by Jon Winokur
SANDRA BERNHARD (1955–)
Comedian-actress-singer known as the Queen of Irony for her satirical one-woman shows, she was a staunch defender of irony in the dark days immediately after 9/11:
The minute you lose your sense of irony, you might as well blow your head off. What’s the point of living if you can’t see something deeper in every situation? That’s what irony provides.
—Sandra Bernhard, quoted by Neva Chonin in the San Francisco Chronicle, December 10, 2001
RANDOLPH BOURNE (1886–1918)
A progressive American social critic at the turn of the century, he employed irony as a weapon first against the militarism that swept the nation in 1915 and then against the subsequent world war, a stand that would isolate him for the rest of his short life (he died in the 1918 influenza epidemic). Bourne is probably best remembered for his unfinished essay, “War Is the Health of the State,” a paean to the ironic life, which he defined as “a life keenly alert, keenly sensitive, reacting promptly with feelings of liking or dislike to each bit of experience, letting none of it pass without interpretation and assimilation, a life full and satisfying—indeed a rival of the religious life.” The ironist is ironical, Bourne wrote, “not because he does not care, but because he cares too much.”
SACHA BARON COHEN (1971–)
Cambridge-educated comedian whose Da Ali G Show is a cult favorite on HBO. “Ali G” is ostensibly a misogynistic malaprop of a black man from the London suburb of Staines (Baron Cohen describes him as an “overconfident ignoramus”), but the character is really a white man trying to be black: Ali G, it turns out, is not a Middle-Eastern name, but short for “Alistair Graham,” a gangsta-rapper-wannabe send-up of middle-class kids who appropriate black street culture. Ali G, then, is a white man pretending to be a black man, which makes Baron Cohen a white man pretending to be a white man pretending to be a black man.
By telling guests they’re appearing on an educational program for young people, the show’s producers wangle interviews with such authority figures as Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Ali G introduces him as “Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali”), James Baker, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, C. Everett Koop, Ralph Nader, Brent Scowcroft, Richard Thornburgh, and former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, who actually raps on the show (“I was attorney general / My name is Meese / I say go to college / Don’t carry a piece”).
Ali G is a twenty-first-century eiron who exposes pomposity by pretending to be stupid. He subverts stereotypes by reinforcing them. He asks cringingly embarrassing questions that his victims take seriously—or pretend to take seriously out of pathological political correctness—and thereby humiliate themselves, as did former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh:
Ali G:
Did they ever catch the people who sent Tampax through the post?
Scowcroft:
No, they did not. And it wasn’t Tampax, it was anthrax.
Ali G:
I think they is different brand names. Like we say pavement, you say sidewalk, whatever. There is different words for the …
Scowcroft:
Well, maybe, but anthrax is the germ and Tampax is something very different.
Ali G:
What is legal?
Thornburgh:
Well, I think most conduct most of us engage in on a day-to-day basis is legal.
Ali G:
So, what is illegal?
Thornburgh:
What is illegal is what the elected representatives of the people define as crimes.
Ali G:
What is barely legal?
Thornburgh:
Well, that’s where you get into technicalities and you have trials.
Ali G:
’Cause me saw dis film called Barely Legal Three and it was about these two naughty college girls and them have done their own work and then as punishment they had to have a three-header with their supervisor, this teacher. Is that to do with the law?
Thornburgh:
Uh, it’s hard to say. That’s probably governed by the rules of the institution, the college.
Bonus irony: The 2002 London premiere of Baron Cohen’s feature film, Ali G Indahouse, was met with anti-racist protests, apparently on the ground that working-class black street culture is somehow exempt from parody, which, of course, is itself a racist attitude.
YOGI BERRA (LAWRENCE PETER BERRA, 1925–)
The former New York Yankees catcher and manager is celebrated as much for his unintentionally ironic pronouncements as for his accomplishments on the field:
We were overwhelming underdogs.
You can observe a lot just by watching.
When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
If people don’t want to come to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?
Bonus irony: One of Yogi’s most famous lines, “I really didn’t say everything I said,” may not have been his: Over the years, sportswriters fabricated Yogi-esque quotes that Yogi adopted.
MASON COOLEY (1927–)
The American aphorist is both a practitioner and a connoisseur, as these selections from his City Aphorisms attest:
The ironies in the commonplace are my inspiration and delight.
A frog in love would not be enchanted to learn that her beloved had turned into Prince Charming.
Irony regards every simple truth as a challenge.
Self-pity makes people callous.
Irony dissolves sentiment, but occasionally a sentiment is strong enough to dissolve irony.
