Irony
An Eastern Block comedian, returning from a trip to the West, was asked, “I hear that capitalism is dying.”“Yes,” he said. “It is dying very beautifully.”
There is a theory that one of the driving forces in our species' developing intelligence was the need to detect deception. How could you ever test a theory like that? How would you go about trying to disprove it? Evolve a new intelligent species? But this does help explain the pleasures of irony, saying the opposite of what you mean.
Since our existence depends on getting what we need from other people, we use words for that purpose. Truth is only one of the techniques available to us. Speaking does not consist of packing up ideas in sentence boxes and listening is not unpacking them. Words cause events in minds. A beneficial event is more to be desired than a cool conveyance of fact.
The other side is that we need to protect ourselves from other people's attempts to verbally manipulate us, and so we are practiced in seeing beneath the surface. We delight in irony, both creating and understanding it.
Consider the following:
"It is now late January, and some people are deciding they can't live up to their New Years resolutions. Rubbish. Just consider those teenagers who are vowing sexual abstinence. They are so successful that they don't need to learn anything about protection. They already have the only perfect protection. If they can keep their resolutions perfectly, with their hormones flowing, then surely any adult can keep a New Years resolution."
Does anyone really think I'm talking about New Years resolutions?
Beyond giving the listener the opportunity to solve a pleasant puzzle, irony makes it possible to say things that you can’t say straight. It’s hard to get people to listen when you say you hate something. That’s not playful. People don’t want to get sucked in. Instead, say you love it and elaborate ironically. That is playful. People can enjoy that.
Irony comes with risks. There are some irony-impaired individuals who don't get it. They will get upset with you even though you are supporting their ideas because you seem to be speaking against them. They don’t like the explanation: they are dull.
Similar are those who are “earnest,” intense and serious. They are the bane of all humorists. Perhaps they get a sense of their own significance from their association with "important" issues. Lightness is therefore a personal attack on their importance.
Although you can't do anything about the dull or the earnest, there are ways to communicate ironically with others. In a speech, you can use tone of voice to indicate you're being ironical. The big risk comes if the speech is ever transcribed. Tone of voice does not survive putting on paper unless you can insert brackets "[voice dripping with irony:]".
For writing, the best option is to make the assertions so exaggerated that the reader finally thinks, "You can't possibly mean this seriously."
The “tropes” are the rhetorical devices that play with the meanings of words. Irony is considered one of the master tropes.
posted by TC @ 7:28 PM
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