by Jon Winokur
—Dave Barry, The Miami Herald, August 11, 1996
When you’re younger, you think a little irony is all you need. You think it’ll get you to the grave, but it won’t. Loss always seeps through. You do need to deal with it.
—Douglas Coupland, quoted by Bronwen Hruska, “Is There Life After Irony for Coupland?” San Francisco Chronicle, March 1, 1994
CANADA
Canada? Yes and no. Americans tend to think of Canadians (when we think of them at all) as bland and literal-minded. Canadians (many of whom regard Americans as obnoxious and literal-minded) are divided on the question of their own irony, and the evidence is indeed mixed: Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who proclaimed the death of irony in the wake of 9/11, is Canadian. So is Alanis Morissette, whose 1993 hit “Ironic” is clueless about irony. Lorne Michaels, the Toronto-born creator and executive producer of Saturday Night Live, said of his early days in Canadian television: “The idea of irony—where you say one thing and mean something different, was considered … not straightforward.”
The irony backlash in Canada was ferocious. Writing in Maclean’s in 1999, the American-born Canadian humorist Charles Gordon decried a pervading “ironic sensibility” and “empty cleverness that passes for pop culture [in Canada].” And the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro publicly lamented an excess of irony in her early work: “Irony was so big [in Canada] then that it got under your skin and you sort of didn’t recognize it,” she said in a New Yorker interview.
Yet Canada has produced a world-class irony monger in the novelist and social critic Douglas Coupland, along with such gifted practitioners as the comedians Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara, and Eugene Levy. And if academic interest is any measure of a nation’s irony quotient, Canadian critic Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) is a major contribution to what might be called “irony studies.” The debate is insoluble, of course, so we’ll simply give a giant of Canadian letters the last word:
We are an ironic people; irony and some sourness is mixed in our nature. It is a matter of climate. We are a northern people.
—Robertson Davies, Conversations (1989)
DESPAIR, INC.
A counterinspirational catalog and Web site (despair.com) offering “demotivational” calendars, posters, coffee mugs, and note cards with “positive negations”:
MOTIVATION. THE POSITIVELY NEGATIVE WAY.™
HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL from industries that package and sell it for our consumption. Yet in these troubled times, cynical marketers have begun to fashion negative parodies to soothe the intellects, if not the souls, of a population grown weary of manufactured hope.
With our Positive Negations™ line, these two worlds collide, as idyllic titles are coupled with dispiriting sayings. The result? A meta-level compound that promises happiness from afar, then slaps you in the face for being so gullible. Très postmodern!
Motivation: If A Pretty Poster and a Cute Saying Are All It Takes to Motivate You, You Probably Have a Very Easy Job. The Kind Robots Will Be Doing Soon.
Success: Some People Dream of Success, While Other People Live to Crush Those Dreams.
Ambition: The Journey of a Thousand Miles Sometimes Ends Very, Very Badly.
ESPN SPORTSCENTER
The daily sportscast fairly drips with sportswriterly contempt for everything, and the relentlessly hipper-than-thou ’tude gets old, but the long-running series of commercials for SportsCenter featuring the biggest names in sports are consistently funny.
MAD MAGAZINE
The first experience of irony, satire, and parody for generations of preadolescents.
1985 cover showing Alfred E. Neuman crushed to death beneath a parachuted crate of first-aid supplies
(DC Comics/MAD magazine)
NEW YORKER CARTOONS
The New Yorker has done for irony what Life did for photography.
By the 1930s and ’40s, the New Yorker cartoon had adopted two basic modes. First, it made fun of its readers’ aspirations—social, intellectual, economic, and romantic—by satirizing their language, their professions, their pastimes, their dress, and their physical mannerisms. This was the humor of self-recognition, but also of self-congratulation, since a fool who can laugh at his folly is not a fool but something rarer and finer: a self-ironist.
—Walter Kirn, “Blame The New Yorker,” The New York Times Book Review, December 26, 2004
Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath.
