The acts of life have neither beginning nor end. Everything happens in a very idiotic fashion. That’s why everything is the same.
Tristan Tzara
Amanda over at pandagon has a very interesting post up about sarcasm and parody. I think she gets it exactly right when she says,
Now, as soon as we pointed out that the girl is flipping the bird [“See where I’m waving around up here with the laser pointer? That’s an obscene gesture“], everyone got the joke. By no means should any of this mean that Boomers who are not Deborah Solomon are irony-impaired or anything like that. It’s just that the Hip Hop Generation is so thoroughly trained to expect things to be remixed or remade or meta-commentaries that we look for that first, especially when we’re being presented with an image or other cultural touchstone that’s already iconic. The audience’s default assumption is parody.
I think this conflict in reception can be extended to blogs, where sarcasm–or, to use the word we made up for it, snark–is standard. Many of us don’t distinguish between being funny and being incisive. Not to argue that the meat papers separate everything into lightweight biweekly lifestyle columns* and the real news, but that difference in form is probably being read as a difference in focus and function.
It might also have something to do with the blur in acceptable subject matter. When you’re riffing on a subject, it’s natural to go from your government to your boss to your baby. Humor can be a very flexible and loopy thread. Comments sections–check out the one Amanda set off–can also be very hospitable to riffs, when eight or nine people toss a joke back and forth.
Speaking as a borderline Millennial (I think), she was also right here:
There were some people in the thread below that complained that the next generation, the Millenials, is being unfairly characterized as “earnest”. I think they’re probably right that it’s unfair. It’s probably a characterization from the same people that think that these sort of multi-layered jokes are stupid. They’re hoping that the next generation will just give up and stop being so ironic. My hope is they’re probably the ones ushering in the po-po-mo era, where there’s no such thing as too self-referential. Otherwise known as the “Snakes on a Plane” generation, where you don’t even have to be familiar with a cultural artifact to mock it.
Our generation is named for a milestone that was supposed to rain death and destruction on us, right after it ended civilization as we knew it, but which resulted in nothing but a few bad made-for-television disaster movies. How could we be less connected to irony? Also, if her argument is true, that circumstances define generational trends rather than some thirty-year epidemic of strong or weak will, then irony will be even more beloved of the Millennials. We certainly don’t have fewer reasons for apathy and disgust.
Some time ago, I started but didn’t finish a post about irony and queerness–which, if you’ll notice, is an identity with a deeply ironic name. It was originally inspired by a brief dispute with Hugo over sarcasm. He’s agin it. No, seriously, he prefers earnest phrasing. I don’t. It has its place, to be sure, and there are people far more talented at it than I am, but it’s not what I do and not what I love. I opened my post with this quote:
AIDS, it was awful! I hope I never get that again.
Steve Moore, gay comedian.
This, to me, is queerness. I love irony because irony is how the perverts communicate. It’s how we make space for ourselves. It’s home. When I think about our heroes–Oscar Wilde, for example, or Sylvester, or Gertrude Stein–I think about people with a deep and abiding love for the absurd.
The second time I almost finished this post, I’d briefly gotten into it with Edith in the comments to this (ironic) post.
Edith said:
Chesticles — very amusing.
The fact that the only option born-women have, in order to go shirt-free, is surgery and hormones to look like a man — not so funny.
I replied that these words were no joke. And they’re not. Similar terms include “mangina” “dicklet,” and “diclit.” (I don’t have to explain those, do I?) We use them in earnest–more or less–to describe ourselves. The old terms aren’t necessarily evocative, and they’re based on lexical definitions of male and female bodies that tend not to acknowledge transsexual bodies. It doesn’t work for me to ignore that I have (or had) these fatty lumps right here in front where everyone can see them. I don’t have a chest like my brother’s chest. Up until very recently, I had a chest like Scott Turner-Schofield’s. It doesn’t work to call them breasts, either. After two years on testosterone, they looked very different from what most women have. I haven’t have a chest like my sister’s chest for a very long time.
Edith assumed this was me just kidding around in part, I think, because she doesn’t understand the rationale behind them. She doesn’t see them as a way to use language to skirt assumptions about whose bodies are real and whose aren’t. Like I said, this is no joke. It’s very difficult to describe something when you have no word to refer to it. How can I talk about what it’s like to bind my chest, or to have someone touch me there? To the extent that description denies us, we are invisible. We exist only to the extent that we conform to normal, acknowledged bodies. This has real-life consequences, too. If men simply don’t have anything other than penises, then no men have any need for gynecological care. If men simply don’t have anything that could remotely be compared to breasts, then of course all men would prefer to have anything remotely comparable to breasts surgically removed.
So, how can ftms refer to their bodies with terms that describe those bodies? Chesticles is one option. We need to make our own multilayered terms, to riff off of the status quo in order to establish our own position. Yeah, it’s funny. We’re funny. This whole situation is funny. Man with gazongas? Hilarious. Getting the shit beaten out of you because you’re a man with gazongas? Hi-fucking-larious. Getting booted off the stage because your gazongas, while currently on a man, apparently don’t qualify as male, which would keep them from qualifying as gazongas at all? Wooooo! I bet Scott Turner Schofield nearly pissed himself.
Humor as resistance is a strategy that marginalized groups have used since humor–or possibly hatred–was invented. How else do you answer assertions like, “You aren’t human?” How do you tear them apart? “Am too!” lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, I’m thinking. Jokes constitute metacommentary; they allow people to get outside the terms offered. Laughter can be a defense mechanism for the unusual, as well as against it.
*Yes, this is real. It appeared not in Lifestyles, Living, Datebook, or Home & Family, but in the editorials section, which is usually reserved for–and even on that day, was otherwise occupied by–impassioned arguments for and against causing explosions in various other countries. Next year, I hope the bears go after him.