Satire

It's been revealed that the Obama administration named its war against Libya -- Operation Odyssey Dawn -- after a little-known album by English progressive rock band Yes.  But what hasn't been revealed are the names of other album titles seriously considered by Obama's inner circle during the build-up to the attack. Through our well-placed sources at the White House, we present to you the Top 10 Rejected "Operation Odyssey Dawn" Names.  Here we go:  10. C-Murder,  Operation The Truest S--- I Ever Said Why it was considered:  It sounded hard-core.

"VEEP," the Baltimore-made political satire starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, will start its second season April 14, HBO announced Monday. Here is the release from HBO:             The Emmy®-nominated comedy series VEEP kicks off its ten-episode second season SUNDAY, APRIL 14 (10:00-10:30 p.m. ET/PT), exclusively on HBO. Created by Armando Iannucci (Oscar® nominee for co-writing “In the Loop”), the show stars Emmy®-winner Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Selina Meyer, who becomes vice president, only to discover the job is nothing like she expected, but everything she was warned about.

Ben Jonson's 1609 farce, The Silent Woman, was among the playwright's greatest hits. Both John Dryden and Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the word "perfect" to describe this satire of Jacobean society. But American audiences are largely unfamiliar with the work, which is receiving its first-known professional American production at Washington's Shakespeare Theatre, where it is currently in previews. Under Michael Kahn's direction, Ted van Griethuysen stars as Morose, an aging, noise-phobic bachelor who marries Epicoene (Ricki Robichaux)

I'd like to thank The Sun for the wonderful satire on Sarah Palin's presidential prospects ("For president in 2016: Guess who?" Nov. 26). Some readers may have mistakenly assumed that op-ed contributor Charlotte Allen was seriously suggesting that the stunningly unqualified Ms. Palin would make a plausible presidential candidate in 2016. But the author's sly tongue-in-cheek and wink of the eye were everywhere evident to discerning readers. For example, the list of Ms. Palin's "qualifications" for the presidency included: (a)

THE CRAWLSPACE CONSPIRACY. By Thomas Keech. Baskerville Publishers. 328 pages. $22. WHAT! ANOTHER lawyer who thinks he can write fiction? Yes, but Thomas Keech, a Baltimorean and an assistant Maryland attorney general, can really do it. What's more, he doesn't write formula junk like murder mysteries. His first novel, "The Crawlspace Conspiracy," is satire, one of the most difficult literary forms to master. What's more, it's satire about politics and bureaucracy in the Queen City of the Patapsco Drainage Basin, a metropolis once called the Largest Unknown City in America, the Monumental City, where else but Baltimore, of which little satire has every been written and even less that's any good.

HOLLYWOOD'S efforts to deliberately rankle conservatives continue unabated. The latest attempt is Warren Beatty's "Bulworth," which opened nationwide earlier this month.The film has a number of things going for it. Beatty's movie -- he's the co-writer, director and star -- is screamingly funny. In some parts, it is brutally honest.Beatty plays California U.S. Sen. Jay Bulworth, who suddenly loses his mind and, during his re-election campaign, starts uttering truth instead of drivel. He tells a Jewish group that he includes all "the big Jews" on his speaking tours and includes an obligatory derogatory remark about Louis Farrakhan in his speeches.

As a biographer of H. L. Mencken, I should know better than to perpetrate a hoax in a newspaper, but last Monday, in my column in the lower left-hand corner of the page opposite this one, I so perped, provoking confusion, suspicion, disbelief, outrage at the Smithsonian Institution, outrage at me and an appeal for a correction, which this is.In 1917 Mencken wrote a made-up ''history'' of the bathtub which asserted that Millard Fillmore installed the first...

Ah, the irony, the irony.The play at AXIS Theatre has a title unprintable in a family newspaper. The New York Times called it "a play by Mac Wellman" when it was produced off-Broadway, so this critic is going to call it "a play the New York Times called a play by Mac Wellman."The title is unprintable because it includes a slang term for a sex act. The irony of its unprintability is that the play itself is about knee-jerk reactions to sexually explicit art.Wellman wrote it as a satire of the controversy sparked by right-wing reaction to the exhibition of photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe, a controversy in which conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms figured prominently.

Kidnappings, shootouts, gun-brandishing women and a rogue hero all wrapped up in one convoluted plot: What more could an action-movie fan ask for? How about a dash of satire? Lethal Force, a 70-minute parody of B action movies, has all of this -- plus an onslaught of ketchup-like blood effects and a power drill scene that would make Tim "The Tool-Man" Allen cringe. "[Lethal Force] is about a guy whose son gets kidnapped, wife is murdered and is forced to betray his best friend," says Kristen Anchor, coordinator of Baltimore's Creative Alliance Movie Makers, which is presenting the film Friday at the Creative Alliance in Highlandtown.

Dick Smothers, half of the Smothers Brothers duo that drov CBS censors batty in the '60s, says most of today's TV satire "is terribly insensitive."Shows such as NBC's "Saturday Night Live" and Fox's "In Living Color" "don't seem to care who they hit or who they hurt," says Mr. Smothers, whose left-wing, antiwar "Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" was abruptly canceled after three seasons in 1969. "Our satire was more gentle, nudging. It wasn't coarse."In a move sure to attract baby boomers with political memories, reruns of the classic comedy-variety show will run weeknights at 8 on cable's E!

