by Jon Winokur
Release of the “ironic cover” CD If I Were a Carpenter, with new renditions of old Carpenters songs performed by the Cranberries, Cracker, Sonic Youth, and Sheryl Crow. Fans of the Carpenters, a mawkish but popular act at a time when hard rock and Motown dominated pop charts, are split: Some embrace the new CD as a fitting tribute; others dismiss it as a travesty. Those who hated the Carpenters tend to like the CD.
1996
Contrary to previous data suggesting that appreciation of linguistic irony develops late in the process of language acquisition, a Boston College study finds that children’s sensitivity to rhetorical irony emerges between the ages of five and six.
In his book, The Comedian as Confidence Man: Studies in Irony Fatigue, Will Kaufman, a lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, coins the term “irony fatigue” to describe the humorist’s internal conflict between the social critic who demands to be taken seriously and the joker who never can be. The term will be hijacked to characterize the backlash against facile irony.
Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic,” in which situations purporting to be ironic are merely sad, random, or annoying (a traffic jam when you’re late, a no-smoking sign on your cigarette break) perpetuates widespread misuse of the word and outrages irony prescriptivists. It is of course ironic that “Ironic” is an unironic song about irony. Bonus irony: “Ironic” is widely cited as an example of how Americans don’t get irony, despite the fact that Alanis Morissette is Canadian.
1998
After a nine-season run and weeks of anticipation, Seinfeld, one of the most popular sitcoms in television history, airs its series finale. The episode, written and produced by Larry David, garners 76 million viewers and $4 million per commercial minute, and is hailed as a pop-culture milestone. (One sitcom scholar describes it as a made-for-television “unifying national moment.”)
After witnessing a carjacking in a small New England town, the Seinfeld Four (Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine) are prosecuted for “criminal indifference” under a local Good Samaritan law. Characters from past episodes testify against them, and they’re ultimately convicted of being “indifferent to everything good and decent” and sentenced to a year in jail. Which doesn’t seem to faze them: Rather than show remorse, they worry about how they’ll look in prison uniforms. That is, they’re still the same shallow, narcissistic twits.
Seinfeld finished by destroying its central premise that it was a show about nothing. Instead, it became about something—about the nature of the sitcom and sitcom characters, articulated in a manner that afforded the audience the pleasure of recognition of extra-, intra-, and intertextual references but none of the pleasure of a happy ending. Ironically, many viewers whose enjoyment had come from recognizing the disruptions of narrative conventions were dismayed by the fact that the final episode refused to provide conventional narrative closure.
—Joanne Morreale, “Sitcoms Say Goodbye: The Cultural Spectacle of Seinfeld’s Last Episode,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, fall 2000
John Waters’s movie Pecker ends with an ironic toast to “the death of irony.”
A study reported in the Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy found a schizophrenic group more likely to take ironic utterances literally than did a control group.
1999
The Minnesota Vikings lose to the Atlanta Falcons after Vikings kicker Gary Anderson, who had made forty-six consecutive field goals, misses one in overtime. Asked if he thinks the miss is “ironic,” Vikings coach Dennis Green replies, “I don’t believe in irony. Things happen. It’s part of the game.”
University of Edinburgh undergraduate Richard South, twenty-one, receives a high mark for a spoof essay citing bogus texts and phony theories in an attempt to prove that modern university English Literature courses are filled with pretentious nonsense. His facetious answer to the essay question, “Is it valid to read literature historically?” quotes such imaginary authorities as Art Banditry and Rectus Historicus, and includes such dubious insights as “the only thing a man needs to read a book is glasses.” The English department insists it knew the essay was a spoof and marked it on its own terms. Lecturer James Loxley says he did not believe the marker could have been fooled by such a clearly ludicrous answer and adds: “The marker enjoyed the wit and invention of it and gave reward accordingly … clearly the marker’s comments were equally ironic. One of the fundamental figurative quirks of language is irony—saying what you mean by saying what you don’t mean—and this exam was dedicated to exploring that premise.” But Mr. South is unconvinced: “High-brow efforts to pass off the marker’s reaction to my script as knowing irony are even more implausible than the fantasy sources themselves,” he says.
