A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the peculiar phenomenon of growing up parodic—that is, of having experienced the world, almost from the cradle, through the distorted lens of farce. And, lo and behold, the Comments section dogpile of the week can be found atop a New York Times “Opinionator” piece by Christy Wampole, an assistant professor of French at Princeton University who proffers much-needed instruction on “How to Live Without Irony.”
Every few years, it seems, irony goes on trial in America. Does anyone remember Jedediah Purdy, the wunderkind whose 1999 book, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, was released when its author was a stripling Yale Law student of 24? This was not long before the twin towers crumbled and Time and Graydon Carter announced the death of irony, which stayed on the slab for all of 48 hours. (That particular moratorium was defied in Salon.com in a piece just good enough to link.) The inquisition continues, despite the fact that we as a people seem to have a tenuous grip on what, in actual fact, irony is.
A good deal of fun was had some years back with Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic,” with its citing of things “ironic” that were, in fact, nothing of the sort. Such fudging was fairly forgivable from a 21-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter, particularly since her album was baldly awful on so many other levels that her misappropriation of a high school literary term seemed like small beer. It is somewhat more disconcerting to encounter a thirtysomething academic with tenure track in sight who has not yet learned to discriminate between irony (a word which occurs 16 times in the body of her piece), which she claims to be addressing/ redressing, and cynicism (occurring once), which she actually is. The title—“How to Live Without Irony”—tells you just about everything you need to know about the condescending tone of Miss Wampole’s screed, which begins with a patently false premise, “If irony is the ethos of our age—and it is…”, and proceeds to pile one assumption atop another. (As one who very recently watched the Thanksgiving Day parade broadcast on ABC-TV, I can assure you that irony is not the ethos of this or any age.) I was particularly taken with Miss Wampole’s entirely unnecessary bit of casual name-dropping: “My friend Robert Pogue Harrison…” In the same spirit, I will mention that my friend Justin Stewart and I have a running joke that plays on the rampant misuse of “ironically” which consists of compulsively inappropriate prefixing statements with the word, as in “Ironically, I already had lunch,” or “Ironically, that article was a piece of shit.”
Ironically, irony’s cache wasn’t always so low. The focus of Miss Wampole’s research is given as “20th- and 21st-century French and Italian literature and thought.” And while I am certain that Miss Wampole could conjugate rings around me, it’s hard to believe, given her area of expertise, that she is unfamiliar with the phrase “irony and pity,” coined (or at least popularized) by the French novelist and all-around man of letters, Anatole France: “L’Ironie et la Pitié sont deux bonnes conseillères: l’une, en souriant, nous rend la vie aimable; l’autre, qui pleure, nous la rend sacrée.” (“Irony and pity are excellent counselors. With a smile, the former makes life pleasant; the latter, with its tears, makes it sacred.”)
The phrase became something of a yardstick for measuring artistic accomplishment for proceeding generations—and, in fact, it still holds up rather well in that capacity. In his appreciation of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comics, the American cultural critic Gilbert Seldes wrote, “It is this touch of irony and pity which transforms all of Herriman’s work, which relates it, for all that the material is preposterous, to something profoundly true and moving.” This passage appears in Seldes’ 1924 “The Seven Lively Arts,” a benchmark study of America’s burgeoning “low,” popular arts, including comic strips, jazz, vaudeville, and slapstick silents. So fond was Seldes of the phrase that he used it repeatedly: “Fitzgerald racing over the country, jotting down whatever was current in college circles, is not nearly as significant as Fitzgerald regarding a tiny section of life and reporting it with irony and pity and a consuming passion.” A New York Times reviewer (Seldes again?) liked the sound of it so much that he cadged it for a March 7,1926 review of Fitzgerald’s “All the Sad Young Men”: “Thus it is that Mr. Fitzgerald has come to irony and pity, and the peace and wisdom that is inherent in partial success, as well as the disillusionment of dream.” In time, “irony and pity” had become so commonplace that Hemingway had a bit of fun with it in The Sun Also Rises.
For Miss Wampole, however, irony is far from a virtue—in fact, it’s pitiful. Her straw man target is the irony-addicted hipster who “haunts every city street and university town.” This hipster remains a somewhat hazy and etiolated figure; we do learn that he or she “studies relentlessly, foraging for what has yet to be found by the mainstream”—one would think a fairly earnest endeavor—although this is belied by the illustration accompanying her article, by one Mr. Leif Parsons, which shows a young man and woman wearing Justin Bieber tee-shirts. The overall bent of Miss Wampole’s argument rallies against such “ironic” appropriation of mainstream culture—which presumably acts as a distraction from the lofty and the beautiful, i.e. “20th- and 21st-century French and Italian literature and thought.” All of this is predicated on Miss Wampole’s disbelief that others could find sincere pleasure in things she despises, to paraphrase The Louvin Brothers’ “The Christian Life” (Covered by The Byrds with, it must be said, a degree of galling irony.) We are fortunate that this pecksniffishness has not always been the rule in American intellectual life—far from Axel’s Castle or the ivory tower, Seldes, happily doing the breast-stroke through the mainstream, seriously engaged with everything low and lively in America, and enriched our understanding of ourselves immeasurably.
There is maybe a paragraph’s worth of legitimate argument that could be extracted from Miss Wampole’s jeremiad—nothing, however, that wasn’t covered in this Onion article of 2000. Certainly, if one allows one’s self to engage with the world of pop, one must accept certain of its premises in doing so, and there is always the risk of becoming accustomed to a diet of dross to the exclusion of much else, of watching a hundred hours of Storage Wars while “Ulysses” gathers dust, unread on the shelf (Or flushing your journalistic integrity down the toilet to be flown around the world by Rihanna.) I am not ready yet to proclaim, however, that “I have seen the best minds of my generation writing snarky Vulture recaps of reality shows.”
Rick Alverson’s The Comedy, which has meanwhile finished a run at BAMcinematek, might be a nightmare visualization of the “cultural numbness, resignation and defeat” that Miss Wampole diagnoses as endemic. As a “statement” about our culture or Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where it’s set—and it gives little enough indication of desiring to be a statement—Alverson’s movie isn’t worth a tinkerer’s damn. It’s fairly fascinating, however, as a character study and autocritique of the negating comic personae of its performers—Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim (of Tim and Eric, Awesome Show, Great Job!) and Gregg Turkington (a/k/a Neil Hamburger)—taken here to a logical (dead-) endpoint. I particularly enjoyed the depiction of the mutually-reinforcing group dynamics, here a closed circle whose interplay had developed into something like a deadpan staring contest, with each daring someone else to crack a sincere smile. Self-destructive though it may be, Tim and Eric’s punitive comedy is necessary ipecac for a culture which, despite what you may have heard, is fairly glutted on earnestness.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.