[quote]Originally posted by Michael Juster:
"... the fate of light verse generally even more unfair.
Somewhere there is a nifty article to be written on how and why light verse fell out of favor and what might happen to bring it back. "
The problem, as is normal, is perception. There's nothing "light" about the first poem in this thread except it's lilt, which adds to its irony in much the way that Kurt Weil's "light" music added to the bitterness of Brecht's lyrics.
I think that finely attuned humor in general, and particularly satire, has fallen out of favor because it's dangerous. Imagine if we heard on the radio, regularly, today, Tom Leher's "and everybody's got the bomb. It's National Brotherhood Week, National Brotherhood Week...." Or Randy Newman singing "let's drop the big one now." I heard Newman say, "I chose the wrong medium: imagine some guy driving along saying, 'Hey, dig the irony.'"
Bob
|