Taking Irony Seriously

Whilst putzing about on YouTube a while ago I found a series of videos relating in various ways to one particular video, under the screenname Paperlilies, which calls for a ban of sarcasm on the site (see it here). I'd actually not recommend you bother with watching it; it consists of a girl "complaining" of sarcastic videos on YouTube and suggesting that no one should make them anymore because she's tired of feeling stupid when she watches them. Her other suggestion is to tag sarcastic videos as such.

The point of the video is to be itself "sarcastic." There was a surprising outlash against this video, particularly by people who didn't understand the joke. Paperlilies posted another video, both amusing and disturbing, in which she reads from the "hater" comments she received (caution, adult content revealing the ignorance and latent aggression of the American YouTube user). Among the interesting responses to this comes from a sympathetic little girl who seems concerned that Paperlilies might take some of the comments to heart. Then there is this "instructional video" on what sarcasm means, which has a kind of low-budget production value to it that almost makes it amusing.

I can't really watch all these videos without flinching each time someone says "sarcasm" or "sarcastic," when what they really mean is ironic. Irony is a difficult concept to pin down, but almost always involves a statement that, taken at "face value," appears to mean what it says, but taken in context or by intonation, actually means something contradictory. Sarcasm is a form of irony, and so the confusion is quite understandable. But in sarcasm there is usually a clear tone and some form of hyperbole in the statement. As a form of irony, it is not always true that all irony is sarcastic, though all sarcasm is probably ironic.

John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are masters of both irony and sarcasm. When Stewart responds to a news story with that exaggerated innocent look on his face, he's usually being sarcastic. When Colbert pretends to be an earnest reporter and asks absurd questions of congresspeople, he's usually being ironic. Another good example of irony is Andy Kaufman, as played by Jim Carey in Man on the Moon. No one could tell when the guy was playing a character and if he was ever being genuine.

To complicate, or maybe simplify things, there's the irony Reinhold Niebuhr discerns in American history, as discussed in this post at God's Politics. Here, irony exists where our misled goals and hopes produce contradictory results that do not in themselves delegitimate the goals. This is a more esoteric form, perhaps, but I think it helps get at the broad nature of the term.

Language changes, of course, but it should change because new situations or ideas require words to be used in new ways, not because we don't know what we're talking about. In the first case language grows; in the second, it becomes meaningless.