Since Mr. Allen wrote these satires, many others, including him, have covered the same territory.
George S. Kaufman would no doubt have been happy to see these satires, freshened by a stream of contemporary references, ending Saturday night on a high note.
In these satires, Varro shows himself a man of the old stamp, making fun of the follies and absurdities of modern times.
Earlier this year, this body of work won him an Ignobel Prize in Literature from The Annals of Improbable Research, which awards these satires on the Nobel Prizes each year.
But the actual artistic point of these satires on bourgeois comfort and sophistication is a visual simplicity that matches the dramas' repudiations of technological, intellectual, and bureaucratic modernity.
All of these satires, of course, emerged from the brilliant mind of Armando Iannucci, also responsible for the surreal headlines The Day Today offered us in its satirical Paxman-style "round-up of the papers".
The fact that neither Cruikshank, nor his bookseller nor his customers, were prosecuted under the infamous "gagging acts" tells Gatrell a lot about the way in which these satires worked as elite products.
Vague and unverifiable suggestions that the "typical" purchaser of these satires must have approved of the view that Pitt was a perpetual drunkard or Fox enslaved to gambling simply will not do.
In reality, these satires of late-capitalist office life have less to say about actual work than about the bureaucratic rituals and distractions surrounding it: the joke PowerPoint presentations, the endless forwarding of stupid YouTube videos, the proliferation of Orwellian corporate jargon.
When the population is (understandably) jaded and cynical, and abandons politics, this only helps the right A view endorsed by retrorik: In some weird way, as [with] Spitting Image in the 80s, these satires merely give credibility to this political system.