—Renata Adler, Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (2000)
PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING
The deception is transparent, of course, but fans pretend to take it seriously:
“Other professional sports are trite now. There’s no more Kirby Puckett in baseball, no more Michael Jordan in basketball,” offers [college student] Kowalski. “Yeah, wrestling is fixed, but at least there are still superheroes.”
—Carolyn Kleiner, U.S. News & World Report, May 17, 1999
SEINFELD
The self-described “show about nothing,” ostensibly without a moral agenda, whose writers’ guiding principle was “no hugging, no learning,” may have had substance after all:
I think we could have a healthy debate (maybe over at the Entertainment Weekly Web site) as to whether Seinfeld is ironic or is in fact an elegantly gloved Jedediah Purdy–esque critique of irony. In fact, the final episode (a much-underrated encapsulation of the show’s recurrent themes) has an almost Waughian valence in its savage mockery of the loss of self and soul among the cosmopolite heathen. You’ll recall that the four lead characters land in a small New England town where they witness a crime and fail to intervene. They are jailed for violating the town’s Good Samaritan law (talk about the commons!), and the show ends with the four of them in a jail cell recapitulating the dialogue from the show’s first episode, creating an absurdist Moebius strip of solipsism, emptiness, and stone-cold loserdom. Is this not like Tony Last in A Handful of Dust, stranded up the Amazon reading Dickens into eternity for the crazed Mr. Todd?
—Michael Hirschorn, Slate, September 22, 1999
THE SIMPSONS
The Simpsons has more levels than a shopping-mall parking lot.
—Jonah Goldberg, National Review, April 28, 1999
The animated sitcom about a yellow-skinned cartoon family (Homer, his wife Marge, and their children Bart, Lisa, and Maggie) who live in the fictitious town of Springfield, USA, is the longest-running sitcom in history. Its comedy runs the gamut from snappy repartee to goofy slapstick, wicked satire to farce, targeting everything from television itself to the American middle class. (Homer describes his family as “upper lower middle class.”) The densely allusive, obsessively self-referential half-hour has been the subject of serious academic work, much of it positive. Paul A. Cantor of the University of Virginia argues that The Simpsons is one of the most socially conscious programs on television because it encourages good parenting and the nuclear family despite satirizing it. “In effect, the show says, ‘Take the worst case scenario—the Simpsons—and even that family is better than no family,’” writes Professor Cantor. Gerry Bowler, professor of philosophy at Canadian Nazarene College, claims the show promotes religion by taking it seriously enough to make fun of it, noting that in various episodes, “prayer is almost always efficacious,” and “God answers his petitioners almost immediately.”
But before we spoil all the fun, let’s look at the “hyper-irony” theory posited by Carl Matheson, head of the Philosophy department at the University of Manitoba, whose book, The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer (2001) proclaims The Simpsons “the deepest show on television,” but warns against thinking that it has a moral agenda. On the contrary: It is utterly nihilistic, and thereby accurately reflects American society’s lack of a binding ethic, and the show’s “hyper-ironic” humor is “based less on a shared sense of humanity than on a se
nse of world-weary cleverer-than-thou-ness,” Matheson argues. The show promotes nothing, offers no moral lessons, spares nothing and no one. It puts forward positions only to undercut them, without offering something better. According to Matheson, this process of undercutting “runs so deeply that we cannot regard the show as merely cynical; it manages to undercut its cynicism, too.”
The Simpsons … treats nearly everything as a target, every stereotypical character, every foible, and every institution. It plays games of one-upmanship with its audience members by challenging them to identify the avalanche of allusions it throws down to them.… I think that the thirty seconds or so of apparent redemption in each episode of The Simpsons is there mainly to allow us to soldier on for twenty-one and a half minutes of maniacal cruelty at the beginning of the next episode. In other words, the heart-warming family moments help The Simpsons to live on as a series. The comedy does not exist for the sake of a message; the occasional illusion of a positive message exists to enable us to tolerate more comedy.
