irony.

[here's a paper i wrote almost exactly 3ya for grad school; last evening, drinking beer in the fading sun with dalton and hughes, the cajoned genius of colbert's white house press dinner came up, and i may have said i once had something to say about it. post-beer, i'm like...eh. but here.]

of yogurts and statesmen.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” announced Stephen Colbert during his monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner, “I believe it’s yogurt. But I refuse to believe it’s not butter. Most of all, I believe in this president.” Juxtaposition has a lot of power, but it’s inert—it’s display power. The meaning is arrayed on the shelf in front of you, sometimes beautifully, but you’re who has to decid you need it and put it in your cart.. But the presidency was not at a low point, he continued. “I believe it is just a lull before a comeback. I mean, it’s like the movie Rocky.” Colbert looked at President Bush, seated to his right up at the podium, then out at the room full of stiff-faced media reporters who looked, as a whole, like a gathering cloud, a dark, not-laughing cloud. “All right,” continued Colbert. “The president in this case is Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed is—everything else in the world. It’s the tenth round. He’s bloodied. His corner man, Mick, who in this case I guess would be the vice president, he’s yelling, ‘Cut me, Dick, cut me!’ and every time he falls everyone says, ‘Stay down! Stay down!’ Does he stay down? No. Like Rocky, he gets back up, and in the end he—actually, he loses in the first movie.” The auditorium was urgently quiet, like the opening moments of a retirees’ Bingo game. “Okay. Doesn’t matter. The point is it is the heart-warming story of a man who was repeatedly punched in the face.” I sat in front of my TV laughing, and as the cameras panned over the stony faces, I stood up, did a little dance, and sat back down. Whether the president and the body of reporters were unable to see the irony or they refused to see it, the net effect was the same: Colbert’s true meaning was lost to them. (With two notable exceptions: Judge Antonin Scalia laughed uproariously when Colbert came after him, leading me to wonder if a lifetime appointment doesn’t necessarily deepen one’s affection for irony; and the face of Laura Bush, which, behind a very fine veneer of mild disdain, was positively hateful.) What’s interesting is how the collective reaction—nonplussed, antsy, aloof—was key to my own enjoyment of the moment. It’s like my seeing that the audience didn’t get Colbert’s speech was the point of Colbert’s speech.

internal motion.

In his classic A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, H.W. Fowler offers this definition: Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware, both of that ‘more’ and of the outsider’s incomprehension. This definition is sharp as a knife and broad as hell, at the same time, for it makes stipulations about both the broadcast end and the reception end of the form. We have the term “ironic intent” to remark that the success of an irony depends entirely on how it is received; the audience could be either unable or unwilling to take the two levels of meaning, and without that dual reception, it’s not irony. It might still be deft, or sarcastic or waggish, but it’s not ironic. At the other end, the broadcast end, irony has motion right out of the gate—it postulates. So right away we’re in grammatically paradoxical territory, because irony is a noun yet it has a verb’s motion. It thinks. Perceiving that underlying sense of motion is vital, literally, for if irony as a form has motion, then it has life. It has what, some years ago, philosophers called “intentionality,” which refers to the state of being aware of the contents of your own mind. Since I am not a behaviorist, I’ll quote one: Intentionality can be conceived of as a hierarchically organized series of belief-states. In this scheme of things, computers are zero-order intentional entities: they are not aware of the contents of their ‘minds’… Having a belief about someone else’s beliefs (or intentions) constitutes a second order of intentionality … Jane believes that Sally thinks her ball is under the cushion. Jane has two belief states in mind (her own and Sally’s). (from The Human Story, Robin Dunbar) Irony, then, involves a third order of intentionality: Stephen postulates that Mark will perceive that George does not understand. So irony has intent (at least in art. The modern human condition is itself meta-ironic, which opens the door for Fowler’s definition as an argument for God; but that’s a paper for another class) and this intent is complex, for it anticipates the reaction of a second party and the subsequent reaction of a third.

almost like democracy.

More than this, though, it’s the last part of Fowler’s definition that understands how everyone’s so good at recognizing irony yet bad at defining it. The two things it postulates—that one party shall hear and shall not understand while the other gets both that “more” and the outsider’s incomprehension—depend on one party’s immediate-and-no-further reception and on the other’s willingness to unpack things—to perceive rather than just receive. That irony requires layers of audience is how I’m able to know it; for when I look over and see the unfortunate first audience, I recognize that I’ve the opportunity to be a member of the lucky second group, even before I’ve begun to unpack the layers of meaning. So, then: irony involves my receiving, understanding, and making a value judgment on it. But I have to do less than that for it to feel ironic to me, because a) seeing that someone else doesn’t get it is always easier than getting it for myself, and b) once I’ve seen that another person doesn’t understand, it’s tempting to stop right there, because already I feel smarter than somebody else. I’m in the club.

