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

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Looking back from an era in which Americans rely upon comedians for the most up-to-the minute social and political commentary (think Jay Leno, Saturday Night Live, or The Onion), how did it happen that we came to trust the sideways glance, the knowing aside, and the dead-on impersonation to tell us something about the world that straight headlines fail to do? The answer, as Humphrey Carpenter shows in this informative and uproarious book, is that we owe it all to our cousins across the Atlantic. It was the British satire "boom" of the early 1960s that created a motherlode of styles, material, and formats for generations of bright comedians and social critics in America as well as in Britain, and set the standard for clever humor that still determines our tastes in comedy and commentary today." A Great, Silly Grin begins with the 1960 Edinburgh Festival, when a staggeringly inspired satirical review called Beyond the Fringe startled a public steeped in the polite, bland banality of the 1950s. From there it was a short trip to the coffee bars of London, where the appearance of a scrub yellow pamphlet calling itself Private Eye overturned the way Britons looked at their world, public events and personalities providing the raw material for this irreverent take on the news.

FROM THE CRITICS

Andrew Solomon - New York Times Book Review

[Hobson and Leonard] get at most of the really crucial problems with psychiatry today....This is a rare and precious accomplishment.

Business Week

[Hobson and Leonard] paint a terrifying picture ...The book [is] likely to provoke outrage even among those who have never thought about these questions.

Wall Street Journal

... it takes a literary historian as empathetic as Mr. Carpenter to reveal the deeper...story [of British satire].

Choice

A well-reasoned argument for both a radical change in the care of the mentally ill and a new role for psychiatry.

Washington Times