The reports of its death were greatly exaggerated. Pundits declared irony dead after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but five years later, not only is it alive — it ruled 2006.
“Given the way the world has gone, we’re in more need of irony,” says Jerry Herron, a professor of English and American studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. “What 9/11 produced was a world where pettifoggery, obfuscation, half-truths and double dealing are more rampant than ever before.”
Irony, the grand dame of the zeitgeist, is pop culture’s weapon against hopelessness, experts say. It’s a tool that transfers power to the powerless. And in a time of a continuing war, citizens jailed without charges, and a government that knows what we’re checking out at the library and searching for on the Internet, it’s a key to understanding what’s happening to the world — with a little humor too.
“The reason irony is more fun than the truth is that it’s more fun than the truth,” Herron says. “Jon Stewart is fun to watch because it seems to give the feeling of being in a club where everyone’s smarter than everyone else. And the whole world seems to be pretty dumb.”
Along with raised eyebrows and knowing looks, irony puts us in the know. We become members of the sorority of sagacity. And it gives us some semblance of controlling what we’re being told, experts say.
But what is irony?
Merriam-Webster says it’s using words to mean the opposite of their literal meaning. But in today’s cultural climate, irony is anything said with your tongue firmly planted in your cheek. It’s sarcastic humor with an exaggerated message.
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“At a time when people feel they’re being lied to and treated as though they’re too stupid to get it, it lets you regain the claim on your own intelligence,” Herron says. “I’m going to tell a lie, too, but I’m going to tell it knowingly and as a joke.”
Irony has existed in Western culture ever since there was a Western culture, says author Ken Kalfus.
“I’m not sure what ironic forms there are in, say, Afghan culture,” he says. “You need a pretty well-developed idea of the individual. . . . Irony is one of the first things that goes in a dictatorship.”
The smug smile of irony bares its teeth when conditions are ripe — there’s overarching disillusionment with the establishment and the public is trying to separate fact from fiction.
“You can look historically at times that seem to be caught up in not telling the truth and irony flourishes,” Herron says. “Like in 18th Century England, when King George was going mad on the throne and the world was falling apart, irony was a thriving form.”
It came to dominate our culture in the 1970s as a way to question authority, says Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.
“It was a response to things like governmental lying and to the commercialization and commoditization and corporatization of everything,” he says. “The only appropriate way to react to what was going on was to be a smart aleck and to say, `Yeah, right,’ to any assertion by the powerful. There was always someone trying to make a sucker out of you.”
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair magazine and co-founder of the defunct satirical Spy magazine, was quoted as saying, “It’s the end of the age of irony. Things that were considered fringe and frivolous are going to disappear.”
But instead of ushering in an age of sincerity, when people help each other, join together and believe in a better world, we’re more interested than ever in whether celebrities wear underwear on a regular basis and have no qualms elbowing that person reaching for the last PlayStation 3 on the shelf.
Irony is alive
“Many people, I was probably among them, said irony was dead and in the face of horrors unimaginable, the only appropriate response was authenticity and realism — postmodern winking was no longer appropriate,” Kaplan says. “It probably was about six months that that lasted. Irony is very much alive and well.”
It’s an era in which comedian Stephen Colbert’s ironic roast of President Bush at a White House correspondents dinner is now legend. And, according to a study by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, more 18-to-24-year-olds watch “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” than read the print edition of a major newspaper.
“It’s become very hard to figure out what is real and what isn’t,” says stand-up comic Marc Maron. “By nature of that, there’s more irony.
“The idea that O.J. Simpson was about to publish a book about what he would have done had he killed his wife and her [friend], that should be an ironic joke, but it’s completely real and horrifying.”
The lines of reality are so blurred, irony is the only way to formulate some type of understanding, says Maron, who will be on Comedy Central’s “Comedy Central Presents” Jan. 12.
“That’s why fake news is resonating much more with people than the real news,” he says. “Because when you can exaggerate or be sarcastic or be ironic, the real message is revealed. Sometimes it takes irony to cut through a lot of the bull.”
Plus, it can sometimes drive messages home more efficiently than the truth.
“People don’t like honesty. They find it boring or too draining for them to engage with,” Maron says. “If something’s put across in a smug or condescending way, it’s got some safety built into it — you can take it in, laugh at it, and it assumes you’re in on the joke.”
Today’s irony can run the gamut from a simple wisecrack, knee-jerk and silly, to something much darker, says John Tomasic, managing editor of the online pop culture commentary Pop and Politics. But in the process, it can bring people together, as long as you know you’re not immune.
“You use it to mock, but you use it best if you’re prepared to be mocked,” he says.
While irony cuts across age groups, ethnicities and gender, it is best understood by the younger generation, who have known irony their entire lives, Tomasic says.
“Young people, by and large, are not confused about the rules of the game. They have grown up with irony. It’s their best friend and worst enemy. It’s their playground pal, their video game instructor, their movie script writer,” he says. “Young people are not at all confused, for example, about `The Daily Show,’ a source of bafflement to the serious men and women in the skyboxes of life.”
In the months after the 9/11 attacks, author Kalfus began to formulate a novel in his head based on the media’s glorification of each victim.
“Everyone who was killed supposedly was a perfect husband, a perfect wife, a perfect father or mother. They were all heroes,” Kalfus says. “I wanted to see them as people, not the way they were killed but by the way they lived their lives. And most probably lived messy lives, like the rest of us.”
Kalfus’ book, “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country” (Ecco, 256 pages, $24.95), was published in July and is based on a couple who thought the other spouse had been killed in the terrorist attacks, and both were secretly happy about it.
“Loosely speaking, irony is a method of humor that deflates a cliche or deflates a particular way of thinking by showing that it’s taking itself too seriously,” he says. “It’s just one literary method of making us see the world a little more clearly in the fog of myths.”
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Questioning every premise
Irony never accepts anything at face value. Instead, it delves deeper, looks further and questions every premise, Kalfus says. And in the process, some form of the truth is discovered.
“You try to puncture a cliche in a straightforward way, you only dent it,” Kalfus says. “Irony, by ridiculing the supports for the cliche, can actually bring it down.”
Irony shifts the reins of power — taking information from the top, altering it, changing it, and maybe in the process, getting closer to the truth. Like a sword of disillusionment, irony is a defense mechanism that gives the public some say in world events that are unfolding.
“What has happened since 9/11 to promote the recidivism of our ironic culture was the run-up to the war,” USC’s Kaplan says. “It’s hard to see what’s going on, and when you do see what’s going on, to not be cynical about the nature of the world and the nature of power.
“And so making fun of it, using it as the grist for parody, as masters such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are doing, seems to be the best way to let the air out of the balloon of power.”