Satirists Stay Funny, Please!
Unless I know some fancy CSS trick... if my drawings are too wide, they interfere with the links list at the side. Here I go, typing a little to push the drawing down. Links are important in generating traffic.
Read Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe (do I put up the Amazon link?). Very shrill, and whiny-conservative. Your children are having sex like rutting animals, all the fault of our permissive society. Of course Wolfe has always written this way (Mau-Mauing the Flack-Catchers), but earlier it had a sense of humour.
I suppose I should find writers more of my political bent, but none of them have a sense of humour, either. Martin Amis comes closest, I suppose, but he fell off with "The Information." Those anti-nuclear-war stories in "Einstein's Monsters" were pretty dire, as well. Wolfe in his earlier work (Tangerine Streamline Baby - I suppose I'll have to do a search on it -- wait, here it is in the "also by" column "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby) was funny, and racy, but that was back in 1964.
Not the greatest book criticism here. More along the lines of "this sucks," but my point is satire should be funny. You can get away with a lot more nastiness that way.
I don't know if Orwell or Wyndham Lewis were funny (there's a odd couple, politically!), but "Five Minutes Hate" was absurd (but true) enough, it had me chuckling. [off by three minutes]
Satirists seems to lose a lot when they get too serious. Thinking of Al Capp in his later years, confronting John Lennon in his hotel room in Montreal. [link here]
Hmm. All those nice links are a lot of work! This could also use some editing, but I'll let it go until I devise some sort of system for writing these off-line.
Read Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe (do I put up the Amazon link?). Very shrill, and whiny-conservative. Your children are having sex like rutting animals, all the fault of our permissive society. Of course Wolfe has always written this way (Mau-Mauing the Flack-Catchers), but earlier it had a sense of humour.
I suppose I should find writers more of my political bent, but none of them have a sense of humour, either. Martin Amis comes closest, I suppose, but he fell off with "The Information." Those anti-nuclear-war stories in "Einstein's Monsters" were pretty dire, as well. Wolfe in his earlier work (Tangerine Streamline Baby - I suppose I'll have to do a search on it -- wait, here it is in the "also by" column "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby) was funny, and racy, but that was back in 1964.
Not the greatest book criticism here. More along the lines of "this sucks," but my point is satire should be funny. You can get away with a lot more nastiness that way.
I don't know if Orwell or Wyndham Lewis were funny (there's a odd couple, politically!), but "Five Minutes Hate" was absurd (but true) enough, it had me chuckling. [off by three minutes]
Satirists seems to lose a lot when they get too serious. Thinking of Al Capp in his later years, confronting John Lennon in his hotel room in Montreal. [link here]
Hmm. All those nice links are a lot of work! This could also use some editing, but I'll let it go until I devise some sort of system for writing these off-line.
posted by Jack Ruttan at 9:41 AM
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