Bonus irony: Department head Cairns Craig warns others not to try the same trick: “Students will not be able to go into exams thinking they can pass by feats of creative imagination.”
“Irony is now embedded in the language, ubiquitous and invisible,” proclaims Kurt Andersen’s millennial comedy of manners, Turn of the Century.
Twenty-four-year-old Jedediah Purdy publishes For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, an indictment of the “despairing irony” plaguing America. According to Purdy, “unchecked and unchallenged” irony is crippling our young people and rendering our political process impotent. The “ironic temperament” desensitizes us to genuine emotion and ultimately makes us bad citizens. The world no longer interests us, Purdy argues, because we are all “exquisitely self-aware.” We enjoy no intimacy, empathy, or affection that has not been “pronounced on a thirty-foot screen before an audience of hundreds.” We can’t speak of “atonement” or “apology” without knowing that those words “have been put to cynical, almost morally pornographic use by politicians.” Purdy finds “something fearful” in what he calls “today’s ironic manner.” It is, he writes, “a fear of betrayal, disappointment, and humiliation.”
Jedediah Purdy was raised on a farm in West Virginia by ruralist parents who moved there, according to Purdy’s father, to “pick out a small corner of the world and make it as sane as possible.” Home-schooled until he entered Phillips Exeter Academy at the age of sixteen, Purdy graduated from Harvard University and Yale Law School.
This pop-culture bubble boy, having been insulated from what he terms “the subtle codes and taboos of teen culture,” was horrified when, as a Harvard freshman, he witnessed fellow students making fun of Love Story, a 1970 film in which the beautiful young heroine dies of cancer. (“YOU’RE GONNA DIE!” they shout at Ali MacGraw.) There had been no such ironic TV viewing in his experience—indeed, there had been no TV. Purdy fired off a letter to the Harvard Crimson denouncing the ritual as a “cold, self-satisfied … hideous practice” and began thinking about writing a book.
The book, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, becomes a cause célèbre and a litmus test, with reviews ranging from rapturous to vitriolic. Purdy is either a twenty-first-century Thoreau, or a “cornpone prophet.” The New York Times commends him for grappling with the “disease of irony” and anoints him avatar of “The New Sincerity.” Time’s Walter Kirn pronounces Purdy a “brainy nature boy … eloquent beyond his years,” and calls the book an “unfashionably passionate attack on the dangers of modern passionlessness.”
But The New York Observer finds the book “bloated with bombast,” and Harper’s accuses Purdy of promoting “unctuous sentimentality.” Salon calls Purdy’s arguments “intellectual fogy porn,” and the Vancouver Sun attacks his “sanctimonious naïveté,” comparing him to “a Tibetan monk lecturing about wife swapping.” Many of the negative reviews are either obtuse or outright dishonest, ignoring Purdy’s distinction between positive and negative irony. The San Francisco Examiner actually faults Purdy for using the word jejune.
Bonus irony 1: Purdy is unfairly attacked by critics who apparently misunderstand (or haven’t read) the book. In an afterword to the paperback edition published in 2000, Purdy tries t
o clarify: “Where I discuss irony in the book, I mean something specific—the contemporary attitude of wry detachment that avoids taking anyone or anything all that seriously, and easily devolves into a meretricious sarcasm.… It is a dogmatic skepticism, a stance that dismisses without thought or examination.”
Bonus irony 2: Purdy’s book generates the kind of unironic, engagé debate it finds lacking in American society.
Bonus irony 3: Through no fault of his own, Purdy becomes the kind of celebrity he decries.
2000
Douglas Coupland proposes a bumper sticker: HONK IF YOU KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN IRONY AND SARCASM.
David Gates’s Newsweek article, “Will We Ever Get Over Irony?” traces the irony backlash to 1926.