Think of middle school for five seconds. If you have a smile on your face, it’s because you’re thinking of how you’re not there now. Five seconds is all it takes to remember that all you need to feel you belong to a group is evidence of someone who doesn’t. The same goes for war—all Roosevelt and Stalin needed to get them to hang out was that dick Hitler. And the same goes for brand identity—in his essay E Unam Pluribus, David Foster Wallace recalls a commercial featuring a guy who cleverly sells Pepsi to an impulsive crowd to illustrate the ubiquity of irony in TV commercials: It creates in me the sense that all these people don’t get it, but I do. All I have to get is that someone else doesn’t, and I’m connected. I’m in the club. Like middle school, when social psychology first begins to spread its many-feathered wings, the first level of ironic perception hinges on understanding nothing more complex than that someone else does not understand. However, like college, a nuanced perception of irony may require some flat-out work to reach, but once there you can hang out with your study group and tell stories about the days when you were friends with Stalin and Pepsi.

your neighbor as yourself.

I have a local friend at the local pub. (By which I mean that, at the pub just down the street from my house, there is a 30something dude who is reliably seated at one particular corner of the bar, and that he often calls me over to chat and catch up about things that are, to the untrained ear, not at all different from the things about which we have recently caught up.) Last week I sat down to talk and have a beer with him and his girlfriend. Conversation went something like this. “I tell you man, the acid Leo sold me yesterday was almost as wild as that gnarly ecstasy I was rolling on last time I saw you.” A pause. “But it was last weekend that was the real trip—I scored an enormous stash of mushrooms, they cost a lot but I got a discount ‘cos I bought a bunch.” As he continued in this vein, I raised my eyebrows and looked down the bar at the girlfriend, who I knew to be a regular drinker but one who categorically refused to use drugs. She stared off at the neon and nodded in that absent, you’ll-know-I’ve-heard-something-new-when-I-stop-nodding kind of way. The other choice topic that night was my friend’s work as a sort of rogue auto mechanic. His work had been spotty, but recently he’d had a vision—he spoke excitedly of getting his business license and building a clientele, were it not for the prohibitively expensive start-up costs. As he continued to talk about his dreams of a business and his inability to get the money together, he became increasingly frustrated by what he felt was the catch-22 of the situation. This was not self-wallowing despondency; he was legitimately unable to see how he could move forward. I’d been a willing ear for half an hour at this point, and did not expect to play any other role, so when he asked what I thought I was almost surprised. So I said what came to mind. “It sounds like the drugs are really working out for you.” He looked at me with a blank sort of disconnect, though past him I caught the face of his girl: She flashed a little half-smile at me, and she winked. I cocked an eyebrow in return and, feeling I had accomplished some small thing, I wished them well and left for home.

It’s interesting how, in the literary world, the grandest, most full-body irony inspires in its readers a sense of belonging not so dissimilar from that produced by the middle-school, Pepsi-Generation ironies which David Foster Wallace so articulately cautions against. Oedipus Rex is not a work I first encountered and personally aligned myself with—as I did with To Kill a Mockingbird or The Catcher in the Rye or The Breakfast Club—yet it holds in it something so profound and human that it nonetheless became a meaningful reference point for me when I read it at age 15 and remains so now at 30. It’s a means both of personally understanding and of talking about hubris and frailty as pitfalls we all must cross over—it doesn’t offer answers, but of course it doesn’t, it’s a tragedy, and tragedies can’t provide answers because nobody wants to see a play called 7 Ways to Win Friends and Still Have Life Run Incestuously, Murderously Off the Track. What Oedipus Rex is is a framework, for individual understanding, yes, but also for connecting, for discussing with you what I’ve just seen or read and us feeling closer as a result. And, Oedipus Rex is an irony.

Fiction has the luxury of imaginary characters that can abandon their imaginary infants and sleep with imaginary mothers. An author can aspire that his audience will perceive an irony and take something good or profound from it, but even a Faulkner-sized ego needn’t concern itself with the future well being of characters it created. When my local bar friend had asked me for my take on his predicament, he’d not been interested in the power-point of my opinion. I’d had only about a sentence to work with; I looked at him, his girlfriend, then him again, and what presented itself was an irony. In retrospect I’m almost proud of it—it was perhaps the best thing I could’ve said. Fowler’s definition is dead-on but, too, it leaves out that there’s a personal motivation behind the creation of any given irony. Even with a teensy, in-the-moment one like in my conversation at the bar, there’s a fourth order of intentionality that cycles back to the irony’s creator: Mark hopes that Girlfriend will feel less alone in her perception that Local Friend does not understand. Likewise, Stephen hoped that Mark would be comforted by evidence that he’s not alone in perceiving that George does not understand. Of course, an ironist’s aspirations for the sum effect could be negative instead of positive, but either way there is a hope there, and that intentionality drives the creation of any irony. Without that fourth order of connective intent, the other three drift apart somewhat, and we end up not sure that the creator’s true meaning is different from the literal. Which, in Colbert’s case, would consign him to the unenviable task of “giv[ing] people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument.”