Irony Survives, Survey Says

Before Sept. 11 people laughed at Bill Clinton when he asked what the definition of ‘is’ is and it was the coolly detached age of irony. Now people ask what the definition of irony is and it is just confusing. Is irony a stance of instinctive mockery where anything with or without a pulse demands a deprecating quip, or is it a smart, potent tool of analysis and detachment that is all the more important in a country’s dark hour? It turns out that irony—the smart kind—and patriotism, in its flag-flying, blood-giving glory, are both resilient. And, comedians claim (and humor website hits corroborate) both humor and national pride fortify a nation against terrifying threats.

Not that, for a while there, it didn’t look like patriotism had totally eclipsed irony in the things-that-define-us-as-American category. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, once it became clear that it was time for grandiose societal assessment, Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair and co-founder of Spy magazine (a now-defunct ’80s irony pioneer), and the rest of the Carter bandwagon declared irony defunct. Carter announced to the media magazine Inside.com in mid-September that “it’s the end of the age of irony.” Which made sense as a prognostication when missing-person posters and soot covered Manhattan.

Something else happened though, when the dust had settled enough so that particle masks were no longer mandatory. The fundamental shift in funniness, it was nowhere to be found. Irony is alive and well and more people are paying attention to it than ever before, say practitioners of the art like Kurt Andersen `76 (co-founder of Spy, former editor-and-chief of New York magazine and co-founder of Inside.com) and Andy Borowitz `80 (a regular contributor to the New Yorker and NPR’s Weekend Edition) because in every time of darkness, dark humor comforts where platitudes disgust. The humor magazine The Onion is doing its patriotic duty and, thanks to a mainstream media obsession with irony’s supposed death, future or second coming, the business of funny commentary is a widely captivating trade these days.

“I think that there was a tendency to try to make sense of it more quickly than possible. The repudiation of irony was an attempt to make sense of what happened. It was a presumption that people were interested in how other people were doing and the preemptive sneer of bad irony didn’t have a place,” says Jedediah Purdy `97, author of For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today and another upcoming zeitgest-chaser about globalization. Purdy has thought a bit about irony, and he has thought it through a bit more than the people who announced its demise. Initial shock meant parody was paralyzed, but only temporarily.

For John Aboud `95 and Michael Colton `97, the co-founders and editors of the website modernhumorist.com, putting irony on hold wasn’t really a choice. Aside from being stuck a continent away from their Brooklyn offices because of flight cancellations, the pair say they couldn’t imagine writing normal comedy immediately following the attacks.

“In the first week, everyone was sort of numb, and that was the ‘death of irony’ phase. But the use of the word irony is sort of incorrect. People were referring to aloof smugness, detachment, and it was hard to be detached from everything that was going on,” Colton says. “The week the attacks happened, we didn’t yet know what was funny. Nothing was really funny.” So the two humorists posted a letter to their readers saying that comedy was postponed, but it would return because its value as an escape mechanism was especially important after the attacks.

“Many people wiser than we have said that among the casualties of last week’s attack is our media’s flip cynicism, its ironic detachment from genuine feeling. Well, if irony isn’t dead then it’s gravely wounded,” they wrote. “How can we be ironic when our fire squad in Park Slope, Brooklyn, has lost half its members?” Colton and Aboud asked for feedback from readers and the response was tremendous. “We got hundreds and hundreds of e-mails from people saying ‘we want to laugh again,’” Colton says. One particularly thoughtful message came from someone who worked in the Pentagon:

“The view from our office window of the Pentagon was (IS) unsettling and unspeakably sad...That said, the humor is slowing returning to our workplace (and I work in a government agency, so believe me, there’s a lot here to inspire laughter!), and we need Modern Humorist to help get us back to some version of our normal, disfunctional [sic] selves. I applaud your decision to place political leaders off limits for now, and hope that when the time feels right, you’ll once again exercise that very American right to speak your mind, no matter how irreverently. Thanks again and God be with you all.”

With or without reader support, Colton says nothing was going to fundamentally change.

“It’s not like we were going to quit the business and go to law school. We’re comedy writers. It was easier because, thank God, we didn’t have anyone in our immediate circle affected.”

And so the Modern Humorist team responded with topical, yet tangential humor. Like Jerry Falwell’s history of America. “Jerry Falwell was a comedy savior in September,” Colton says. “It was topical, on the periphery, didn’t really strike at what was going on.”

And irony didn’t go anywhere because irony is actually a crucial tool. Even one of its most outspoken critics, Purdy, says so himself.

“[The right] kind of irony is actually essential to civilization. The ability to doubt oneself is a very important capacity. After the end of stupid irony—if we have actually reached the end—it could lead to leaden earnestness. Or it’s possible to move into a more refined ironic sensibility where we do take ourselves and the world’s threats seriously,” he says. “It’s a civilized capacity to laugh at ourselves in small ways even as we go about big things.”

The direction this big action will take us is unclear, but Purdy does not fear that America will stop laughing.

“So it’s a crude crossroads. One fork is toward the realm of perpetual self-seriousness, the other is more engaged irony,” he says.

Purdy separates the good from the bad irony, and, he explains that many people who said irony was dead did so because no could fathom any more crude mockery of everything after Sept. 11. The problem is apparently that the definition of irony was sloppy to begin with.

Marhsall Sella, a culture writer for the New York Times magazine, thinks that it is fair to call some irony dead.

