The Big Book of Irony
Page 9
—David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1998)
Irony is spent as a cultural force. Around the time of Lenny Bruce, the ironic posture was a thrilling épater le bourgeois against repression, conformity, official smugness, and fatuity. Now that the edifices have been torn down, the ironic posture has itself become party to the forces of official smugness and fatuity.
—Michael Hirschorn, Slate, September 22, 1999
Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.
—Lewis Hyde, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking” (1975)
Irony is unrelieved vertigo, dizziness to the point of madness.
—Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, second edition (1983)
I’m not interested in the irony of my position. Cancer cures you of irony. Perhaps my irony was all in my prostate.
—Anatole Broyard, Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death (1992)
I know idealism is not playing on the radio right now, you don’t see it on TV, irony is on heavy rotation, the knowingness, the smirk, the tired joke. I’ve tried them all out but I’ll tell you this, outside this campus—and even inside it—idealism is under siege beset by materialism, narcissism, and all the other isms of indifference. Baggism, Shaggism. Raggism. Notism, graduationism, chismism, I don’t know. Where’s John Lennon when you need him?
—Bono, commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania, May 17, 2004
More disheartening is the beating The Phantom Menace took for its earnestness. Each year, Hollywood’s products grow more cynical and self-aware. If a movie eschews this oh-so-hip edge—if its young hero says his dream is to fly in a spaceship, and he means nothing more than that—then it will be mercilessly punctured by reviewers’ barbs. In an age drenched with irony, sincerity is often rejected out of hand.
—Eric Larsen, the American Enterprise Online
Pleasure in irony … is an ego trip.
—Jessamyn West, The Life I Really Lived (1979)
Irony was a kind of autopilot, a default setting. It was what lots of academics and others thought “smart” meant, but it was tiresome and so many were fond of it. They were so disheartening. Why weren’t they better?
—Frederick and Steven Barthelme, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss (1999)
When [irony] is not employed as an honest device of classical rhetoric, the purpose of which no healthy mind can doubt for a moment, it becomes a source of depravity, a barrier to civilization, a squalid flirtation with inertia, nihilism, and vice.
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)
Irony is appropriate only as a pedagogical tool, used by a teacher interacting with pupils of whatever sort; its purpose is humiliation, shame, but the salubrious kind that awakens good intentions and bids us offer, as to a doctor, honor and gratitude to the one who treated us so. The ironic man pretends to be ignorant, and, in fact, does it so well that the pupils conversing with him are fooled and become bold in their conviction about their better knowledge, exposing themselves in all kinds of ways; they lose caution and reveal themselves as they are—until the rays of the torch that they held up to their teacher’s face are suddenly reflected back on them, humiliating them. Where there is no relation as between teacher and pupil, irony is impolite, a base emotion. All ironic writers are counting on that silly category of men who want to feel, along with the author, superior to all other men, and regard the author as the spokesman for their arrogance. Incidentally, the habit of irony, like that of sarcasm, ruins the character; eventually it lends the quality of a gloating superiority; finally, one is like a snapping dog, who, besides biting, has also learned to laugh.
—Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878)
I don’t think there’s been a single pun on any of my records for ten years and yet I’m known for that because of the first few albums. And the same with irony—it’s an overplayed hand and it’s also a juvenile hand. The deliberate seeking of darkness and the sardonic, and the denial of feeling and the denial of trust and belief, it’s something that you do when you’re younger and it’s something that is right—part of it’s genuine and part of it is insecurity. I’m not saying that was all wrong. I love a lot of the songs I wrote then, I still sing them, but there’s room in the world for lots of different points of view, lots of different types of expression, even inside the repertoire of one songwriter and singer.
—Elvis Costello, quoted by Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian, August 30, 2003
Irony is a refuge for the insecure. We retreat into our irony cages when we feel threatened by our difference from other people. Finding out that you’re not like everybody else is hard. Yet the hurt that accompanies this revelation decreases if that revelation stays private. So long as we do not see other people seeing us as “different” we can sustain the semblance of belonging. When I reveal my tastes under the sign of irony, I leave open the possibility that I’m not being serious, that I’m only pretending to have those tastes. If I sense that the people I’m talking to will accept my fondness for Wilco, World War II movies, or cheese soup, then I can gradually make it clear that I’m making a serious declaration of taste. On the other hand, if I don’t sense that their acceptance is forthcoming, I can move on to another topic, knowing that I have, strictly speaking, told the truth. From this perspective, irony functions like those escape routes that governments devise for their leaders. It gives you an “out,” but only when you need it.
