Adam Gopnik, in a piece about Kingsley Amis (“The Old Devil,” The New Yorker, April 23, 2007), adduces a transatlantic divide in favored types of satire:
The Larry David character [in "Curb Your Enthusiasm"] doesn’t mind keeping up the nice-guy act so long as he never actually has to do anything unselfish; the Amis men expect that they will eventually have to act unselfishly, since that’s what life and the world squeeze out of you, but they hate having to keep up the nice-guy act. . . . One kind of comedy comes from having to show more than you can really feel, the other from the embarrassment of feeling more than you ever want to show.
