In a world where women can buy a "Just in Case" sports bra with a hidden pocket for weapons, or download the "bSafe" app with a voice-activated SOS alarm, you'd be forgiven for not realizing the "AwarePod," as the Canadian Women's Foundation dubbed its new campaign, is satire.

The film seems sharp, witty and bizarrely humorous. You have to give points to Waititi for taking this creative risk

Imagine there's a virus living inside you. This virus is harmless. Most of the time. But then, something causes it to change and it could kill you unless you take one dose of a powerful drug. Now imagine there is a critical shortage of this drug. This is the scary scenario at the heart of the debut novel by Hanover resident and Dartmouth professor Charles Wheelan. It's called The Rationing, but this isn't a book about a disease. It's a political satire about how the United States government handles the unfolding public health crisis. Personalities clash. Political ambitions get in the way of productive discussion. Fake News opportunists muddy the waters and foreign countries take advantage of a vulnerable United States. Charles Wheelan joined NHPR's Peter Biello to talk about his new book.

A 30-minute guided tour of the latest exhibition in the Milberg Gallery in Firestone Library at Princeton University. Tours meet in the lobby of Firestone Library. The exhibition is open Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday in the Milberg Gallery, Firestone Library. Open to the public. “Monsters and Machines: Caricature, Visual Satire, and the Twentieth-Century Bestiary” will focus on the use of bestiary – animal or zoological motifs – in visual satire during the period between World War I and the end of the Cold War. Drawing from PUL’s rich collections of 20th-century posters, illustrated periodicals, and ephemera from North America, Europe, Asia, Eurasia, and the Middle East, the exhibition will look at works of weaponized visual humor created by and aimed at exponents of different national cultures and ideologies. The exhibition will run from September 12 to December 8, 2024.

to write a satire paper

A stellar cast play leaders of G7 countries facing an existential crisis in Rumours, a smart film about communication, diplomatic nonsense and not coping, says Simon Ings

Manchester : Manchester University Press, [2017]

Written and directed by first-timer Clax, the Telugu dramedy ‘Bedurulanka 2012,’ starring Kartikeya Gummakonda and Neha Shetty, is an indie-spirited narrative that’s delightful in parts 

Over three decades and approaching its 600th show, the Kannada play Mukhyamantri has made its mark as a classic. The play, with its meaning contemporary and dynamic, is a fine example of top notch acting, direction and content

Unite and campaign to evenly redistribute northern India’s polluted air to the rest of the country

Caricaturist James Gillray was arrested over a print showing politicians kissing a new royal baby’s backside

A note-perfect 'clean coal' parody site has become the talk of the Internet. With its Coal Cares campaign, the heretofore unknown activist group Coal is Killing

French satire Deerskin was scheduled to screen in movie theaters this week. Instead, it is now opening online and will help theaters with the money earned on streaming views.

Chen Weng was born in Wuhan and lives in Seattle. Both connections inspire her "Messycow Comics" strips about panic and hoarding.

This uncanny story of preppy drug dealers has a touch of Heathers and a bit of Bret Easton Ellis, and an intriguing take on what high school is really like

Tayarisha Poe, like her partial namesake, has a gift for the uncanny. She is the photographer and film-maker behind this feature debut, which began as an online multimedia project and was developed as a conventional movie through the Sundance screenwriters and directors labs. What has emerged is an intriguing, opaque, tonally elusive story that seems weirdly unfinished. It is set in a privileged high school – a world of ivy-covered stone buildings and shady quadrangles where rich kids are separated into malign and mutually hostile cliques. It has a touch of Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis, a hint of Heathers and a bit of the elegant, disdainful satire of Dear White People.

Somehow, though, it is odder, more stylised and contrived, always holding out the possibility that it is set in the future, or in an alternative present on some other planet, or inside the head of one of its characters who is having a disturbing dream – the kind that ends just as it is about to give up its meaning. Right until the closing credits, I half-expected the face of each person on screen to flip upwards, revealing a Stepford-like set of dials.

Pics/Gautam Benegal

The setting of Gautam Benegal's A1 Chiken Sope cartoons is largely familiar to those who get their meat from the local market. The air is thick with down feathers, and dismembered bits of chicken scattered about, with butchers being none too fussy about our sensitive nerves. In Benegal's hands, however, this scene is turned into a humorous commentary of our contemporary socio-political scenario.

A1 Chiken Sope series, where we meet a butcher named Salim Bhai and his rather chatty coop of chicken, has been one of Benegal's longest series. The National Award-winning animation filmmaker and cartoon first invented A1 Chiken Sope in 2006 for the supplement of a newspaper, after a bird flu scare, when people had stopped consuming chicken. The poultry business was evidently suffering. A minister smuggled in a tandoori chicken leg into the Lok Sabha, and started eating it to prove that it was perfectly safe. "I drew a cartoon of a chicken shop where one bird boasts to another, showing the headlines, 'Hey guys check this out, my second cousin, twice removed, made it to the Lok Sabha'," says Benegal, 52. In 2009 A1 Chiken Sope found more takers, the year when Benegal joined Facebook.

Having made nearly a thousand cartoons in this series, he says, "On social media, you can post a rough sketch and it becomes a mass pool of conversation with several people contributing to it, which is not the case with mainstream media," he says. The chicken, or chiken as Salim Bhai's shop terms them, play the role of both the naive public and the court jester. In one cartoon, the chicken bid adieu to their former coop-mate, bundled in a black bag, as Salim Bhai hands it over to a customer. "There goes Sonu... recruited into the militia," says one hen. "The chicken's work is to get slaughtered. They are a captive population, but a large percentage is happy at being kept. There is a person who is their benefactor, and is selling them out. We are all chicken," he says, adding, "There is an existential angle to this. The only way to escape is to stop being chicken," he says.

About 35 of these cartoons will be shown at Chemould Prescott Road, Fort, starting May 25, for 10 days. You may want to pay close attention to Benegal's caricatures, where the strength of these cartoons lies. Rather than state the obvious visually, Benegal thrives on allusions and references. Everything is an open secret. "I draw a lot from the earlier part of the century, when cartoons were couched in symbolism and stylised references. The latter is true in my case — it's like guerrilla warfare. You won't be able to put your finger on it, but everybody knows and everybody smiles about what they are seeing," says the cartoonist, whose first brush with the art was as a 15-year-old with Satyajit Ray's children's magazine, Sandesh.

There is a certain rawness to them, with a lack of standardisation that we may see with daily cartoons in mainstream media. And Benegal is not interested in polishing them up either. His taste in cartoons, for that matter, is very James Thurber, the American cartoonist who was featured regularly in The New Yorker, and the late Abu Abraham, whose worked for several publications, including Punch and The Observer. "We are used to a very gentle form of cartooning in India, be it themes or visuals. I wanted A1 Chiken Sope to be very ad hoc, much like how politics in India is," he says.

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The BBC’s self-parodying show goes too far – in the direction of complacency, complicity and all-round smugness. But comedy can be a remarkable force for exposing the flaws of the society from which it springs  

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With this, her first novel, Naoise Dolan proves she is a wonderfully sharp, comic writer, adept at making wisecracks in the caustic, knock-'em-off, knock-'em-down tradition of Dorothy Parker

With this, her first novel, Naoise Dolan proves she is a wonderfully sharp, comic writer, adept at making wisecracks in the caustic, knock-'em-off, knock-'em-down tradition of Dorothy Parker

Hayden Library - NX556.A1 G47 2018

STACK SCORE Mu P257 bew

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