—Charlie Bertsch, “The Spirit of Irony,” Bad Subjects, posted in October 2000 at bad.eserver.org
There’s terrific merit in having no sense of humor, no sense of irony, practically no sense of anything at all. If you’re born with these so-called defects, you have a very good chance of getting to the top.
—Peter Cook, quoted by Ronald Bergan in Beyond the Fringe … and Beyond (1989)
In Defense of Irony
We cannot use language maturely until we are spontaneously at home in irony.
—Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950)
Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony and has no ear for its whispering lacks eo ipso what might be called the absolute beginning of the personal life.
—Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony (1841)
Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
—Agnes Repplier, In Pursuit of Laughter (1936)
A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
—Jessamyn West, The Life I Really Lived (1979)
Objection, evasion, distrust, and irony are signs of health. Everything absolute belongs to pathology.
—Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
The armor of irony is a little ugly, it’s difficult to lug around, and it makes it hard to hug one another. But maybe irony is, in the end, better than abs of steel.
—Veronica Rueckert, “The Post Modern Ironic Wink,” To the Best of Our Knowledge, Wisconsin Public Radio, June 26, 2005
We live in a society heavily invested in predictable outcomes, risk management, plans for every contingency, and elimination of the unexpected. We are, in other words, into control, or at least the illusion of control. Irony invites us to step down from our pedestals, to loosen our anxious grip on life, to take ourselves a little less seriously, and to be healed. My guess is that being human has less to do with being in control than it does with rising to the various occasions that life hands us.
—Anthony B. Robinson, “Post-Election Musings on the Healing Power of Irony,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November
13, 1998
Irony has more resonance than reason.
—Robert Lanham, The Hipster Handbook (2003)
Irony … has a long and honorable history as a rhetorical device. It isn’t, as its critics are taking this opportunity to claim, the nihilistic acceptance of the worst of human nature, the universal “Whatever.” More often, it’s a rational response to consumer culture; all but the most credulous of us, once exposed to advertising, are budding ironists. And not so coincidentally, the ability to laugh at the difference between what we’re told and what we experience means we have to recognize that difference—in other words, think critically.… An appreciation of irony doesn’t preclude genuine emotion any more than appreciating baseball precludes liking football.
—Laurel Wellman, San Francisco Chronicle, September 25, 2001
Irony is the hygiene of the mind.
—Elizabeth Bibesco, Haven (1951)
There are no exact guidelines. There are probably no guidelines at all. The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance.
—Václav Havel, address upon receiving the Open Society Prize awarded by Central European University (1999)
Irony is not for anything. It has no higher purpose. It is a perspective on the world, one that takes advantage of distance and some weirdly skewed point of view to see everyday things—pomposity, convention, higher purposes, and the earnest advancement of points like this one—as ridiculous or sad or just somehow other than what they usually seem. It’s a lens that is morally neutral, deployed for evil as easily as for good.
—Judith Shulevitz, Slate, January 4, 2000
America has a famously vexed relationship with its irony: Though our pop culture exports about 90 percent of the world’s supply, the puritanical, isolationist, log-cabin region of the nation’s oversoul prays nightly for its death. But in a world as complicatedly social as ours, it’s not expendable—irony is social chess, the playful manipulation of lazy expectations. It’s at least as important as love or sadness. Only total extermination of the species would kill it.
—Sam Anderson, Slate, November 10, 2005
It’s easy to forget, in the wake of the various thudding political and cultural broadsides it’s provoked, that irony ever had anything to do with subtlety. Most commentators and critics have comfortably equated the ironic mood with a smirking refusal to feel anything much beyond jaded pop-culture connoisseurship; matters have scarcely been helped by enterprising writers and filmmakers who have mined just that misapprehension in the cause of their own smirking, unfeeling minor celebrity.
But irony remains a supple, indispensable literary device, squaring comically misguided human desires and aspirations smartly against their messier worldly outcomes. Put another way, the antithesis of irony, the great idiom of unintended consequences, is not earnestness or sincerity, as is now so widely assumed, but tragedy—the blank hand of fate remorselessly stamping out consequences, blithely oblivious to our own puny intentions. Since it highlights the folly of our own longings against the indifference of the cosmos, irony is one of the only ways to register a feeble protest against this state of affairs while keeping something like a smile on one’s face.
—Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post, March 26, 2002
Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
—Victor Hugo, Oration on Voltaire (1878)
Ironic, No?
