by Ken Jennings
Here’s a sample alazon takedown from Aristophanes’ oldest surviving comedy, The Acharnians. The crafty protagonist is Dicaeopolis, a farmer fed up with the Peloponnesian War currently raging between Athens and Sparta. Halfway through the play, the fiery general Lamachus bursts onto the stage in full battle armor, holding a shield with the image of a Gorgon’s head on it and wearing a helmet flamboyantly crested with ostrich plumes. The chorus immediately rats Dicaeopolis out, telling Lamachus that the lowly citizen has been grousing about the Athenian war effort.
“How dare you, you wretch of a beggar?” he booms.
Dicaeopolis immediately backpedals, in full eiron mode. “Oh, General Lamachus, my hero, do pardon me. Even a beggar has the right to speak his mind.”
“What did you say about me? Out with it!”
“Um, I don’t remember. It’s your armor, it’s making me nervous. Can you cover up that hideous face?”
Lamachus covers his shield. “Is that better?”
“Now turn it facedown on the ground.”
“There you go.”
“And can I have a feather or two from your helmet?”
Lamachus hands him a plume. “Here’s one.”
Dicaeopolis makes to gag himself with the ostrich feather. “All right, hold my head while I puke, your helmet crest makes me sick.”
You can imagine the beefy Gaston type in his ridiculous battle dress turning red with rage. This may read like a silly “slow burn” routine straight out of Laurel and Hardy, but there’s actually a much sharper edge: Aristophanes wrote The Acharnians in the sixth year of the long and bloody Peloponnesian War, and Lamachus was a real (and famously bombastic) Athenian general. Dicaeopolis goes on to undermine Lamachus’ case for making war and convinces the chorus that his clever solution—negotiating a private peace treaty between himself and Sparta—is the better way to go.
To Aristophanes, the important thing about the dissembling of the eiron was that it relied on restraint rather than boasting, making it closer to the device we call litotes today. Litotes is a kind of comic understatement using reversal, like a man opening a door onto a blizzard and observing, “It’s not exactly a nice day out.”III Today this kind of thing still seems ironic, but it’s gentle irony, Hugh Grant irony, dad irony. A more advanced practitioner of eironeia was Socrates, who according to Plato would feign ignorance on a topic or even pretend to be convinced by an opponent as a ploy to draw out the weaknesses in the other’s argument. This question-asking tactic is still part of the modern Socratic method, so ingrained that we don’t even call it “irony” anymore. We call it “law school.”IV
But Socratic irony quickly blossomed into a broader device, the ability to say something and mean the exact opposite—and still be understood, as long as one used the right markers. Verbal irony is often seen as synonymous with sarcasm, but in fact the overlap isn’t perfect. “Sarcasm” comes from the Greek word for “flesh” (just like “sarcoma” and “sarcophagus”) and refers to any witty put-down so caustic that it metaphorically “strips the flesh” off another. Remarking, “Ah, I love my commute!” while stuck in a traffic jam is irony, but it isn’t designed to wound anyone, so it isn’t sarcasm, strictly speaking. Conversely, when a member of Parliament said to Churchill in 1946, “Winston, you are drunk,” and he famously replied, “Bessie, my dear, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I will be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly,” that was sarcasm but not irony—he meant every word.V
You Oughta Know
In drama, the canonical example of irony is a character being unaware of something the audience already knows. Just as with verbal irony, the literal words of the text conceal a metamessage of precisely opposite meaning to the careful listener. Dramatic irony dates back to Greek tragedies like Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, in which Oedipus spends the first scenes of the play in pursuit of the man who murdered King Laius and thus cursed the city of Thebes. The audience knows that Oedipus himself is the unwitting killer (and has married his own mother to boot!), which gives us a little thrill of superiority during all of his tirades. We’re a step ahead. Shakespeare used the device so often you’d think he was getting paid by the dramatic irony: Othello praising the loyalty of Iago, Duncan praising the integrity of Macbeth. (Spoilers: both are bad hiring decisions.) In those cases, dramatic irony emphasizes the contrast between well-meaning men and the tragic doom that awaits them. But sometimes it’s nothing more than a smart way for an author to put readers through the wringer, as when Romeo plans to kill himself with poison alongside Juliet’s body in her tomb, though the audience knows she’s not dead, merely asleep. Hitchcock told François Truffaut that this was the difference between surprise and suspense: if a bomb is planted under a table where two people are talking, a director might be tempted to withhold that information until the last moment, but in fact it’s best to show the bomb to the audience as soon as possible. “In these conditions,” he explained, “the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!’ ” This is why, in his film Vertigo, one of the all-time-great twist endings in movie history is revealed to viewers via flashback almost an hour before the end of the film.
