Evening Standard - London, July 19th, 1999
OUR DUMB CENTURY by the editors of the Onion (Boxtree, GBP 9.99)
THERE are some things you just don't expect the Americans to be good at.
Hatred, yes: the country that invented the Ku Klux Klan has that one well covered. Humour, yes indeed. Expertly nuanced gags flow from the Friends scriptwriting team as fast as Cokes off a robotic bottling line. But satire?
On the face of it, no, for in a place where optimism is virtually compulsory, it requires real bitterness, real disappointment that things are not better than they are. It needs irony; a resource with which Americans, ahem, are not alw...
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