Intolerable Acts of Irony

Two weeks ago, while on a London adventure with a good friend, we were walking down the street in Borough Market when I lunged across the cobblestones to make a jovial point. Instead what I made—or rather, what my ankle made—was a resounding SNAP as my foot turned under me. I went down like a ton of bricks. I was even wearing sensible shoes.

Though I managed to salvage the trip—in large part due to the unwavering devotion and saintly patience of my friend—I spent most of the rest of my time in England swollen and grumpy. I was also afflicted with one of those obnoxious little ironies in life: that while generally I do enjoy being at the center of attention, I also enjoy not being at the center of attention when I so desire. I spent most of that week getting a lot of attention, and I hated it. Try going unnoticed while hobbling around on European Tiny Tim crutches.

God bless us every one indeed. Oy.

I think of myself as being high maintenance as it is, and that embarrasses me. Add “outright helpless” to that, and I just want to die of shame. My ankle may have been sprained (and the size of a cantaloupe), but my pride was severely fractured.

So what do we learn from this particular experience?

First, and perhaps most importantly, that sensible shoes may not save you from physics and cobblestones.

Second, when I am hurt and embarrassed, for some reason I immediately default to being grumpy or downright angry.

Third, I find irony in my day to day life to be deeply annoying.

Upon further reflection, I find the second two items to be more closely linked than I had originally anticipated.

I have been thinking about irony, off and on, for about ten years. Such are the perils of loving Modernist American literature. I loved The Sun Also Rises when I was seventeen, but when I read it at twenty-four, I began to realize how much of the irony I had missed on the first go-round. In college, I understood irony in terms of the Lost Generation—how it was a device employed by authors and poets to distance themselves from a pre-war conviction or sentimentality, which, post-war, rang false. In academia, I understand the use of distance, and even contradiction, between statement and meaning.

In my personal life, I think it sucks.

Not surprisingly, there’s a lot going on in the why behind that thought.

In my family, growing up, whenever one of the daughters would seem to consider the wisdom of saying something in front of our parents—a swear, a dirty joke, etc.—our dad would say, in the same pedantic tone every time, “You are responsible for everything that comes out of your mouth.” I’ve noticed a phenomenon in which a person, usually a person of high education and liberal leanings, will say something really obnoxious—along the lines of acutely annoying or vaguely offensive—in blasé tones. Implicit in this unfortunate statement is that the speaker is being ironic; that is, whatever he or she is saying is inherently excusable because it’s being said with irony.

I’m sorry, but sometimes that dog don’t hunt.

I understand the concept of engaging a topic you do not like—an idea, a policy, a person—with irony as a way of expressing your disdain or opposing views. I also very much understand that you can have too much of a good thing. My sister, an English professor, tells her students that irony in American culture died with Johnny Carson, but has perhaps been reborn in John Stewart. Irony as those two men have practiced it is characterized, in my mind, by restraint; the knowledge that they could really let loose, but a dry raise of the eyebrows is in fact enough to get the point across. Irony as I have experienced it off-screen is often characterized by the idea that the distance between speaker and statement is effectively a “get out of jail free” card for being smug, offensive, and generally insufferable; restraint has nothing to do with it.

And so I would say to everyone from the writers of the New Yorker to the deep-feeling denizens of higher education: exercise restraint. Less is more. Irony is not carte blanche for being an ass.

Now, inevitably, we come to the more bruised, more honest portion of my complaint. Irony in the New Yorker or smug college students is avoided easily enough: close the magazine or put in your headphones. However, when irony gets personal, I get grumpy. In the broadest sense, it is not often that we find stories with strong doses of irony—Shakespeare to Hemingway and everything in between—in which the characters are happy. As I recall, Othello didn’t make it out so well, and “content” isn’t exactly an adjective I would use to describe many Modernist characters. Shocking though it may be (and here I exercise sarcasm rather than irony, since there’s very little distance between my statement and me), I don’t want to live an ironic life. I want to live a happy life.

I have no idea where that sentiment fits on a post-(post?)-modern spectrum. Maybe it’s just trite. And true.

The truest truth is that irony in my personal life makes me vulnerable, something I do not enjoy. I spent most of my early life as a fifth wheel; kind of a “two, and two, and you” scenario, in which my parents were one pair and my sisters another. Occasional torment in school didn’t help my acceptance issues. As a result, I’m still very (overly) sensitive to exclusion, to the sense of being on the outside. When my professorial sister lays on the irony, with all the confidence in the world, sometimes I don’t think what she’s saying is funny. I think it’s offensive, because again, I don’t think irony is carte blanche. The irony opens up this yawning gap between us, and on my side of the gap, I feel like I’m being excluded because I’m not funny enough, not smart enough, or not cool enough to get it. And so, true to form, when embarrassed and hurt, I get just plain grumpy.

I always, always think of the Emperor’s New Clothes during acts of intolerable irony, and yet I’m still not quite able to call foul, even though I know the moral of the story as well as anybody else. Because maybe there is something there that I don’t see, and that possibility makes me scared.

Isn’t it ironic. Don’t you think?