A Great, Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom Of The 1960s - Softcover

Carpenter, Humphrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0306812053 ISBN 13: 9780306812057

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2003

Synopsis

A Great, Silly Grin opens at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival, where a staggeringly inspired satirical revue called Beyond the Fringe startled a public steeped in the polite, bland banality of the 1950s. From there it is a short trip to the coffee bars of London, where the appearance of a scruffy yellow pamphlet calling itself Private Eye overturned the way Britons looked at their world. The apotheosis of the satire boom, and the progenitor of so many American comedy acts, was the groundbreaking BBC television program "That Was the Week That Was," which combined elements of sketch comedy and evening-news broadcast to produce something essential, hilarious, and, on occasion, scandalous. Humphrey Carpenter's history of this tumultuous and exciting era introduces us not only to the people involved in its creation--Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Michael Frayn, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, and David Frost--but also their routines and sketches.

About this title

About the Author:

Humphrey Carpenter is the award-winning biographer of Dennis Potter, J. R. R. Tolkien, W. H. Auden, and Ezra Pound. He broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio. Carpenter is married with two children and lives in Oxford, England.

From Publishers Weekly:

To re-create the anti-establishment era of the 1960s, Carpenter interviewed almost 40 of the top "surviving satirists and their associates," and the result is both authoritative and amusing. Carpenter, best known for his biographies of Dennis Potter, Auden, Pound and Tolkien, sets the scene with the political and cultural backdrop of post-WWII "austere drabness" giving way to subversive antics on radio's Goon Show in 1951. The Edinburgh Festival of music and art began in 1947, and additional entertainments there were known as Festival Fringe. These "intimate revues" of music and comedy underwent an intellectual transformation when Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett teamed for the sharp-edged satire of Beyond the Fringe in 1960. As Miller put it, the quartet "tried to rinse away some of this gaudy sentiment," abandoning the "dum-de-da of conventional revue." It set the tone for what followed: the lampoons of Private Eye magazine, the satirical cabaret known as The Establishment and the BBC's top-rated That Was the Week That Was (aka TW3), laying a foundation for Monty Python and later comedic concepts. The concluding chapter covers how the movement's writers and performers fared in later years. Since Carpenter did extensive research on Dennis Potter, it's surprising to find no rundown of the satirical sketches the team of Potter and David Nathan wrote for TW3. Still, students of comedy history will find this the perfect companion volume to shelve alongside The Compass, Janet Coleman's superb history of satirical, improvisational theater in the U.S. 16 pages of b&w photos.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0306812053
• ISBN 13: 9780306812057
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 408