie's death in Hollywood, hounded by obscenity charges. To many admirers, he was a martyr to middle-class morality, and now he is being hailed as the most influential social satirist of the era. A dozen-odd records of Lenny are available, plays and films have been made of his life, and now another movie is under way in Miami. Dustin Hoffman, 36, has the lead in Bob Fosse's Lenny, and, on location, he came up with his own analysis...
Angus Wilson seemed to begin where Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Hux ley left off. It was as if he had been born a middle-aged comedian, clever but desolate. For him there was no initial period when a young satirist simply func tions: a predatory animal savagely but happily on the hunt...