After 9/11, Jon Stewart said irony might be dead forever.  After the ascendancy of Barack Obama, some folks have said that again.  This is, some have suggested, why comedians do not want to make fun of Obama.  He represents something they actually like, and so they convince themselves there’s nothing about him to mock, nothing about him to be ironic about.  It’s the worst kind of ignorant provincialism masking as enlightenment. 

Still, there is little doubt that these are challenging times for the professionally arch. Gilbert Gottfried, widely credited with being the first standup comic to tell a 9/11 joke (he complained 18 days after the attacks that he couldn’t get a direct flight to California because “they said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first”), noted that his gun-shy colleagues, afraid of spoiling the love fest or being accused of racism, “continue to do Sarah Palin insults, and that really struck me as odd.”

Read here about the self-congratulating self-righteousness that blinds progressives to the fact that, yes, even things they like can be mocked.  And read about at least two writers who see the desperate need for irony in these utterly sober times: one is O’Rourke.  One is Didion.

 

NOTE: For those who were asleep that one day in senior English when the teacher explained irony, here’s a summary.  There’s three kinds: dramatic irony, situational irony, and verbal irony.  Dramatic irony is easy to understand: it’s when something is happening to a character in a story, and the audience knows something the character does not know.  We see a man hide in a closet.  We see a woman enter the room.  “Look out!” we say, “There’s a man in the closet!”  In that way, dramatic irony is really just a kind of suspense. 

Situational irony is when something completely unexpected and poetic happens in real life, like when you find out that your blind date really is blind, so you wear dirty clothes or a terrycloth bathrobe on the date – and you find out she’s not blind, but blond.  Think poetic justice.

 

Verbal irony is the easiest of all.  It’s called sarcasm.  Saying the opposite of what you mean.  A man asks his friend, who just got fired, how his day is going.  “Terrific,” says the friend.  That’s verbal irony.