Travelers never think that they are the foreigners.
The moment of orgasm is no time for ironic comments.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND (1961–)
Post-ironic Canadian novelist, culture critic, and neologist who named “Generation X” and made it famous in his novel of the same name. Coupland’s mordant coinages expose the vacuity of postmodern irony:
Knee-Jerk Irony: The tendency to make flippant, ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation.
Derision Preemption: A life-style tactic; the refusal to go out on any sort of emotional limb so as to avoid mockery from peers. Derision Preemption is the main goal of Knee-Jerk Irony.
Obscurism: The practice of peppering daily life with obscure references (forgotten films, dead TV stars, unpopular books, defunct countries, etc.) as a subliminal means of showcasing both one’s education and one’s wish to disassociate from the world of mass culture.
O’Propriation: The inclusion of advertising, packaging, and entertainment jargon from earlier eras in everyday speech for ironic and/or comic effect: “Kathleen’s Favorite Dead Celebrity party was tons o’ fun” or “Dave really thinks of himself as a zany, nutty, wacky, and madcap guy, doesn’t he?”
Squirming: Discomfort inflicted on young people by old people who see no irony in their gestures. “Karen died a thousand deaths as her father made a big show of tasting a recently manufactured bottle of wine before allowing it to be poured as the family sat in Steak Hut.”
—Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991)
JACQUES DERRIDA (1930–2004)
Algerian-born French philosopher and critic whose ironic “deconstruction” of literary and philosophical texts looks not at what is ostensibly intended but rather at the effect of what is stated, thus favoring interpretation over content.
To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
—Jacques Derrida (attributed)
DAVE EGGERS (1970–)
Editor and founder of the literary magazine McSweeney’s and author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), a bestselling memoir of how he became the single parent of his eight-year-old brother after the deaths of their parents. Filled with self-consciously self-conscious reflections on self-reflection, AHWSG takes self-irony to sublimely ridiculous levels. Eggers, it turns out, is not only a practitioner and connoisseur,
but also an irony-prescriptivist:
When someone kids around, it does not necessarily mean that he or she is being ironic. That is, when one tells a joke, in any context, it can mean, simply, that a joke is being told. Jokes, thus, do not have to be ironic to be jokes. Further, satire is not inherently ironic. Nor is parody. Or any kind of comedy. Irony is a very specific and not all that interesting thing, and to use the word/concept to blanket half of all contemporary cultural production—which some aged arbiters seem to be doing (particularly with regard to work made by those under a certain age)—is akin to the too-common citing of the “Midwest” as the regional impediment to all national social progress (when we all know the “Midwest” is ten miles outside of any city). In other words, irony should be considered a very particular and recognizable thing, as defined above, and thus, to refer to everything odd, coincidental, eerie, absurd, or strangely funny as ironic is, frankly, an abomination upon the Lord. (Re that last clause, not irony, but a simple, wholesome, American-born exaggeration).
—Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2001 Vintage edition)
ALAN GREENSPAN (1926–)
More a master of obfuscation than irony, the former Federal Reserve board chairman warrants inclusion on this list for his impenetrable pronouncements, including the tour de force:
I guess I should warn you: If I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said.
—Alan Greenspan, speech to the Economic Club of New York, 1988
CHRISTOPHER GUEST (1948–)
Probably the world’s foremost “mockumentarian,” he wrote, directed, and acted in such quasi-improvisational classics as Waiting for Guffman (1996), Best in Show (2000), and A Mighty Wind (2003), but is perhaps still best known for his portrayal of Nigel Tufnel in the mock rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap (1984, directed by Rob Reiner).
JERZY KOSINSKI (1933–1991)
Polish-born American novelist whose suicide note read: “I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call the time Eternity.” Chance, the protagonist of Kosinski’s 1971 novel Being There, is a simple-minded gardener who never left the estate until his employer died. His naïve, TV-informed utterances are mistaken for profundity by self-deluded stuffed shirts whose plans and schemes are thereby exposed as folly.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616)
The great English playwright and poet is the ultimate master of irony. His plays are all about the unintended consequences of words and actions; his characters are always making blunders caused by the gap between appearance and reality. Disguises, mistaken identities, and misunderstandings produce multiple layers of irony: Lear rejects the daughter who loves him most; Mark Antony’s praise for Brutus is really blame; Olivia falls in love with her ideal man, who turns out to be a woman. And then there’s Hamlet: ambivalent, alienated, solipsistic, and tragically ironic:
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
—Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
Irony is what keeps Hamlet going … he’s the Dave Eggers of medieval Denmark.