2001
James W. Fernandez and Mary Taylor Huber publish Irony in Action: Anthropology, Practice, and the Moral Imagination, an examination of irony from an anthropological perspective.
2002
Paul Krassner releases the comedy CD Irony Lives! (renamed from its pre-9/11 title, The Devil in Me).
Bumper sticker sighted in Santa Monica, California: MY CHILD WAS VOTED “MOST IRONIC STUDENT” AT CROSSROADS SCHOOL.
2003
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi sparks controversy in the European Parliament when, in response to questioning from German socialist member Martin Schulz about Berlusconi’s use of Italian immunity laws to avoid bribery prosecution, Berlusconi says: “In Italy they are making a movie on Nazi concentration camps. I will propose you for the role of capo.” Despite an official rebuke from Parliament, Berlusconi refuses to withdraw the remark, saying that it was meant as a joke inspired by the German legislator’s “tone and gestures.” “My joke wasn’t meant to be offensive,” Berlusconi maintains. “It was an ironic joke, perhaps the translation wasn’t done in an ironic sense.”
Self-described “ironic-therapist” Dr. Liz Margoshes tells The Village Voice that ironic people have special needs, therapy-wise:
Ironic people often have trouble with the hyper-earnestness of traditional therapists. And they really don’t want their slant toward the world analyzed away as a defense.
Irony is a particularly useful stance in therapy. Seeing the world with ironic detachment is similar to what the Buddhists tell us to work toward—a giving up of attachments or rigid beliefs that get in the way of directly experiencing the world. Irony is a wonderful tool for examining things. You can stand back and watch yourself feel and think. Gradually you change from believing that there is an “objective,” immutable “reality” (“I’m shy,” “Men don’t like me,” “I’ll never get out of this dead-end job,” etc.) to seeing how your beliefs and attitudes are really just thoughts—and thoughts can be changed—and that it’s actually your own subjectivity that’s getting in your way! Once you see that, you start to see that actually there are no limits to what you can think, feel, and do.
—Dr. Liz Margoshes, quoted by Elizabeth Zimmer, “New Stances Sharpen Traditional Disciplines,” The Village Voice, September 17–23, 2003
2004
Ironycorner, a store with nothing but articles of clothing bearing the word IRONY, opens in Tokyo.
In a 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley, Bob Dylan, whose poetic lyrics galvanized a generation of social activists, claims he was misunderstood:
Dylan:
My stuff were songs, you know? They weren’t sermons. If you examine the songs, I don’t believe you’re gonna find anything in there that says that I’m a spokesman for anybody or anything really.
Bradley:
But they saw it.
Dylan:
They must not have heard the songs.
Bradley:
It’s ironic, that the way that people viewed you was just the polar opposite of the way you viewed yourself.
Dylan:
Isn’t that something?
Tom Wolfe’s novel I Am Charlotte Simmons receives the Bad Sex in Fiction award from Britain’s Literary Review, whose judges cite the following excerpt as a sample of Wolfe’s “ghastly and boring” prose:
Slither slither slither slither went the tongue. But the hand, that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns—oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest—no, the hand was cupping her entire right—Now!
Wolfe protests that the passage was meant to be ironic, citing his use of the word otorhinolaryngological: “I purposely chose the most difficult scientific word I could to show this is not an erotic scene,” he explains. “There’s nothing like a nine-syllable word to chase Eros off the premises.”
2005
When JetBlue Flight 292 from Burbank to JFK develops landing gear trouble after takeoff, the Airbus A320 with 145 people aboard circles LAX to burn fuel before attempting an emergency landing. Television networks abandon regular programming to cover the unfolding drama, and passengers watch the live video on in-flight TV. After a safe landing, passenger Alexandra Jacobs tells reporters: “We couldn’t believe the irony that we might be watching our own demise on television—it was all too post-post-modern.”
Concerned over low turnout in elections, especially among young voters, the European Parliament launches a Web site featuring “citizen friendly” information and self-effacingly “ironic” marketing, including T-shirts poking fun at the parliament’s arcane legislative procedures.