During the entire duration of my odd email exchange with "PASSIONGAMER4CHANGE," I was never completely sure whom I was talking to. If 60 percent of statistics are made up, then 40 percent of all Twitter accounts are owned by someone who is not who they portray themselves as. "PASSIONGAMER4CHANGE" is a character (probably), who masterfully satirizes what's going on in the video games world by portraying a disillusioned fanboy through Twitter (@RPGsbebroke) and Tumblr (rpgsbebroke.tumblr.com)

From a Sunday magazine cover piece to Page One stories and blogs posts, I feel like I have been writing about the new HBO satire "VEEP" for at least a year. But the series starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus  as Selina Meyer, a former senator who becomes vice president of the United States, doesn't debut until Sunday. I've been writing about it so much because this rich and daring series from Armando Iannucci is Maryland made. So, everyone knows what I think about "VEEP. " I love the performance by Louis-Dreyfus, who takes great risks and nails comedic nuances that most TV actors never get within shouting distance of intheir careers.

It's a cold, gray Friday afternoon in a dark and drafty concrete warehouse at an industrial park in Columbia. Not exactly the setting in which anyone would expect to find glamour, wit or the next big thing in pop culture. But through a series of doors built into a maze of temporary walls and stage flats, there's a group of a dozen tall director's chairs bearing Vice President of the United States seals set in two ragged rows along with a bank of TV monitors and warming lights. And in the center of the first row, sitting sideways in a black power suit coat and skirt, legs casually crossed, is Julia Louis-Dreyfus, star of HBO's new political satire "VEEP.

This just in: With mega disaster MySpace off of News Corp.'s books, chief Rupert Murdoch bets on cleavage, says the following "letter" leaked to press: Dear Ms. Knowles, May I call you Beyoncé? My wife Wendi is a big fan of yours. Her iPod is stacked with your albums. Her favorite song is "Single Ladies (Put a ring on it). " Let me tell you, I did. My reason for writing is Wendi. She thinks I need to capitalize on the "Fox Look" by starting a fashion line. You probably already know this, but I am chairman and chief executive officer of News Corp., parent company of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post, and I thankfully, finally, offloaded MySpace — my little social networking mistake!

The young theater ensembles around town haven't cornered the market on the edgy or the avant-garde. The Vagabond Players , more readily associated with mainstream (or at least near-mainstream) repertoire, is closing its 95th season with a decidedly offbeat item, "Abducting Diana," by Italian playwright Dario Fo, the 1997 Nobel Prize laureate for literature. It's a gutsy choice for the company, but the play, a combination of satire, farce and a dash of commedia dell'arte, seems to suffer in the translation.

The pink flamingo-shaped lights decorating the balcony rail of a mobile home in Florida signal the level of taste on display in “The Great American Trailer Park Musical.” This 2005 off-Broadway musical indulges in lowbrow satire, but the music and lyrics by David Nehls and book by Betsy Kelso are highly skillful in conveying  lowly material. If the production at the Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre immediately gets into the show’s trashy spirit, it’s surely because four of the cast members (Maribeth Eckenrode, Kristen Zwobot, Karina Ferry and R. Brett Rohrer)

An agent so afraid of all his clients that his stomach rumbles like Vesuvius. A superstar hired for an action film who shows up looking bearded and burly, like Steve McQueen as Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of the People. A cutting-edge director who banks his career on a bloody climax involving Sean Penn, three thugs and a dog. These elements of the terrific new comedy What Just Happened? have caused some reviewers to label it a satire and judge it by the standards of satire, weighing whether it's as stringent or cutting as it might be. Yet as anyone knows who's read Art Linson's source book of the same name (or his previous book, A Pound of Flesh)

Like the perfect mate or the ultimate Western omelet, great satire on film is next to impossible to find, usually because filmmakers are afraid to crack a few eggs and to have faith in their audience.If all-out satire is to work on the big screen, the director, the screenwriter and the cast have to be willing to play each situation out to its illogical extreme without fear of appearing too foolish.Likewise, all involved in the farce have to trust that the audience is smart enough to get what's going on and buy into it without hesitation.

Perhaps you saw the report on Drudge about "closet-gate,"  which broke this weekend , in which staffers for Vice President Joe Biden constrained a Florida journalist to closet during a fundraiser at a wealthy developer's house. But what you haven't heard about -- until now -- is the 4-minute phone call that preceded that deprivation of freedom. Through our well-placed sources at the White House, we present to you the entire transcript of that phone call between party host Alan Ginsburg and the vice president.

It's been revealed that the Obama administration named its war against Libya -- Operation Odyssey Dawn -- after a little-known album by English progressive rock band Yes.  But what hasn't been revealed are the names of other album titles seriously considered by Obama's inner circle during the build-up to the attack. Through our well-placed sources at the White House, we present to you the Top 10 Rejected "Operation Odyssey Dawn" Names.  Here we go:  10. C-Murder,  Operation The Truest S--- I Ever Said Why it was considered:  It sounded hard-core.