" Barry" mercilessly mocks the plight of actors, but it also takes the work seriously, defending acting as a calling, as a way to address despair and as a technique for transformation and change.
Aldous Huxley, the novelist grandson of T. H. Huxley, who lived with the Haldanes for a time, parodied him, a touch mercilessly, as the scientist Edward Tantamount in the novel Point Counter Point.