April 6, 2012: American Satire

[This week, in honor of April Fool’s Day, I’ll be highlighting various American Studies connections to the holiday—not just to foolishness, but to pranks, jokes, and humor. This is the fifth and final post in the series.]

Highlighting (more briefly than ideal, but they speak for themselves) five great works of American satire.

1) Washington Irving’s A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809)

2) Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger (1898)

3) Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

4) Tim Robbins’ film Bob Roberts (1992)

5) Jon Stewart and The Daily Show’s America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction (2004)

You’d be a fool not to check these out! Belated March recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. Any American satires you’d highlight?

4/6 Memory Day nominee: James Watson, the molecular biologist whose discovery (in collaboration with Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin) of the DNA molecule and its double helix structure earned him the Nobel Prize and changed the face of virtually every aspect of biology, genetics, and medicine (among other fields).