If we move dramatic irony into real life—that is, we assume all the world’s a stage, with an enthralled audience out somewhere in the darkness and a puckish Hitchcockian god pulling the strings—we get cosmic irony. Adolph Coors III was allergic to beer. Fitness guru Jim Fixx died of a heart attack while out for a jog. In our more enlightened age, when we assume quirks of fate like these to be part of the naturally occurring order of the universe, we prefer the less grandiose term “situational irony.” Instead of Oedipus wailing to the gods about the plague of Thebes, it’s a man complaining to coworkers about the smell in the break room fridge, only to find that his own forgotten sandwich is to blame. At long last, we’re getting close to what my ninth-grade teacher meant when he said irony was “the opposite of what you expect.” What he didn’t explain was that not every unexpected occurrence is ironic, because the crucial thing—the crucial irony—about situational irony is that the outcome, though unexpected, must somehow seem entirely fitting at the same time. Often, a situation is neatly reflected back on itself in some way: a marriage counselor files for divorce, a school marquee offers “Congradulations” to a spelling bee champ, the firehouse burns down, the meteorologists’ picnic gets rained out.
But what about rain on your wedding day? In her hit 1995 song “Ironic,” Alanis Morissette cataloged what she considered to be some of life’s everyday ironies, and was immediately taken to task by scolds everywhere, in newspaper columns and stand-up comedy routines. Dying after winning the lottery or getting ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife is merely an unfortunate coincidence, was the smugly in-the-know thing to say about the song. Coincidences aren’t ironies. Even lexicographer Bryan A. Garner, writing about the word “irony” in his Garner’s Modern English Usage, takes a full paragraph to opine that Morissette “crossed the line” in the song. “All [these situations] amount to tough luck, but they are hardly ironic,” he notes sternly. In a 1,056-page reference work, “Ironic” is the only alternative rock song of the 1990s so strongly condemned. Hootie & the Blowfish areVI not mentioned once.
But if a situational irony is at its heart just an occurrence that’s “the opposite of what you expect,” then Garner’s distinction isn’t clear at all, because so is a weird coincidence. If we’re going to distinguish so disapprovingly between the two, a lot must be riding on just how unlikely the coincidence is, or how strikingly apropos the twist. Granted, if you’re getting married in Seattle in April, then rain on your wedding day is merely unfortunate, not ironic. But what if you’ve planned an outdoor ceremony in Palm Springs during an otherwise bone-dry July, and the rainclouds gather just
as the service begins and part just as abruptly during the recessional? In other words, just how many spoons need to come out of the knife dispenser before a simple run of bad luck with flatware takes on an ironic tinge? (More than ten thousand, says Mr. Bryan A. Garner.)
One objection to this broadening of the definition of irony might be that the twist ending is merely an escalation, not a reversal, of the expected outcome. Take Alanis Morissette’s story of “Mr. Play It Safe,” who finally goes on vacation after being grounded by a lifelong fear of flying—only to die in a plane crash. To an irony purist, the problem here is that the man was expecting to die, so the crash is the opposite of irony. An ironic version of the story would have to end with him heroically taking over for the pilot, or sleeping through a terrifying near miss, or dying in a car accident on the way to the airport, or something. No one has articulated this viewpoint more elegantly than word nerd George Carlin, who wrote, “If a diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by a runaway truck, he is the victim of an accident. If the truck was delivering sugar, he is the victim of an oddly poetic coincidence. But if the truck was delivering insulin, ah! Then he is the victim of an irony.”