“Irony sort of gets pushed aside momentarily. If anything we don’t need the cultural deflation of irony right now. I suspect it isn’t dead, it’s laid up,” he says. “People who decry irony are really decrying an adolescent tone of irony where everything is mocked.”

Andersen breaks down the difference most clearly.

“Stupid, reflexive cheap cynicism—at least for a while—will go away some, which is all to the good,” he says. “What is funny is always a matter of treading around the edges of propriety. When people use irony they mean everything from Craig Kilborn to Joseph Heller. So the annoying form of excessive commenting upon oneself, the more precious breathing one’s own fumes may be the ones [forms of irony] I would be happy to see go away.”

But after Sept. 11, why was everyone so interested in what people who write satire were up to anyway?

Irony, dead or alive, got surprising amounts of attention in a moment when news outlets actually had some real news to relay after a summer of shark attacks and painfully-extracted sexual confessions. Even some comedians themselves, an admittedly self-important group by trade, were surprised at how the national spotlight turned toward funny business.

“We figured our fans would wonder what we were going to do, but the amount of hits we got was pretty amazing,” says Maria Schneider, a 10-year veteran of the writing staff of the popular humor newspaper, The Onion. “People just wanted to see some humorous content. We’ll maybe try to point out things that the mainstream media hasn’t pointed out.”

The Onion put out an extremely high-quality issue, mainly, Schneider says, by responding with what the staff members themselves were thinking and feeling after the attacks.

“We wanted to do an issue in which we tried to understand what was going on. We tried to do ideas based on how we felt personally,” she says.

One story in the first issue following the attacks was titled “Not Knowing What Else to do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake.” Schneider explains that she and Onion colleagues attended a party soon after September 11 where a friend apologetically served a cake with red-white-and-blue frosting.

“She was embarrassed, but there was this idea that no words can encompass [feelings after the attack.] It seemed to epitomize the feeling,” Schneider says.

This humor and emotional honesty worked, most people agree. Purdy, who admits he doesn’t read The Onion as often as he’d like, perused the paper’s special edition covering the attacks and was quite impressed.

“The Onion’s first issue was interesting, wry and ironic, sweet and oddly moving, curiously powerful even though it was a farce,” he says. “It was the best possible patriotic mobilization of the Onion’s resources.”

Although Schneider worries a little that she and her colleagues will start taking themselves too seriously if they let the critical acclaim get to their collective head, she is happy that the fans are happy. Fellow humor writer and commentator Borowitz also appreciates the response he got.

“For once, we comedians were sort of at the center of a lot of media scrutiny. So we have a lot more power than we thought. It was the first time in 20 years of doing [humor writing] where I got an emotional reaction.”

Andersen was perhaps the most nonplussed by the irony clamor.

“People feel all the more thirst for good comedy that can work in this moment. People look to excellent practitioners rather than the guy down the hall.”

Sensitivity runs high these days, especially regarding tried and true presidential humor, but no one thinks what counts as funny has changed immeasurably.

“One thing about comedians is as a group of people we don’t like to fail very much,” says Borowitz. So no one will push the envelope into crass territory too quickly. But Americans will still care about things that never have and never will deserve their attention.

“Celebrities were idiotic before and Mariah Carey will continue to post idiotic things on her website,” says Borowitz. “The right to be trivial is protected in wartime. You cannot work and be serious all the time. We will laugh again, maybe not at Zoolander, but we will laugh. People are scared and skittish but the laughter will win out.”

Laughter at whom, is the question. Bush, a prime comic target, may be tacitly off-limits.

“People are going to be nervous about making fun of the president…but there is a difference between making fun of the president and supporting him as commander-in-chief and being very patriotic,” Borowitz says.

Purdy recalled that at the time For Common Things was released, Sella, who profiled Purdy in the Times Magazine, asked a question that resonates for Purdy today especially.

“He asked whether I thought that the kind of public engagement I was arguing for would only happen in a time of war. I tried to answer as best I could, like I’m trying now,” he says. “It comes at such a terrible price that I can’t see it as any kind of triumph or vindication.”

It’s not a triumph for anyone that the flippancy and comedy that has recently crept into mainstream media is now out the door. Joel Stein’s humor column in Time Magazine has been indefinitely suspended, as have other comedic features in the newsweekly.

Apart from one story in the crisis-coverage package in the first week after the attacks, Stein has not been as busy as usual.

“My office is cleaned and all my friends have been talked to,” he says. “These are serious times and if you’re a newsgathering organization, you’re going to want to devote all your resources and space to this. Everyone knows this is the biggest story they’ll every cover.” He is disappointed, though, to no longer have editorial space in the magazine. And, like everyone else who writes comedy or comments on people writing comedy for a living, he rejects the notion that comedy is now less important than it was before.

“If you thought what you did was meaningless before, it probably is,” he says, and clearly he thinks what he did was not meaningless. Triviality is on hold, but Modern Humorist and The Onion are going forward with comedy that will help the nation heal.

So maybe comedy pieces like this post-Sept. 11 “Friends” parody from Modern Humorist are really performing a valuable service in the nation’s time of need:

MONICA: They’re gonna need some help cleaning up. (Grabs a mop) Who’s with me?

CHANDLER: Could you BE any more of an anal neat freak?

MONICA (annoyed): How about if I withhold sex? Am I anal then?

CHANDLER (cowed): Well, that depends. Are you withholding anal?

JOEY (thumbs up at CHANDLER): Dude...anal? Niiiice.

Maybe not.