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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Did satire die with communism?,
This review is from: More Unkempt Thoughts. (Hardcover)
Do you find most sit-coms imbecilic and Monty Python's Flying Circus, well, adolescent? Then what you are looking for is satire. As Ambrose Bierce, the great American satirist of the late 19th and early 20th century put it in his Devil's Dictionary, satire is "an obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness. In this country satire never had more than a sickly and uncertain existence, for the soul of it is wit, wherein we are dolefully deficient, the humor that we mistake for it, like all humor, being tolerant and sympathetic. Moreover, although Americans are `endowed by their Creator' with abundant vice and folly, it is not generally known that these are reprehensible qualities, wherefore the satirist is popularly regarded as a soul-spirited knave, and his ever victim's outcry for codefendants evokes a national assent."One thing is true. For reasons unknown to me, when you are trying to think of a 20th century satirist, he is likely to be Russian, Polish or Czech. And none of them published anything during the last ten years. Satire seems to be especially flourishing in a repressive environment, be it Austrian-Hungarian empire, tzarist Russia, or communism. Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (1909-1966), a Polish aphorist, was one of the last grand masters of the art of satire. His brilliant bitter-sweet collection of aphorisms, "Mysli nieuczesane", was first published as a serial in 1957, and English translation by Jacek Galazka followed in 1962. "More Unkempt Thoughts" is a follow-up, published posthumously in 1968. If you can find this gem, give it a chance.
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