Everywhere, paint has peeled scabrously.

Spike Lee has grabbed a tiger by the tail in his scabrously risky new comedy, "Bamboozled."

Newsweek called it "a scabrously funny satire of real-estate magnates in Dubya's Texas".

The next morning, they trooped through the crumbling interior, where plaster chunks had fallen scabrously amid colonies of wavy-capped white fungi.

When the scabrously funny Bridesmaids staggered into cinemas recently, it swiftly reignited the debate about the way Hollywood deals with half its potential audience.

He was gossipy, indiscreet and scabrously funny about his enemies (step forward Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton).

Mr. Landau's hilariously crotchety Bela Lugosi is as poignant as he is scabrously funny.

If the body language largely suggests a hollow indifference to the anguish being anatomized so relentlessly, at times scabrously, suffering is no more readily legible in Ms. Huppert's delivery of the text.

There's no denying that Queenan's prose can be scabrously entertaining, though he is usually funnier at the length of the essay, where the mockery has less time to congeal into bile or mere shtick.

Richard Rushfield's scabrously funny first novel, ON SPEC (St. Martin's, $21.95), is a cautionary tale about Hollywood and a contemporary take on a morality play, or rather, script.

Makeshift buildings cluttered the cracks of the city's hive form, sand and plaster, sagging and peeling; aging scabrously, ungracefully, against the support of far more ancient buildings as eternal as the sea itself.

Reviewing the episode for EW, Ken Tucker called the episode "scabrously funny" and summed up its message as "[k]nowledge really matters; many people are lazy and consequently become prey to exploitation."

Such is the setup of "Sexual Healing," Jill Nelson's first novel, described by its publisher as a "steamy and scabrously funny . . . comedy of outraged manners," an altogether fair, even slightly modest, assessment.

He received his first batch of rave reviews only a few years out of school for his production of "The Lime Tree Bower," a scabrously funny trio of monologues that included a memorable portrait of a degenerate, drunken academic.

With its harshly funny portrait of the penny-pinching gentry, of greedy nuns and aggressive salespeople pushing pressure cookers as miraculous kitchen tools, the film offers a scabrously mocking portrait of officialdom putting on a display that is as grotesque as it is hypocritical.

The crucial role of Thersites, a clownish Greek camp follower who scabrously decries his world of "wars and lechery," is woefully miscast with a glib performer (David Manis) who seems like a wisecracking middle-class graduate student, not a cynical, psychically corroded witness to years of war-front atrocities.

To balance the star-struck enthusiasm of his young alter ego, William (played by Patrick Fugit), Mr. Crowe brings the great, scabrously honest clown-poet rock critic Lester Bangs (nicely underplayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman) into the picture to serve as a reality check and as the film's subterranean-homesick conscience.

Becoming increasingly disillusioned with the music business and politically radical, Sky released the controversial and scabrously satirical Songs That Made America Famous in 1973 (the album was recorded in 1971 but rejected by several record companies before it found a home); to this day he claims to have received no royalties for the album.