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Always
the picture of sartorial elegance in her signature bespoke
pantsuits, cigarette in hand, Fran Lebowitz has been dispensing a
particularly dry brand of New York humor for the better part of
thirty years. A modern-day Dorothy Parker with more than a
hint of Oscar Wilde and perhaps a soupçon of Mark Twain, Lebowitz
has been a fixture on the New York cultural scene since the 70's
when she began her career as a columnist for Andy Warhol's Interview.
Lebowitz's
rapier-sharp wit and sardonic pronunciamenti are the
perfect companion for a lazy Sunday afternoon, an antidote for the
blues and all forms of dull conversation. She spares few
people in her finely-crafted essays and remarks, which can be
found in her two best-known works - Metropolitan Life and Social
Studies - both of which are included in The Fran Lebowitz
Reader. Like Wilde, Lebowitz achieves comic effect by
playing with commonplace meanings, inverting logic, using the
duplicity of the double entendre, or by ending a sentence with a
complete contresens. Lebowitz is particularly fond of
targeting the disingenuous and the inane, the religious and the
self-righteous, or any of the sacred cows that need an occasional
debunking - the more politically incorrect an observation, the
better. "The girl in your class who suggests that this
year the Drama Club put on The Bald Soprano will be a thorn
in people's sides all of her life."
As
with the most successful humorists, a humanistic streak underlies
Lebowitzian wit, a sometimes coy but earnest desire to improve the
intellectual tenor of a conversation or to distinguish the
outstanding from the merely pedestrian: "Great people talk
about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people
talk about wine." "Vegetables are interesting but
lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of
meat."
Fran
Lebowitz is an essayist extraordinaire and master of
eloquent badinage, who coined the marvelous 'audibly tan'
[Californians], a New Yorker par excellence with just
enough self-deprecatory awareness to announce, deadpan:
"Success didn't spoil me, I've always been
insufferable." A yiddishe kopf with enough
Jewish angst to declare: "There is no such thing as inner
peace. There is only nervousness or death. Any attempt
to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behavior."
She is also possessed of an abiding love for New York City that
once led her to declare: "When you leave New York, you are
astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is
not enough."
See:
The
Fran Lebowitz Reader
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