apery

No theater could hold out against the laughter of apery at this sight.

The Metamorphosis, in The Penal Colony,and Other Stories Franz Kafka 2000

The petals were so dry and apery that they crumbled at the first touch.

The Seventh Scroll Smith, Wilbur 1995

There was nothing original as yet discoverable in him; nothing to deliver him from the poor imitative apery in which he imagined himself a poet.

Sir Gibbie George MacDonald 1864

Schoppe, the satiric chorus of Jean Paul's romance of Titan, makes his appearance at a certain masked ball, carrying in front of him a glass case, in which the ball is remasked, repeated, and again reflected in a mirror behind, by a set of puppets, ludicrously aping the apery of the courtiers, whose whole life and outward manifestation was but a body-mask mechanically moved with the semblance of real life and action.

A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare George MacDonald 1864

I saw there many women, dressed without regard to the season or the demands of the place, in apery, or, as it looked, in mockery, of European fashions.

Woman in the Ninteenth Century and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition and Duties, of Woman. Margaret Fuller 1830

Hence the comic matter chosen in the first instance is a ridiculous imitation or apery of this constant striving after logical precision, and subtle opposition of thoughts, together with a making the most of every conception or image, by expressing it under the least expected property belonging to it, and this, again, rendered specially absurd by being applied to the most current subjects and occurrences.

Literary Remains, Volume 2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1803

It pleased me far better, than if the houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a nobler taste: for this nobler taste would have been mere apery.

Biographia Literaria Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1803

Hence the comic matter chosen in the first instance is a ridiculous imitation or apery of this constant striving after logical precision and subtle opposition of thoughts, together with a making the most of every conception or image, by expressing it under the least expected property belonging to it, and this, again, rendered specially absurd by being applied to the most current subjects and occurrences.

Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1803

'Self Preserved …' 's loose, jam-based riff colossi stand in stark relief to everyone else's doo-wop apery or sterile poptronica.

NME Features 2010

It was the 1950s, in other words-that time of culture's parody and simulacrum and apery.

FIRST THINGS: On the Square 2010