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Irony to Plummet in 2009?

Hard times and a popular president could be bad for smart alecks.

By David Beers 2 Jan 2009 | TheTyee.ca

David Beers is founding editor of The Tyee.

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  • Chic Ironic Bitterness
  • R. Jay Magill, Jr.
  • The University of Michigan Press (2007)

In the days and weeks following Sept. 11, 2001, the scolds declared irony to be dead. It wasn't. In fact, we were then entering what today can be seen to be a Golden Era of Irony. It may have peaked in May of 2006 when Stephen Colbert, in character, speaking about the president who sat to his left at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, declared:

"I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers, and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message that, no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world."

So rather than expire, irony thrived. And thankfully so, given the need to puncture and destabilize the idiotic jingoism of the George Bush era.

Which makes it legitimate to ask: will Barack Obama be bad for irony? Will Stewart and Colbert and other satirists on the left self-censor in their desire to see Obama succeed?

Well, wouldn't that be ironic? Even doubly ironic?

'A joke and a menace'

Because let us recall in September of 2001, when the call went forth to chasten the ironic impulse in American life, it seemed, well, rather ironic.

The nation had been attacked by apocalyptic fundamentalists. But the media were blaming the likes of Jerry Seinfeld and Bart Simpson.

Time magazine essayist Roger Rosenblatt was very upset with what were considered the shallow and flippant popular culture wiseacres of the day. They had placed America in harm's way. "The ironists, in seeing through everything," he wrote, "made it difficult for anyone to see anything" including "the difference between a joke and a menace."

The time had come for irony to be put away like a child's toy, implied Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. "There's going to be a seismic change. I think it's the end of the age of irony."

Six years on, such pious prescriptions had proven "disastrous" in the view of R. Jay Magill Jr., author of Chic Ironic Bitterness, a historical and philosophical examination of ironic discourse published in 2007.

As Magill explains, it is textbook ironic when ambitious doings yield results opposite to their intent.

Irony, then, would be a war on terror that produces more terrorists.

Irony would be any time U.S. officials deprive people of rights and liberties in order to prove America is a bulwark of democracy.

A critical appreciation of irony, an engaged rather than detached irony, is just what we needed on Sept. 12, 2001, in order to keep a healthy sense of perspective.

Indeed, if after 9-11 our leaders had cultivated a more ironic view of the world, we'd probably be in a better place today.

"[T]he complaints that fuelled the attack on irony -- that society had become too selfish, civically unconcerned, hypocritical, self absorbed, that we had lost our sense of proportion and self-restraint and humility -- are legitimate and important ones," Magill writes. "Irony can be a very useful critical tool for pointing out such flaws."

Satire as weapon

To believe so is to separate the thoughtful ironist from the sarcastic slacker, a bright and vital line drawn by Magill. He places the ironic citizen at odds with not only the religious conservative, but also the cynical "realist." The cynic, lacking hope, assumes the world is "brutish" and "has given up entirely on performing a social role." The ironist, by contrast, is invested in the belief that society can be made better. Satire is the goad to reform. To wield it well, the reformer must remain true to self, hyper aware, shielded from phoniness by ironic detachment. As Randolph Bourne wrote in 1913: "The ironist is ironical not because he does not care, but because he cares too much."

It's nothing new, this distrust between people who are ironic and people who are not. Socrates' use of irony in pretending ignorance to reveal the truth offended Aristotle for being untruthful. Magill deftly traces the evolution of intellectual thought about irony, parsing Kierkegaard, Hegel, Nietzsche and many others, and he praises with insight many of the great practitioners of our day, including Colbert and the hyper-self-reflexive author Dave Eggers. Oddly absent, though, is any mention of Generation X Godfather Douglas Coupland, or the enigmatic ironist Eminem. Very little is said about how Blacks, Aboriginals and others on the margins of North American society have refined ironic humour as a means for both coping with injustice and skewering the oppressor.

As Magill (an American) does chronicle, two strands of sensibility -- seekers of godly certitude and tweakers of satiric jest -- have been woven into America's intellectual DNA from the beginning. The great colonial fire and brimstone preacher Jonathan Edwards begat a grandson, the gifted political satirist, Timothy Dwight, member of the Connecticut Wits. Two centuries before The Onion, Philip Freneau was skewering federalists with his own hilarious fake newspaper. From Washington Irving to Mark Twain to Jon Stewart, the line is long and unbroken, and Magill feels emboldened to declare that "Satire is again serious business. The serious have been subdued."

Liberator or safe refuge?

But is there really cause for such triumphalism? Beyond its ability to puncture artifice, what can irony build? Magill speaks of the "liberating" power of irony and pronounces that "ironists see the present age as something not measuring up to their ideas of what social life and culture could be -- that is, they are most often progressive."

If Magill is right, the U.S. isn't likely to go irony free any time soon. Odds are slim that Obama, playing with the hand he's been dealt, will measure up to progressive smart alecks' "ideas of what social life and culture could be." And if he does, losing the Daily Show will be a small price to pay.

Meanwhile, here in Canada, well, there's plenty of raw irony still to be mined, even if Stephen Harper had never clutched that terrified kitty. Stewart recently has had his own hilarious swipe at our parliamentary follies, and Mercer clearly is having way too much fun the bleaker things look.

Still, let's not confuse the ironic barb with all the sleeves-rolled-up good faith and communal action that crisis times likely are about to ask of us. As the brilliant social critic Christopher Lasch noted three decades ago, the ironic stance is more defensive than proactive. It's the natural crouch of a person bombarded with lies in an over-commercialized public realm.

In volatile days like these, whenever a tycoon or politician is lampooned, it can be tempting to see the march of Magill's ideal ironists, their imaginations revved for social change. It is easy to confuse merely putting down the powerful with actually taking up a cause.

But we're no better off if irony, after so many YouTube downloads, has merely become a personal style of coping.

What does it mean if everyone is in on the joke, but the joke is still on us?

 [Tyee]