Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Irony and Sarcasm

2022; Penn State University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.8.2.0381

2333-9934

Bruce Michelson,

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

At levels beyond the reach of recent handbooks and encyclopedias (reviewed in this journal) on classifications and patterns of comic utterance, Roger Kreuz’s pocket-sized introduction, in the excellent MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, offers clarity, plain-language insights, stylistic grace, and merciful freedom from restrictive method. Describing half a dozen varieties of irony and roving through two millennia of culture-specific and near-miss attempts to define them, Kreuz also engages in due course with sarcasm as an all-invasive subspecies of verbal (and usually oral) irony; and along the way, he visits satire, parody, paradox, and other protean modes of disruption. Because he is writing “a biography” of “irony” as “a troublesome word” (xii), he doesn’t try to resolve these troubles. On the contrary, he treats irony as a source of creative rebellion against expectation and taboo, against habits of inner life, and against scholastic attempts to define it too closely and lock it up. Aristophanes, Sophocles, Socrates, and Cicero (credited with coining the Latin “ironia” by adapting from Aristotle’s Greek) are here, as well as Quintilian, Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, the Earl of Shaftsbury, Byron, Oscar Wilde, Wayne Booth, and Paul de Man; these and other famous voices are reviewed concisely and thoughtfully rather than merely trundled out. Moreover, they often share space—at times even the same paragraph or page—with celebrity pundits, performers, and pop-culture noise from our own moment: Jon Stewart, Douglas Coupland, Stephen Colbert, Gene Wilder, Nicolas Cage, Donald Trump, smiley emoticons, Broadcast News, Titanic, House, Reality Bites, and (inevitably) Alanis Morissette. And it all works, in part because the abiding purpose is to observe broadly and modestly and to describe rather than define.Kreuz explores and relishes the changefulness and permeable borders of the conventional categories of romantic irony, historical irony, cosmic and Socratic and verbal and situational irony, each of which gets a fresh look as he ranges through many contexts and memorable one-off experiments. The organization here is limpid, and the focus remains steady. This focus is exemplified in Kreuz’s documenting the gradual loosening of the definition of the word “irony” in various editions of H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Early, stodgy adjudications about what the word “irony” should and shouldn’t signify were revised in recognition of the fact that cultural and verbal practices have moved on. Neither Sigmund Freud nor Henri Bergson is mentioned at all, and their absence is not a lapse but a strength, for in a book about irony and comic utterance as inherently dynamic, there’s no point grappling yet again with reductive generalizations from early in the last century that aim to delimit varieties of exuberance that cross boundaries and outrun definition.In chapter 6, where Irony and Sarcasm reviews certain specific kinds of irony as modes of aggression, the attention falls on deployment in social interactions and irony as critique in the public sphere—as in Salieri’s sly ridicule of Mozart in the presence of a slow-witted emperor in Amadeus, the hasty banning of Candide in Paris and Geneva in the mid-eighteenth century, and the official interdiction of sarcasm in North Korea and of published ridicule and mockery in Saudi Arabia as recently as 2018—with nothing about a “relation to the unconscious” or about any alignments with Bergson’s taxonomies of laughter. The scrutiny falls on where and how such irony actually turns up, how it works, and the ruckus it can cause rather than roots in the id. The most playful chapter in the book’s sequence is titled “What Irony Is Not,” and it makes its distinctions with admirable economy and also with enough wit to demonstrate that Kreuz understands what he is talking about, not just linguistically, historically, or politically but also from within. Irony, he affirms, is not coincidence, nor is it paradox. It can sometimes be satire but by no means always, and it isn’t parody either, and yes, in that stubbornly familiar song from a quarter century back, Alanis Morissette got things seriously wrong—though Kreuz observes that as she grew up, her understanding of irony grew up as well.Kreuz also steers clear of the kind of semantic-mechanism analysis favored in the journal Humor and in recurring campaigns by some of its regulars. He works instead from a common-sense presumption that fully functioning, grown-up human minds are more complex and agile than a freeware app for spotting verbal incongruity. Accordingly, when the book engages with sarcasm at length as a breed of ironic discourse, it pays serious attention to a useful concept from the neurosciences: a theory of mind, promulgated more than thirty years ago by Simon Baron-Cohen and espoused also by influential writers like Daniel Dennett, namely, a capacity, normally absent in very young children and often lacking in adults with varieties of autism, to “understand another person’s thoughts, and also the ability to infer what a person thinks about someone else’s thoughts” (68). It follows, then, that the quip, the caustic remark, and the sly rejoinder can either hit home or spark delight only for listeners and witnesses who can escape, at least for an instant, the confinements of their own outlook and imagine a situation as others might see it. It also follows that many scholastic analyses of jokes, sit-coms, stand-up routines, and literary works with comic dimensions fall flat every year because of an unwillingness to countenance what Kreuz proposes as fundamental to sarcasm as a social practice and to understanding verbal irony as we encounter it elsewhere in contemporary life.In a later chapter, Kreuz also underscores the value of recognizing the sarcastic tone of voice, a dimension so important, in his view, as to warrant an acronym—STOV—as Richard Roberts, Anne Cutler, Patricia Rockwell, and Kreuz himself have suggested elsewhere. The idea is that in oral discourse, intonations and inflections can be essential signals that something we hear is indeed intended as wry or sarcastic rather than guileless or naïve. This seems an insight worth bearing in mind, considering that so much of the irony, sarcasm, and snark we negotiate now is predominantly or entirely oral, that recent attempts at striking such poses in print have often and notoriously miscarried, and that the so-called general theory of verbal humor, essentially a fleshed-out “semantic mechanisms” formulation, does not effectively countenance the possibility that how an utterance sounds can determine what it means. Due regard is paid to the importance of context. A Parisian boulevard sneer can slice deep with a deadpan delivery, but that tone might not work so well in your next bon mot face-off back home, where a Bill Murray nasal sing-song is a playbook rec for scoring points. Irony and Sarcasm is not only an ideal starting point for students exploring these and kindred varieties of humor and laughter; for veteran scholars it can provide a refreshing return to a rich history and also to clear thinking.