I’m as big a usage stickler as anyone, not to mention a huge Carlin fan, but I’ll say it: this seems like splitting hairs to me. A news story about a diabetic run over by a sugar truck tickles the funny bone in exactly the same mordant way as one about an insulin truck. (And if we’re nitpicking, I’m skeptical that an “insulin truck” is actually a thing.) Neither accident has some immediately perceptible aura of ironic perfection that the other does not. And in any case, English doesn’t really have a word for “coincidental in a dark and oddly poetic way,” so in the post-Alanis era, its close cousin “ironic” might have to do.
A Perpetual Knowing Wink
Twenty years later, it’s hard to believe grammarians ever had their panties in a bunch over the iffy situational ironies of Alanis Morissette, because the irony umbrella has stretched further still. What was once an occasional rhetorical tool has metastasized into a way of life. Today, you can have ironically baroque facial hair and a closet full of ironic hats and varsity jackets. Your walls can be covered in bad garage-sale landscape paintings with UFOs or Bigfoots added in by later hands, your DVR full of the reality shows you hate-watch. Ride your ironic brakeless bike to get together with your kickball league or Boggle bros or some other “Can you believe we’re doing this?!?” ironic pastime, which was announced on the Evite in Comic Sans. More serious apostles of irony might even scour Craigslist for an ironic car (2003 PT Cruiser?) in an ironic color (Pastel Yellow? Deep Cranberry Pearl?) and then slap an ironic Hello Kitty sticker on the bumper before hitting the road. What’s next, the ironic college degree? The ironic relationship? The ironic career? “Check this out—I just spent twenty-seven years selling processing systems for a bulk material handling company. Oh, it was hilarious.”
The stereotype of the contemporary hipster is rooted in what might be called post-irony. For thousands of years, the drifting definitions of irony all had one thing in common: a gap between the signifier and signified whereby something could be represented by its exact opposite. “Smooth move!” meant “Unsmooth move!” “Water, water, everywhere” meant “Nor any drop to drink.” But an ironic pizza tattoo does not mean “I hate pizza,” or even “This tattoo is bad.” Instead, an ironic, self-aware pose bestows plausible deniability, the ultimate concession to our modern cult of cool. If you think my T-shirt of an astronaut Smurf captioned with the words “SPACED OUT!” is good, “I know, right?” But if you think it’s dumb, “I know, right?”VII Maybe I’m not sure myself, or maybe it’s both at the same time. Schrödinger’s kickball league.
Nostalgia looms large in modern irony, as my middle school Toto fans apparently figured out early. To me, it’s one of hipster irony’s potentially redeeming qualities: the refusal to let go of childhood completely, the insistence on room for play. The first lifestyle ironists were the early adopters of “camp” in the 1950s, putting the aesthetic of the previous generation in quotation marks for their own affectionate amusement. Susan Sontag enumerated their colorful canon for the straights and squares: art nouveau posters, King Kong, flapper dresses, ballet, Flash Gordon Sunday comics, Bellini operas, Tiffany lamps. But to camp tastes, a Tiffany table lamp wasn’t just a lamp. It was a “lamp,” a comment on lamps, a prop in the grand theater of life. As camp irony aged, its referents moved forward with it on a sliding scale from Mae West and Carmen Miranda into the television age, and you wound up with eighties yuppies ironically glued to the Nick at Nite reruns of their boomer childhood. But since the timeline of nostalgia icons passed 1966—the debut of Batman on TV, the enshrinement of camp into the mainstream—our millennial ironic signifiers have increasingly become things that were self-aware to begin with: the Spice Girls, Goosebumps, SpongeBob, Tarantino, Scream. Camp has eaten itself.
As a result, the potential for charm and whimsy in ironic nostalgia has been tainted. There’s nothing pure or childlike about having to like something “ironically.” What does that even mean, that you don’t really like it but everyone is talking about it? Or, even worse, that you actually like something that doesn’t match your sophisticated persona, so it has to be a “guilty pleasure”? God forbid any actual enjoyment should overwhelm our studied pose of world-weary nonchalance.
