LUDIC LOG

Irony, you may have heard, is dead.

This is sure to come as bad news for the small but vital number of people who have made this form of cultural expression into a cottage industry of sorts, but it cannot be helped: times change, and we must change with them or forever be consigned to the dustbin of history. Surely no one is happy about the Death of Irony -- the journals of serious opinion on both the right and left are not gloating over the demise of The Big I, even though they never really liked it. But facts are facts. It's been nearly 5 months now since a few dedicated and decidedly unironic men created the conditions under which irony sneeringly faded and died.

Of course, it helps that irony's death was scarcely faster than its birth; for thousands of years it was the playground of effete intellectuals and pompous litterateurs, and its useful life as a tool of the masses was, culturally speaking, a blink of an eye. It also helps that most people never went much for irony in the first place; they didn't like it, didn't trust it, thought it was a bit suspect. Critics, opinon-makers and those whose job (granted them, certainly, by someone who knew what they were doing) it is to safeguard our culture generally placed irony in the same category as satire, philosophy and intentional gender confusion -- something to be allowed but never really embraced.

All along, irony frustrated us: by its very definition it would not say what it meant. It was insincere. It was confusing. It didn't do what we expected it to do. All sorts of impenitent and unwelcome ideas could be wrapped in its mantle, and we wouldn't even know it! Happily, the wise guardians of American thought knew how to handle it. There was no need to ban it -- we learned long ago that getting rid of things is problematic and can backfire. Much easier to simply declare it unfashionable. Those who worked in irony were juvenile and immature at best and hypocrites of the highest order at worst. Its chief advocates were suspicious, pretentious or childish. Still, despite these noble efforts at informing the public, it never really quite went away.

That was then. Now, we have a New Sincerity; we have people who know better than to temper their every earnest urge with the pale cast of thought; we have learned that some things are beyond our feeble attempts at humor and some subjects, and the people who discuss them, must not be subject to ridicule, no matter how subtle its tone. Dramatic irony and comedic irony are as useless as the buggy whip, because life has enough drama, and comedy just isn't right anymore. Arthur Schlesinger once dared to suggest that "what we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous"; but where is he today? He's dead, just like irony. And if he's not, he might as well be.