—Charles McGrath, “No Kidding: Does Irony Illuminate or Corrupt?”, The New York Times, August 5, 2000
SARAH SILVERMAN (1970–)
Standup comic, actress, and writer whose irony springs from the incongruity between her demure persona and the scathing content of her material. Her punch lines are razor-sharp ironic twists:
I was raped by a doctor. Which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.
Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I’m one of the few people that believe it was the blacks.
I was licking jelly off of my boyfriend’s penis and all of a sudden … all of a sudden it hit me … Oh my God! I’m turning into my mother!
[The events of September 11] were devastating. They were beyond devastating. I don’t want to say especially for these people, or especially for these people, but especially for me, because it happened to be the same exact day that I found out that the soy chai latte was, like, nine hundred calories. I had been drinking them every day. You hear soy, you think healthy. And it’s a lie. It was also the day we were attacked.
I want to get an abortion, but my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving.
Appearing on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 2001, Silverman told a joke that used an ethnic slur ironically. She eventually responded to the backlash … with more irony:
I got in trouble for saying the word Chink on a talk show, a network talk show. It was in the context of a joke. Obviously. That’d be weird. That’d be a really bad career choice if it wasn’t. But, nevertheless, the president of an Asian-American watchdog group out here in Los Angeles, his name is Guy Aoki, and he was up in arms about it and he put my name in the papers calling me a racist, and it hurt. As a Jew—as a member of the Jewish community—I was really concerned that we were losing control of the media. Right? What kind of a world do we live in where a totally cute white girl can’t say “Chink” on network television? It’s like the fifties. It’s scary.… There are only two Asian people that I know that I have any problem with, at all. One is, uh, Guy Aoki. The other is my friend Steve, who actually went pee-pee in my Coke. He’s all, “Me Chinese, me play joke.” Uh, if you have to explain it, Steve, it’s not funny.
—Sarah Silverman, quoted by Dana Goodyear, “Quiet Depravity: The Demure Outrages of a Standup Comic,” The New Yorker, October 24, 2005
Silverman’s deadpan contribution to The Aristocrats (2005), a documentary by Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza in which a succession of comedians tell their versions of a prototypical dirty joke, is the most inventive, and ironic, of the film:
Joe Franklin loved the Aristocrats. He was, like, our rehearsal director when Dad and my brother weren’t there. And my mother, and my nana—weren’t there. I was on his show. He said it wasn’t a “taped show,” but we, like, did a show.… It was his office, but he had a bed in it, like a couch, that he called Uncle Joe’s bed for little people. Joe Franklin raped me.
According to Provenza, “If the choice of who raped her was anybody but Joe Franklin, we couldn’t deal with it. But by making it Joe Franklin she spins it off into absurdity yet again. Imagine Joe Franklin being sexual. There’s an irony in that alone.”
JONATHAN SWIFT (1667–1745)
Poet, novelist, essayist, preacher, and one of the great satirists in the English language, his A Modest Proposal (1729) is a striking demonstration of the power of irony. Published three years after his masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels, its full title is: “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of the Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to Their Public.” It calls attention to the exploitation of the Irish masses by their English landlords by dryly proposing that poor Irish parents earn money by selling their babies to the English as food, which will also help reduce overpopulation. The phrase “a modest proposal” has been used ironically ever since.
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child, well nursed, is at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.
As to our City of Dublin, Shambles may be appointed for this purpose, in the most convenient parts of it, and Butchers we may be assured will not be wanting, although I rather recommend buying the Children alive, and dressing them hot from the Knife, as we do roasting pigs.
MARK TWAIN (SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS, 1835–1910)
American author who drew on his childhood along the Mississippi River to create masterpieces of realism, wit, and irony, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), widely considered the best American novel.
Huck smokes and swears too much, but he’s intelligent and resourceful. H
is innate sense of justice leads him to help his slave friend Jim escape from his “rightful” owner. It is ironic that Huck brands himself a sinner for defying the morality that deems anyone who “steals” a slave from his owner a bad person. With deadpan earnestness, Huck is the quintessential “unreliable narrator” who naïvely recounts adventures while floating down the Mississippi on a raft, allowing Twain to make sharp comment on human nature.
Bonus irony: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of the great egalitarian statements in American literature, is still suppressed as racist by school boards that fail to grasp its central irony, that is, that Jim is the only honorable adult character in a novel peopled by white murderers, liars, and hypocrites.
Against Irony
Irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.” Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: The ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.