Word: send-up
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McCaffrey's book Restoree, published in 1968, was a send-up of other science-fiction novels of the 1950s and '60s that portrayed women as weak, damsel-in-distress types. "I got so goddamn tired of the heroines' sitting in the corner of the spaceship wringing their hands and crying," McCaffrey says. "I would have been in there kicking and screaming, doing anything to help the hero...
...David Foster Wallace's marathon send-up of humanism at the end of its tether is worth the effort. There is generous intelligence and authentic passion on every page, even the overwritten ones in which the author seems to have had a fit of graphomania. Wallace is definitely out to show his stuff, a virtuoso display of styles and themes reminiscent of William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis. Like those writers, Wallace can play it high or low, a sort of Beavis-and-Egghead approach that should spell cult following at the nation's brainier colleges...
...sharp knife to the culture of victimhood, Bryan Callen portrayed a slacker who felt beaten up by the world because he was one-eighth black. Callen, as white as Matthew Perry, unleashed a rabid tirade about the injustices he suffered because of his "appearance." More irreverent still was a send-up of Mad About You titled Mad About Jew, which imagined Louis Farrakhan married to Whoopi Goldberg, here a publicist for Comic Relief...
...page novel that calls itself 'Infinite Jest' (Little, Brown; $29.95) is doubly intimidating. First there is its length. Second, the title itself hints that the joke may be on the reader. By definition, infinite means no punchline. Yet David Foster Wallace's send-up is worth the effort, says TIME's R.Z. Sheppard. "There is generous intelligence and authentic passion on every page, even the overwritten ones where the author seems to have had a fit of graphomania. Characters and events are propelled by a distinctive prose that frequently mixes teenage trash talk and intellectual abstraction, a Bevis-and-Egghead...
From there we move to the lesson itself. In a send-up of the theoretical bent of academia, lonesco presents his pupil as stunningly brilliant in philosophy and theory, yet unable to grasp the concept of subtraction. In a hilarious scene, the professor grapples with all kinds of examples--matches, fingers, ears and noses--to demonstrate the idea of "taking away," as the student merrily proclaims that two minus one is in fact two by the principles of logic...