A Great, Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s - Hardcover

9781586480813: A Great, Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s
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What Jonathan Miller, one of its high priests, calls a "peculiar episode in British cultural history" provides rich material for Carpenter to dig into. He explores the creeping postwar unease, fast-growing consumerism, and other social factors of the early 1960s that set the stage for the explosion of "a new ... characteristically English style of subversion" that took the form of the most silly social and political commentary. Carpenter, also a biographer of Tolkien, Auden, Pound, and others, traces the people who fed England's sudden appetite for satire, including Miller, Michael Frayn, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Alan Bennett. The edition includes eight pages of crisp b&w photos. Originally published in London in 2000 as That was satire that was (Victor Gollancz). Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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About the Author:
Humphrey Carpenter is the award-winning author of biographies of Dennis Potter, J.R.R. Tolkien, W.H. Auden, and Ezra Pound. He also writes the "Mr. Majeika" series of children's books, and broadcasts regularly on BBC radio. He 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.
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  • PublisherPublicAffairs
  • Publication date2002
  • ISBN 10 1586480812
  • ISBN 13 9781586480813
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages400
  • Rating

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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. ---A vibrant history of the British satire explosion of the early 1960s-from Private Eye and Beyond the Fringe to That Was the Week That Was-and its lasting influence on comedy. Humphrey Carpenter's A Great, Silly Grin is both a thoughtful history and a great deal of fun. The British satire boom of the early 1960s created a motherlode of styles and material for generations of bright comedians and social critics on both sides of the Atlantic and set a standard for clever humor that still shapes comedy and commentary in America today. Carpenter's history of that formative era revisits the 1960 Edinburgh Festival, when a staggeringly inspired satirical review startled a public steeped in the polite, bland banality of the 1950s; recalls the appearance in London coffee bars of a scruffy yellow pamphlet calling itself Private Eye, and looks back at the groundbreaking BBC television program That Was the Week That Was. Exclusive interviews with the people involved are woven together with a wealth of comic material, photographs-most from private collections and never before published-and other contemporary material to bring the era vividly to life. Carpenter also assess the satirical movement's impact in America. A Great, Silly Grin is a feast of nostalgia for those who remember its signature comedians fondly, and an insightful look back at a high-water mark for satire in the English speaking world. nein. Seller Inventory # 7607

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