Who's to Say What's Obscene?
Politics, Culture, and Comedy in America Today
گزارش تخلف
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
June 8, 2009
Krassner (Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut
), publisher of the Realist
magazine, ruminates on American social and political hypocrisy in these essays that drift between current events and the heyday of the 1960s counterculture when the author dropped acid with the Merry Pranksters and palled around with Abbie Hoffman. Krassner weighs in on the last election cycle, the decriminalization of marijuana, and racism, with a stated (and largely achieved) goal of illuminating the gulf between what society says and what it does. The essays focus mostly on other humorists, and while he points out that today “sarcasm passes for irony,” he's far from a curmudgeon and praises such current comics as Sacha Baron Cohen and Sarah Silverman. Krassner says, “It doesn't have to get a belly laugh, it just has to be valid criticism, which is the classic definition of satire,” and while this book lingers too long on nostalgic remembrances and tackles serious issues too directly to get constant laughs, it makes a convincing case for the importance—and political necessity—of irreverence.
August 1, 2009
The Internet has given septuagenarian Yippie Paul Krassner yet another lease on life. Or at least another platform for his witty anarcho-iconoclasm. Many of the writings in this anthology debuted in places like AVN Online and the Huffington Post (whose proprietor introduces the book). Krassner writes on anything that catches his eye: the war on drugs, stand-up comedy, Don Imus, to mention just three topics. This is both a blessingyou never know what Krassner is going to write aboutand a curse: at times Krassner seems less like a keen-eyed social commentator and more like one of those guys who buttonholes you at a party and wont let you get a word in edgewise. Still, he maintains a high hit-to-miss ratio, and each piece is short enough (roughly the length of a newspaper column) that if it doesnt catch your fancy, you can always flip to the next one. The collection also includes a number of touching memorials to cultural icons Krassner has known, including Allen Ginsberg, George Carlin, Kurt Vonnegut, and Robert Anton Wilson.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)
دیدگاه کاربران