sarcastic reviewing can be funny

Sorry if this offends anyone, but I enjoyed the following passage in John Gray’s review of Hardt/Negri/Zizek:

“Commonwealth, the last volume in the series, adds very little to the previous two. There are a couple of sections purporting to deal with the collapse of American hegemony but nothing that addresses its real impact, which is to recreate a decentred world of several great powers competing with one another much as the great powers did at the end of the 19th century.

The style remains a mix of strangulated jargon and toe-curling uplift. ‘The notion of social becoming,’ the authors inform us, ‘suggests the possibility of moving out of the anti-modernity of indigenism in the direction of an indigenous altermodernity.’ Moving from intra-academic obscurity to bad poetry, at the end of the book they write: ‘The process of instituting happiness will constantly be accompanied by laughter… While we are instituting happiness, our laughter is a pure as water.’

This is radical theory in the idiom of Monty Python. The painful quandaries of politics are wiped away, and all that remains is feelgood blather dressed up as neo-Marxian analysis. It is a relief to turn from this pap to Slavoj Zizek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, a book which for all its faults makes clear that revolution necessarily involves large doses of suffering and coercion.”

Book reviews seem to be the most appropriate medium for sarcasm, which can be hilarious even when you like the book in question.

Or film reviews… I still remember the first sentence of the Chicago Reader’s review of the first of the new Star Wars films: “Not half bad, for a toy commercial.” Or when they maliciously subtitled “Cool Runnings” as “Uncle Tom’s Bobsled.”