Intellectual Grand Slam

John Clarke – the NZ comedian who “rates as a national institution” across the Tasman –  delights critics with his latest book, The Tournament. A blistering satire, The Tournament involves a fictitious tennis contest between the leading lights of the modernist movement – such “cultural titans” as Duchamp, Eliot, Joyce and de Beauvoir. Clarke sees satire as the last bastion of democracy: “The world is full of ideas, full of interesting ways of looking at things. It’s all an antidote to being lied to.”