Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Hi Chuck:
>
> >Ah, yes humor of self was invented by our society and serves some
> >central socio-economic and practical purpose. Hmm.
>
> Laughter wasn't invented by the dominant ideology, but earnest
> exhortations to cultivate a "sense of humor" must have been. :) If
> anyone wants to encourage the comic as the rhetorical mode of choice
> among leftists, it defeats the purpose to say: "I have yelled at ATC
> about this for years, for all the difference it makes. The problem is
> that people on the left are earnest, dull, and irony-impaired.
> --jks." The comic has to be performed, not declaimed.
There is one additional problem, hidden in the equation of "earnest" with "irony-impaired." All the great ironists of literature were extremely earnest. So if one wants to create a movement of ironists, one first needs to have at least an elementary understanding of what irony is, how it is produced, and what its range of effects are. But the very impulses which create this need blind its advocates to their own lack of understanding of irony. Fundamentally, irony and comedy are opposed modes of discourse, irony being characteristic (in literature) of tragedy and (in daily life) of superficial (but essential) comradeship. Irony in daily life is essentially phatic -- a way not of attack but of affirming one's recognition of the other by exposing oneself to easy ridicule, thus indicating that one trusts one's companion not to so interpret one. A dog exposing its throat to another dog is the best image I know of for such daily use of irony.
Carrol