But not all of the new attitude is brash and self-mocking, insist market researchers.

CNN: Tuned In To Hip

Conservatives will like his strong performance in the debate, with its almost comic, self-mocking repetition of his 9-9-9 plan.

BBC: Rick Perry: Oops and out

Readers will wonder what self-mocking Berlin would have made of this growing monument.

ECONOMIST: Isaiah Berlin

The splashy identity-issue photographs that Asya makes vaguely resemble the film itself, which conveys none of the self-mocking suggested by the title.

NEWYORKER: The Imperialists Are Still Alive!

As the famously roguish Casanova, Malkovich bears an imperious and occasionally self-mocking air, whether eloquently philosophizing, wading into the action himself, or merely watching his younger self carouse.

WSJ: Review: Frisky Malkovich in 'Giacomo Variations'

She reveals that unpublished novels, written when she was very young, may exist somewhere in a Texas archive: useful one day for thesis or biography hunters, but not, if her self-mocking summaries are anything to go by, yet more treasures-in-waiting.

ECONOMIST: English memoirs