Is it me or is there an increasing concord between expectations and actually occurrences? I was so hoping irony was dead seven years ago, if only to make writing less snarky and more imaginative. Long ago and far away. -EY
excerpts from http://www10.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/fashion/23irony.html?_r=5 Irony Is Dead. Again. Yeah, Right.PITY poor irony. Declared dead after 9/11, it staged a strong rally beneath a “Mission Accomplished” banner, only to find itself in mortal danger once again.
Its ill health was noted by, among others, no less an ironist than Joan Didion, the nation’s poet laureate of disillusion. The week after the election, in a talk at the New York Public Library, Ms. Didion lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama had become an “irony-free zone,” a vast Kool-Aid tank where “naïveté, translated into ‘hope,’ was now in” and where “innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized.”
But are ironic sensibilities like Ms. Didion’s — the detachment of mind, the appreciation of the folly of taking things at face value — really disappearing?
Not according to the conservative humorist P. J. O’Rourke, who reported from his New Hampshire office on Wednesday that he was finishing a piece for The Weekly Standard with the working title, “Is It Too Soon to Start Talking About the Failed Obama Presidency Just Because He Isn’t President Yet?”
<snip>To be sure, President-elect, you’re no 9/11. Back then, irony seemed, for a time, impossible. Nowadays, Ms. Didion said in her talk, which will be published Monday in The New York Review of Books, it is simply “not the preferred way” of viewing events.
Mr. O’Rourke, for his part, said that Mr. Change himself, with his choices of usual suspects and Beltway insiders to help him run the country, was proving no slouch in the irony department.
But Ms. Didion might be on to something. A Nexis search found that the incidence of the words “irony,” “ironic” and “ironically” in major American newspapers during the two-week period beginning Nov. 6 slipped 19 percent from the same period last year.
In New York, Ms. Didion’s home city, irony has been steadily disappearing from daily newspapers for a decade, the analysis found. In those same two-week November periods from 2000 to 2008, appearances of “irony” and its cognates tumbled 56 percent. Some of the drop seems to be because of the shrinking of newspapers, but a similar Nexis search with a control word, “went,” showed a drop of only 32 percent, leaving an irony gap of 24 percentage points.
THE ONION, whose less-than-half-joking postelection headline read something like “Nation Finally Lousy Enough to Make Social Progress,” seems to be having trouble finding its bearings, too. Even a gentle, somewhat toothless Nov. 11 article, “International Con Man Barack Obama Leaves U.S. With $85 Million in Campaign Fund-Raising,” drew criticism on discussion boards for feeding into stereotypes about blacks, said The Onion’s editor, Joe Randazzo.
<snip>Roger Rosenblatt, the former Time columnist who wrote that Sept. 11 might at least “spell the end of the age of irony,” said that while irony had its place and time, this was not it.
“Irony,” Mr. Rosenblatt said, “is a diminishing act — the incongruity between what’s expected and what occurs makes us smile at the distance. But there are some events that occur, like 9/11, and perhaps Obama, though I didn’t think of him in this context, that are so big that they almost imply an obligation not to diminish it by clever comparisons.”
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