The Comedy of Deconstruction
Postmodern irony became the default voice in comedy in the mid-1970s, so I’m happy to blame the Vietnam-and-Watergate cocktail of disillusionment that ruined everything else. Saturday Night Live was a much more knowing affair than the typical comedy-variety sketch show of its era, which it explicitly indicated by dubbing its cast the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. SNL was a television show about television, just as its early mascots Albert Brooks and Steve Martin were becoming stars by performing stand-up comedy about stand-up comedy. By 1977, Steve Martin was selling out stadiums and seeing albums go platinum on the strength of a routine with almost no jokes at all. I’m serious; try listening to a record like Let’s Get Small today. Martin brings out a banjo but never gets around to singing a real song, just nonsense syllables. He discusses material he’s not going to do. He pretends to yell at the backstage crew. He gets applause for his catchphrases (“Well, excuuuse me!”) but frames them explicitly as lame catchphrases. It’s funny, but you find yourself waiting for the actual routine to begin. The whole thing is delivered in an affectedly zany voice more on the level of Pee-wee Herman or Bobcat Goldthwait than the gentle ironist you’d expect from his later film persona. In short, he’s performing stand-up and deconstructing it at the same time. “Yes, this is comedy!” he yells at one point.
But the standard-bearer for Generation X irony was David Letterman. I can still remember the first time, as a kid, that I saw Letterman do the thing where he would repeat something funny until it became unfunny (or vice versa!) and then just kept going until it looped back around again. It seemed like he was defying all laws of comedy, or even logic, but there it was. The detached superiority of a Steve Martin would have been too much to take every weeknight, but Letterman’s ironic remove was balanced by a genuinely amused glee—that wide grin, that cocked eyebrow, the best laugh on television.VIII He was in on the joke, but he wanted us to know that he was enjoying it as much as we were.
That didn’t keep the show’s pioneering anticomedy from bemusing audiences, though. The first decade of Late Night with David Letterman was, largely thanks to cocreator and head writer Merrill Markoe, a never-ending parade of completely gonzo comedy ideas delivered in the most deadpan fashion possible: a humidifier locked in battle with a dehumidifier, chatty check-in phone calls to a random book publicist visible in an office across the street, “Shoe Removal Races” between a podiatrist and a shoe salesman, a full 360-degree rotation of the televised image during the course of one show, a rerun episode dubbed by a cartoon voice-over cast. (Those last two stunts resulted in hundreds of phone calls from con
fused viewers.) Even the show’s signature bit, the Top Ten List, began life as a joke-free take-off of magazine polls, with Letterman straight-facedly listing ten “Words that Almost Rhyme with ‘Peas.’ ”IX On that historic September 1985 show, Letterman treated the list like the ironic throwaway it was, hurrying through the ten items so fast that bandleader Paul Shaffer didn’t even have time to strike up a drum roll until number seven. There was almost no audible laughter for the odd conceptual gag, exactly as the show intended.
But there’s a difference between a comedian who doesn’t care if the audience always laughs and one who almost prefers that they don’t. One is the genially weird Letterman, begetting ironically self-aware talk shows through the decades down to Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Comedy Bang! Bang!, and Tom Scharpling’s The Best Show. The other is Letterman’s frequent early guest Andy Kaufman, genuinely hoping that audiences are annoyed and bewildered when he wrestles women or reads page after page of The Great Gatsby in his live act. Without that kind of perverse commitment, you don’t get the middle-finger-to-the-audience of Tim and Eric and the whole Adult Swim ethos, so many levels of irony deep that it recedes to infinity like two mirrors reflecting each other.
In twenty-two minutes of absurd TV or Internet comedy, that kind of nihilism can be bracing. But as a lifestyle? At best, it’s just a way to avoid getting pinned down to a principle or a preference at all. Take that too far and you wind up with a society so cynical that caring about anything seems a little suspect. What’s up with these goody-goody environmentalists, so sincere about everything all the time? And devout religious people, what sick secret guilt are they overcompensating for? At this point, when I see a young urbanite wearing a trucker hat, I’d rather the subtext be “I am wearing this ironically, in that I think trucker hats look bad and all rural Americans are shitheads,” which is dumb but at least is an opinion, rather than “I am wearing this ironically, in that I think trucker hats are funny and cool . . . or do I?!?”