—Carl Matheson, The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer (2001)
Meta-irony abounds in The Simpsons. Nelson’s laugh (“HA-HA!”) punctuates ironic moments, and there are frequent allusions to both the misuse of the word and the cultural debate over its meaning:
Homer:
How ironic. Now he’s blind after a life of enjoying being able to see!
Bart:
Lisa’s in trouble. Ha! The ironing is delicious.
Lisa:
The word is irony.
Bart:
Huh?
Disaffected youth #1:
Here comes that cannonball guy. He’s cool.
Disaffected youth #2:
Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Disaffected youth #1:
I don’t even know anymore.
TELEVISION
You watch television, you know it’s bad for you, but you can’t stop. Solution: Watch ironically. According to David Foster Wallace, people love/hate television, so they try to “disinfect themselves … by watching TV with weary irony.” For William Gibson, watching television ironically is at the core of American culture:
In our hypermediated age, we have come to suspect that watching television constitutes a species of work. Post-industrial creatures of an information economy, we increasingly sense that accessing media is what we do. We have become terminally self-conscious. There is no such thing as simple entertainment. We watch ourselves watching. We watch ourselves watching Beavis and Butt-Head, who are watching rock videos. Simply to watch, without the buffer of irony in place, might reveal a fatal naïveté.
—William Gibson, “The Net Is a Waste of Time,” The New York Times Magazine, July 14, 1996
WAR
War is ironic, if not for those on the home front, then for those fighting it:
War is ironic because everybody believes that life is pleasurable, and they should. They have a right to believe that, especially if they’re brought up under a Constitution that talks about the pursuit of happiness. To have public life shot through with that kind of optimism and complacency is the grounds for horrible, instructive irony when those generalities prove not true. War tends to prove them not true. War is about survival and it’s about mass killing and it’s about killing or being killed—that is, in the infantry—and it is extremely unpleasant. One realizes that a terrible mistake has been made somewhere, either by the optimistic eighteenth century or by mechanistic twentieth century. The two don’t fit together somehow, and that creates, obviously, irony.
—Paul Fussell, quoted by Sheldon Hackney, “A Conversation with Paul Fussell,” Humanities, November/December 1996
YIDDISHKEIT
Yiddishkeit, literally “Jewishness,” positively brims with irony:
Customer:
Is the soup hot?
Waiter:
No, it’s cold.
—Overheard at the Stage Delicatessen, New York City, circa 1960
During a gigantic celebration in Red Square, after Trotsky had been sent into exile, Stalin, on Lenin’s great tomb, suddenly and excitedly raised his hand to still the acclamations: “Comrades, comrades! A most historic event! A cablegram—of congratulations—from Trotsky!”
The hordes cheered and chortled and cheered again, and Stalin read the historic cable aloud:
JOSEPH STALIN
KREMLIN, MOSCOW
YOU WERE RIGHT AND I WAS WRONG. YOU ARE THE TRUE HEIR OF LENIN. I SHOULD APOLOGIZE.
TROTSKY
You can imagine what a roar, what an explosion of astonishment and triumph erupted in Red Square now!
But in the front row, below the podium, a little tailor called, “Pst! Pst! Comrade Stalin.”
Stalin leaned down.
The tailor said, “Such a message, Comrade Stalin. For the ages! But you read it without the right feeling!”
Whereupon Stalin raised his hand and stilled the throng once more. “Comrades! Here is a simple worker, a loyal Communist, who says I didn’t read the message from Trotsky with enough feeling! Come, Comrade Worker! Up here! You read this historic communication!”
So the little tailor went up to the reviewing stand and took the cablegram from Stalin and read:
JOSEPH STALIN
KREMLIN, MOSCOW
YOU WERE RIGHT AND I WAS WRONG? YOU ARE THE TRUE HEIR OF LENIN? I SHOULD APOLOGIZE?
TROTSKY!
—Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (1968)
Masters of Irony
Irony is a vital presence in the works of great artists, writers, and thinkers, including: Socrates, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Chaucer, Erasmus, Voltaire, Montaigne (“the father of the modern form of ironic skepticism” according to Jedediah Purdy), Cervantes, Benjamin Franklin (the cool Founding Father was a crackerjack self-ironist), Flaubert, Kierkegaard, Anatole France, Thomas Hardy, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, Edith Wharton, O. Henry (in his story “By Courier,” a character speaks “in a deliberate sweet voice that seemed to clothe her words in a diaphanous garment of impalpable irony”), Chekhov, Proust, Pirandello, Kafka, Robert Graves, Somerset Maugham (that virtuoso of detachment), Thomas Mann, Will Rogers (“Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through trying to save”), Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard is narrated by a corpse), Nabokov, Magritte, Brecht, E. M. Cioran (the Romanian aphorist was obsessed with the supreme irony of consciousness, that humankind’s greatest achievement is also its greatest affliction), Evelyn Waugh, Groucho Marx (actually quite hostile), Camus, William Burroughs, Claes Oldenburg, Joseph Heller (Catch-22 has entered the language as shorthand for absurd paradox), M. C. Escher, John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth (only if you deem seriocomic-postmodern-experimentalist-metafictional-fiction ironic), Anne Sexton, George Carlin, Jack Nicholson (“My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son of a bitch”), François Truffaut, Umberto Eco (every word he writes means something else, including and and the), Calvin Trillin (“Math was my worst subject because I could never persuade the teacher that my answers were meant ironically”), Steve Martin, Paul Krassner (the motto of his underground paper, The Realist, was “Irreverence is our only sacred cow”), Andy Warhol (was he a master of irony or did irony master him?), John Waters (the mustache alone!), Martin Mull (always funny but I never believe a word he says), Kurt Andersen, David Letterman (before 9/11), Andy Kaufman (the self-described “anti-humorist” never “broke the fourth wall”), Bill Murray (may not have a single unironic bone in his body), Joe Queenan, Jim Jarmusch, Garry Shandling (“I think there is a great irony in the fact that I had to decide whether I wanted to host a show—because I was offered those late-night shows—or whether I wanted to do a show about a guy who hosts a show”), Dennis Miller (master ironic allusionist), John Malkovich (claims he can’t act unless the words contradict what the character feels), Quentin Tarantino, Jerry Seinfeld (“irony incarnate,” per Jed Purdy), Larry David (plays a character just like him named Larry David), Ka
thy Griffin, Stephin Merritt, David Foster Wallace (though he considers himself a “realist”), Dave Chappelle, Louis Theroux, Jon Stewart (in a deliciously ironic reversal, The Daily Show’s “fake news” anchor excoriated CNN Crossfire hosts Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson for not taking their jobs seriously), Stephen Colbert, and the following.
John Waters’s ironic mustache
(Getty Images/Evan Agostini)
JANE AUSTEN (1775–1817)
Witty chronicler of middle-class manners and morals in eighteenth-century England whose narrators employ understatement and irony to instruct and uplift readers. Austenian irony is gentle and constructive, an irony of engagement. She ironizes because she loves, and wants to make things better. Witness two examples from Pride and Prejudice:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Elizabeth’s eyes were fixed on her with most painful sensations, and she watched her progress through the several stanzas with an impatience which was very ill rewarded at their close; for Mary, on receiving, amongst the thanks of the table, the hint of a hope that she might be prevailed on to favour them again, after the pause of half a minute began another. Mary’s powers were by no means fitted for such a display; her voice was weak, and her manner affected. Elizabeth was in agonies. She looked at Jane, to see how she bore it; but Jane was very composedly talking to Bingley. She looked at his two sisters, and saw them making signs of derision at each other, and at Darcy, who continued, however, imperturbably grave. She looked at her father to entreat his interference, lest Mary should be singing all night. He took the hint, and when Mary had finished her second song, said aloud, “That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit.”