Column: Irony is the anti-personality
Published Feb. 23, 2010
Irony is juvenile. I realize for some young people (including me), it's such a pervasive part of social interaction that sometimes we don't even realize we're being ironic.
Even though I can't help but be ironic sometimes, I know it's childish. If personality is matter, then irony is antimatter. It is anti-personality.
For a brief period during my sophomore year of high school, I developed a friendship based entirely on irony. We never once discussed anything we truly appreciated. The only things we ever talked about were the things we both hated but jokingly pretended to like, and I was completely aware of this fact at the time.
The one time I can remember going over to this guy's house, we filmed a movie based on horror genre clichés and watched music videos on BET. These were the days when a young Kelis brought the boys to the yard with her milkshake, and we had a good laugh at the absurdity of this half-hearted, barely-coherent metaphor.
A few months later I began eating lunch with different friends with actual mutual interests, and I don't think this particular friend ever came back.
I guess my point in telling that boring anecdote is to convey this: Sometimes it's easier to be ironic than to have an actual personality. It's possible to get along with someone who doesn't have a lot in common with you if you can instead bond over the things you don't really care about. I don't think it's any coincidence that our media-savvy generation is much more ironic than the generations that came before.
Consumer culture is inherently disingenuous. Businesses pretend they really care about you and want to help you build a sense of individuality or something, when in fact both producers, and consumers tacitly understand they really just want to make money off you. I think being exposed to an insincere business that claims it has your best interests in mind when it's really not interested in you at all sort of makes us a bit more disingenuous ourselves.
We're all accustomed to interacting with cashiers, flight attendants and waiters who aren't really interested in how well you think they're doing their job or how satisfied you are — a lot of these people (not all, but many) only remain courteous because there's money involved. When a waitress asks you, "How's the coffee?" we don't often make the mistaken assumption she actually cares.
When you have so many consciously disingenuous interactions with strangers in these situations, it's not a very difficult leap to start making new friends that way too.
It's also easy to talk to people about things that aren't truly important to them because there's no way they will be judged. In this way, irony is a defense mechanism. If I only talk about the things I dislike, then I don't risk other people judging me for the things I really do like. Maybe this is why it was easier for me to speak ironically about Kelis' lyrics than it was to talk earnestly about a band I actually liked.
But of course, I haven't talked to my all-ironic friend in years. And I think, as we get older, irony looks more childish all the time.
The other day at work my co-workers and I were sifting through a box of free books when someone approached and asked, "Are those books?" My co-worker, already browsing the books, began a sarcastic reply that he never quite finished. "No, they're —." But instead of finishing his biting remark, he told us he hates ironic sarcasm, and then we agreed and looked for books we might truly enjoy.