National Lampoon, May 1984
“The Fan’s Journal by Jean Genet”
By Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones
A comic trick is to describe sports in the manner of something completely inapposite, such as football matches described in the language of a theatrical review – although that’s no longer so odd as the sports columns have been infiltrated by overly-educated humanities graduates who want to make some their high culture rub off on popular entertainment. Lookee me, lookeme, look at how cultivated my appreciation is. Match reports which come freighted with associations and similes more appropriate to a high church ceremony. In such a vein, here we get a parody of literary ne’er-do-well Jean Genet giving a baseball report. His usual orchids growing in a sewer metaphors are a unnatural occurrence on the baseball diamond. So in Genet’s florid scandalising poetic style of the bad streets, we get all his usual tricks (pun intended) such as Negroes, faggots, and sailor . Few sports reports will ever make so much of arseholes, semen, recreational drugs and homosexual attraction.
1 comment:
Wow, first-rate parody to my ears. The wind went out of the Lampoon's sails well before the end of the '70s, according to widespread opinion, but gems like this can be found much later than that.
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