Leo Reich’s debut Fringe show is dazzling. A portrait of rabid Gen Z narcissism that is brilliantly funny, and despite the artfully superficial persona, threaded through with melancholy and rage; emotion which is ironic and also not. Reich is incisive about the conditions that have generated contemporary pathologies - the warping effects of technology for… Continue reading Leo Reich: Literally, Who Cares
Category: satire
Jerk
The BBC 3 sitcom Jerk, stars Tim Renkow as an anti-hero who exploits his cerebral palsy to get away with bad behaviour. Widely acknowledged to be ground-breaking in its representation of disability, the series is a radical departure from the narrative conventions that situate disabled characters as either victim or saint. With a clear kinship… Continue reading Jerk
Catherine Cohen: the twist?… she’s gorgeous
‘The Twist...? She’s Gorgeous’, Catherine Cohen’s recent Netflix special, sees her concoct a flamboyant spectacle of feminine narcissism, in a show characterised by a rather perfect tension between self-regard and self-deprecation, conceit and vulnerability, play and pain. Part of what’s dazzling about Cohen’s performance is the sheer speed and precision with which she moves through… Continue reading Catherine Cohen: the twist?… she’s gorgeous
Rutu Modan’s Tunnels
A thrilling adventure story, Rutu Modan’s new graphic novel, Tunnels, is also very funny. The story has a buoyant, almost farcical energy, and there’s a satirical aspect too, an empathetic satire which is fond rather than acrimonious. As with her previous work, Modan’s subject is Israeli life, and the story’s archaeological focus shows the preoccupation… Continue reading Rutu Modan’s Tunnels
Dead Souls
A satire on the cultural sector, which uses humour to play with ideas about literary convention and value, Dead Souls is also a series of philosophical enquiries, with plagiarism the preeminent theme. Set in a slightly warped world where poetry has become immensely lucrative, the novel explores the case of a plagiarising poet, Solomon Wiese, publicly shamed… Continue reading Dead Souls
Paul Beatty: Unmitigated Blackness
Paul Beatty is a hugely significant comic writer: one of only a few contemporary novelists whose work is consistently satirical. His most recent novel, The Sellout, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2016, shares DNA with other irreverent, iconoclastic masterpieces like Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five. The novel traces the tribulations of his protagonist,… Continue reading Paul Beatty: Unmitigated Blackness
Comedy and cancel culture
Questioning liberal orthodoxy is a formidable prospect given the inevitability of outrage. But as we risk sliding into coercive ideological conformity, opening up space for debate is surely a matter of some urgency. Comedy is one place where such issues can be raised and explored in relative safety, and two recent instances, Leigh Stein’s satirical… Continue reading Comedy and cancel culture
Self Care
Leigh Stein’s satirical novel, Self Care, is both consistently funny and compulsively readable. It’s also very important. An account of a startup, ‘Richual’, a community platform ‘for women to cultivate the practice of self-care and change the world by changing ourselves’, the novel traces the increasingly panicked travails of the two female co-founders, Maren and… Continue reading Self Care
Armando Iannucci’s David Copperfield
All too often humour is seen as somehow secondary to satire - Harry Levin, for instance, describes satire as ‘purposeful comedy’, with the implication that humour alone is insufficient. Indeed, as the privileged critical category, satire often serves ‘to defend comic art against charges of frivolity’ (Green 106). This tendency is understandable given the distinctions… Continue reading Armando Iannucci’s David Copperfield
Jojo Rabbit
Jojo Rabbit has been nominated for 6 Oscars, and has just won a Bafta, so, despite the very mixed reviews, it’s clearly appealing to many. For me, it brought to mind other well received films that were similarly muddled – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri for example. The Oscars often favour films which take on… Continue reading Jojo Rabbit
Humour in the Arts 