2006
David Friedman’s ironicsans.com begins offering “pre-pixelated” clothes.
I IRONY bumper sticker sighted in Branson, Missouri. Bonus irony: I IRONY bumper sticker sighted in Branson, Missouri.
Irony Takes a Holiday
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when we laugh.
—George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma (1911)
During the dark days after the 9/11 attacks, in a climate of heightened national unity, when Americans were telling each other that “everything has changed,” culture commentators announced the death of irony.
There had been irony backlashes before, but nothing like this. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, cofounder of the ultraironic Spy magazine, proclaimed a “new era of earnestness”: “I have a feeling something fresh will emerge, the way people think, the way people create, is going to change,” he wrote. Time magazine essayist Roger Rosenblatt announced the “end of the age of irony” and predicted we would no longer “fail to take things seriously.” The historian Taylor Branch told the Los Angeles Times that the attacks were a “turning point against a generation of cynicism for all of us,” and George Schlatter, producer of the 1960s hit Laugh-In, told The Christian Science Monitor, “This may be an event which historians look back to as the beginning of a new era of sensitivity, introspection, and growth.”
The deadpan fake newspaper The Onion suspended publication, and The New Yorker omitted cartoons. George Carlin changed the title of his HBO special from I Kinda Like It When a Lotta People Die to Complaints and Grievances, and Courtney Love announced plans to enlist in the Marines and buy stock in American companies. (Both the Marines and the market declined.) Several Hollywood films were withdrawn from distribution because they dealt with terrorism, including the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Collateral Damage. Broadway attendance plummeted and theaters went dark. CBS postponed the Emmy Awards show, and the four networks aired a star-studded telethon for 9/11 victims. On The Tonight Show, Jay Leno declared, “Bush is smart now.”
On his first show after the attacks, David Letterman dispensed with an opening monologue and welled up as he wondered aloud whether it was right to do a show so soon. Later, comforting a weeping Dan Rather, Letterman broke into tears himself. “It’s terribly sad here in New York City,” he said. “There is only one requirement for any of us, and that’s to be courageous.”
Writing in GQ, Joe Queenan declared Letterma
n’s teary performance a turning point:
By expressing his unquestionably heartfelt sentiments in a direct and touching fashion, the man who had done more than any other American to elevate irony to a viable urban lifestyle signaled to his colleagues, imitators, and perhaps even Paul Shaffer that the time of sneering detachment had come to an end.
—Joe Queenan, “Unemployment Among Ironists Rose 65% Last Month,” GQ, December 2001
But the Post-Ironic Age never dawned, the New Earnestness failed to take hold, and dissenting voices soon chimed in. New York magazine editor Mark Horowitz answered Graydon Carter: “I think it’s especially funny that the editors of Vanity Fair have become the new imams, spouting moral seriousness and declaring that all frivolity must come to an end. If tourism, real estate, and finance in N.Y. collapse, then people will really be earnest and serious. If we lose our frivolity, that really is a victory for terrorists.”
Jedediah Purdy, who condemned the spread of cynical irony in his 1999 book, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, called for a new kind of irony “to keep dangerous excesses of passion and self-righteousness and extreme conviction at bay,” that is, to combat the kind of fanaticism that motivated the terrorists. David Beers, writing in Salon.com (“Irony Is Dead! Long Live Irony!”), called for an “engaged” irony, while pointing out the irony of abandoning a “cleareyed” ironic sensibility just when we need it most to avoid being swept up in “the new jingoism.” National Public Radio essayist Ralph Schoenstein quipped that the death of irony was about as likely as the death of stupidity. And two weeks after the attacks, The Onion returned with such headlines as:
U.S. VOWS TO DEFEAT WHOEVER IT IS WE’RE AT WAR WITH AMERICAN LIFE TURNS INTO BAD JERRY BRUCKHEIMER MOVIE BUSH SR. APOLOGIZES TO SON FOR FUNDING BIN LADEN IN ’80S