Brewing heir Adolph Coors III was allergic to beer.
The “Marlboro Man” (actor David McLean) died of lung cancer.
Pima County (Tucson) Arizona supervisors held a closed meeting to discuss Arizona’s open meetings law.
U.S. Border Patrol uniforms are manufactured in Mexico.
A Mexican national was arrested in 2003 for bringing two hundred pounds of marijuana into the United States concealed in the bumpers of his car, which he had purchased at a U.S. Marshal’s auction in San Diego after it was used to smuggle illegal aliens and seized by the INS, which had failed to discover the hidden pot.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, so many visitors were taking souvenir pieces that a protective fence was installed, so that, yes, the Berlin Wall was guarded by a wall. Bonus irony: Originally a barrier designed to keep East Berliners from escaping a Communist “worker’s paradise,” the Berlin Wall became a canvas for graffiti and other forms of ugly art that flourish in the West. The Berlin Wall thus went from a symbol of Soviet bankruptcy to one of Western decadence.
The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is protected by an anti-graffiti veneer manufactured by Degussa, the same company that produced the chemical Zyklon B for Nazi gas chambers.
RKO’s The Conqueror (1956) starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan was filmed in St. George, Utah, directly downwind from the Nevada atomic test site. By 1980, inordinate numbers of St. George residents and ninety members of the cast and crew had died of cancer, including director Dick Powell, costar Susan Hayward, and the super-patriot Wayne himself. In 1998, the state of Utah promoted St. George to tourists as “Utah’s Hot Spot.”
I thought, Three nights ago I was up there bombing and now I’m down here [in a North Vietnamese prison] being bombed and I’m going to check out. Isn’t that ironic!
—John Yuill, American bomber pilot, on Operation Linebacker II, a massive bombing raid on Hanoi in 1972
Soon after San Francisco neurologist Dr. Richard Olney began conducting clinical trials to investigate the efficacy of cancer drugs on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (and after spending decades caring for ALS patients), he was himself diagnosed with the disease and enrolled in his own study.
The author of a New Mexico state law mandating felony charges against owners of dangerous dogs was hospitalized after his own dog bit him on both arms.
I once talked to an old cannibal who, hearing of the Great War raging in Europe, was most curious to know how we Europeans managed to eat such huge quantities of human flesh. When I told him the Europeans did not eat their slain foes he looked at me with shocked horror and asked what sort of barbarians we were, to kill without any real object.
—Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)
In 1972, President Richard Nixon and White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman discussed fellow Republican Ronald Reagan:
Nixon:
Reagan is not one that wears well.
Haldeman:
I know.
Nixon:
On a personal basis, Rockefeller is a pretty nice guy. Reagan on a personal basis, is terrible. He just isn’t pleasant to be around.
Haldeman:
No, he isn’t.
Nixon:
Maybe he’s different with others.
Haldeman:
No.
Nixon:
No, he’s just an uncomfortable man to be around.
Later in the conversation, Nixon, one of the most peculiar men ever to have occupied the White House, actually describes the preternaturally affable Reagan as “strange.” (Source: White House tape released in 2003.)
The Ronald Reagan Building, Washington’s largest federal structure, is named after a president who said government was the problem and not the solution and promised to make it smaller.
One of the 1992 presidential candidates, H. Ross Perot, answered charges of mental instability by publicly dancing with his daughter to Patsy Cline’s rendition of “Crazy.”
H. Ross Perot
(AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe’s 2005 state of the nation address, in which he promised to remedy his country’s chronic electricity shortages, was blacked out by a power failure.
Saddam Hussein spent almost a billion dollars on a series of impregnable
underground bunker complexes, yet his last refuge was a five-by-eight-foot mud hole.
Jim Fixx, author of the bestselling The Complete Book of Running (1977), which popularized jogging as a means of life extension and helped start America’s exercise revolution, died of a heart attack at age fifty-two while jogging. An autopsy revealed severely blocked coronary arteries.
Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some seventy-five separate sections from the novel. Students reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.
—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (“Coda,” 1979)
The papers relating to Charles A. Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic flight are stored in the Missouri Historical Society’s library on Skinner Boulevard in St. Louis, the site of an old synagogue. Lindberg biographer A. Scott Berg noted the irony, given Lindberg’s reputation as an anti-Semite.
In 1987 the Chicago Cubs traded relief pitcher Dickie Noles to the Detroit Tigers for “a player to be named later.” At the end of the season, the Tigers sent “the player to be named later” to the Cubs. It was Dickie Noles.