American satire is enjoying something of a bittersweet golden age these days thanks to the extreme excesses of contemporary conservatism and right wing Christianity. Creatures like Ann Coulter, Dick Cheney, and Pat Robertson are to satire what the richest organic manure is to an abundant and thriving agricultural system.

According to Merry Webster, "satire" is "a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule; a trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly."

In that sense, George W. Bush has made America a good place to live — for a satirist.

Historically, notable satirists have included Aristophanes, Rabelais, Twain, and Vonnegut.

In contemporary American pop culture, some of the shinier baubles of this new golden age include The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, South Park and Real Time With Bill Maher. One could even argue that Ann Coulter herself is a satirical version of Eva Braun and that Bill O'Reilly is a satirical version of Joseph Goebbels.

And if you're in New York City at the moment and have a taste for some live and in person satire, a brilliant and astonishing example of this genre of political and social commentary is slaughtering American pop culture on West 24th Street.

Through October 7, The Cutting Room is hosting Seattle performance artist Grady West in the terrifying and Hannibal Lecter-funny person of alleged drag queen Dina Martina. And the great news is that Dina delivers two shows in one, just like Doublemint chewing gum. She's an outrageous drag queen with an insane sense of humor that has half the audience struggling through a relentless succession of good old-fashioned belly laughs, but she's also a brilliant satirist and commentator on American pop culture that leaves the other half of the audience in a state of jaw-dropping wonder.

Like all comedic geniuses, Dina leaves you with the impression that she's frantically ad libbing and working off audience input and reaction when in fact 95 percent of her monologue is a brilliantly crafted script. (She confessed this to me after the show while I was examining her huge surrealistic cameltoe in an attempt to understand its "origin.")

Dina Martina drags you kicking and screaming on a roller coaster ride through a brutally honest and thoroughly insane world of American pop culture that includes the joys of trailer park life; malapropisms worthy of Norm Crosby, Richard Sheridan and Emily Litella; several bizarre perversions of American music including popular, rock and country; and freakish nods to American icons like Carol Channing, Divine, John Waters, Andy Warhol, Ritalin, and Rip Taylor.

Article Author: Richard Rothstein

A native New Yorker with decades of experience in journalism and public. Born the same year as modern Israel and still with as many issues. We're both working on it.

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