storefronts and subways

Jokes come in all kinds of forms — one-liners, long stories, slapstick, sarcasm. Whichever kind you please, all jokes have different depths, different kinds of layers, which tell you something about how ‘clever’ the joke is. As the kinds of memes that populate social media continue to grow in reference to each other, the depths of our ironies continue to compound, reaching new, tautologous heights.

SINCERITY

At the very lowest level, there is the fully sincere. A feeble slapstick attempt might only have this one layer — guy gets hit in the balls, or steps on a broom, or slips a banana peel, and that’s the joke. If you laugh, it’s because you found that — and only that — funny, the physical outcome of whatever misfortune befell our comedian. The intended outcome of the joke is obvious; you’re supposed to be laughing at the pain the guy’s in.

There’s no irony to the moment, no subversion of the accepted narrative explanation for why you should be laughing, to point and laugh at self-aggrandisingly. Irony, in this sense, is humour found in the meta-details of the moment; not the intended comedy of the joke itself, but the humour found in the fact that it’s x making the joke, or some event y happened before the telling of the joke, or that it occurred in place z. This is the first level of irony, simply the ironic, which is pretty much synonymous with the sarcastic, save for some slight differences in mechanism.

SARCASM AND IRONY

The sarcastic is wit, a clever comment that conflicts or calls out the coincidence of a previous moment. A sarcastic comment is a dissection, taking apart some comment or experience and drawing something funny out of it. This is a pure form of irony. It’s laughing at the subtext of the joke, but without any extra recognitions or pretences. Irony, in the context of social media, extends to laughing at the surroundings of the joke — including who’s laughing sincerely. A large part of the ironic response is the recognition of your separation from the group of recipients who would genuinely be laughing at the statement, and your distance from that intended audience contributes, in part, to the comedic expression.

Compared to the post-ironic and meta-ironic landscapes to come, it’s still quite sincere, quite rudimentary. It’s peering behind the narrative presented; rejecting the intended humour in favour of a piercing, insightful comment, but it doesn’t involve any self-recognition or awareness of the broader comedic interplay. Crucially, it functions still at the level of the individual joke, subverting it, but fundamentally only that particular joke. This is what marks out the sarcastic, ultimately fuelled by the ironic, from deeper forms of post-irony and meta-irony.

POST-IRONY AND META-IRONY

The post-ironic and meta-ironic frameworks for humour are a very different kind of comedy, borne out of the spiralling, self-referential nature of memes on social media. Because of the speed and volume of sharing memes online, their sincerity, the amount of time they spend recognised as funny for their narratively intended purpose, is ever-diminishing.

Soon after their conception, they become ironic — take a painfully classic memetic phrase like, ‘he protec, he attac, but he eat snacc’. For a little while, this might’ve been funny for the actual intended story attached to it — the sublimation of tense, important states — protection, attack — into a comedically comfortable one — eating a snack.

This wouldn’t have lasted long. Soon, the joke would’ve passed through the initial stages of irony — look at the losers finding this funny, look at the quality of the snack in question, etc. This is the expected retaliatory sarcasm and irony that every joke, passed around the forum of the internet, encounters.

POST IRONY

But then the joke reaches post-irony. Here, the utterance is posted ironically but interpreted sincerely — the author is fully aware of the irony of the situation, and brings up the joke in that ironic context, but the actual expression of the joke loops around, attempting to make irony of the ironic posting of the joke, and the only way to achieve that is essentially a return to full sincerity. Matthew Collins explains in reference to the film Bad Lieutenant:

The film contains what a Snakes on a Plane-style irony-fest should: hokey plot, bad acting, and deliciously over-the-top glorification of sex and drug use. But the film does much more than revel in its genre’s campy history — The Bad Lieutenant is gorgeously shot and contains pervasive, incisive commentary on everything from race relations to police corruption and the definition of finding success in America.

Post-irony is recognition of this muddling of irony and earnestness. In many cases, it is then a return to that earnestness, in a tautologous search for a new depth of irony that drives the subject headfirst into sincerity. The only way to escape traditional irony, to go above and beyond that sarcastic dissection, is to subvert that initial subversion, which of course, brings us right back to the opening sincerity.

Post-irony doesn’t have to be this full-circle return. It also lies in the befuddlement, the obfuscation, the concealment of sincerity, where the audience has no idea if the author is posting said meme ironically or genuinely believing in it. This is the form of post-irony that achieves its goal, of subsuming and rising above the sarcastic form, without having to demote itself to that very basic sincerity.

META-IRONY

Meta-irony is the newest development in this comedic square. Whereas post-irony is ironic posting and sincere interpretation, meta-irony is both posted and interpreted ironically. This is the ultimate self-awareness, not only of the irony of the comedic utterance itself, but recognition of the irony of the context in which posting said meme would be constituted as ironic.

It’s like a young person posting a classic facebook minions meme, fully aware of the separation between themselves and the intended audience (posted ironically), finding it funny for that reason (interpreted ironically), but more than just that, finding the utterance funny for it’s actual sake. In this way, meta-irony incorporates sincerity into itself in a way that post-irony can’t, by definition.

Of course, it is difficult to say whether we can separate the ‘finding it funny for it’s own sake’ from the recognition of the ironic context and act of posting, but meta-irony flexes to include this earnestness. This is the deepest form of irony, an awareness and utilisation of all previous forms — the sincerity of the meme, its perverted irony, the contextual ironies of that distance between intention and result, and the inclusion of the subject’s actual affection towards the meme for all of the above sakes.

IS HUMOUR RUINED?

It’s unclear what this really means for humour. Some of what social media considers the funniest remarks are entirely context-driven and exist in the post/meta ironic space. A philip traylen note I saw recently:

“‘whose dog is that?’ ‘it is my mother’s’ summer”.

I found it funny, but what on earth caused that reaction in me? Ultimately, it’s a spiral of ironies — firstly, a subversion of the recent ‘brat summer’ / ‘hot girl summer’ type form, so there’s the initial, structural sarcasm and irony. But then, there’s also the post and meta ironies of the comment. The awareness of the subversion of the form, but also the awareness of the futility and meaninglessness of the content of the comment itself, the mundanity of the words, juxtaposed, but actually perfectly aligned, with the structure of the comment, all beautifully ironic, all perfectly self-referential and (in)sincere.