Those who can do; those who can’t spoof,” said an old colleague of mine back in the Eighties, but even she couldn’t have imagined just how much of an ironic world we would live in one day, some three decades later, a world diminished by memes, traduced by emojis. Just look at Instagram, a forum where irony and righteousness cohabit; or the microclimates of fashion, where irony has escalated so much that luxury brands now positively encourage the lampooning of their logos; or the art world, where imitation is no longer the sincerest form of flattery, but the most remunerative. Seriously (although not really), how many times can you bastardise a Warhol, use a children’s television theme tune in a hip hop anthem or wear meta double denim?
Irony was purposefully the product of post-war leisure culture, but it only started to become annoying in the early Sixties, when an obsession with consumerism started to inspire comic book parodies and pop art metaphors. It was in the Eighties that it really started to gather speed, though, when it quickly became an epidemic. It was in the music we heard on the radio, on television, in the shops, on our backs and in our bellies (are you trying to tell me that nouvelle cuisine wasn’t ironic?). At one point Graydon Carter’s Spy magazine devoted an entire issue to the problem, enrolling ironists in the Eighties’ register of social-economic cults. To paraphrase the extraordinarily ironic Eighties pop star Huey Lewis, it was no longer hip to be square, it was cool to be ironic.
Back then, “irony chic” meant revival tours, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, The Monkees’ Greatest Hits, Paul Smith shirts (the “classics with a twist”), illustrated socks, Bruce Willis recording Sixties R&B tunes, vogueing, junk fetishism, books such as Roadside America, vintage clothing, Homemaker dinner services, Goober Grape peanut butter and grape jelly (irony is often a coalition of good and bad taste), multicoloured surfing shorts, Fifties cocktail shakers, Jean Paul Gaultier, Sixties Hawaiian shirts, Madras sports jackets – anything, in fact, that made a virtue of its archness or naffness. Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott – more than an expert on the subject – put it another way: “It’s the approach of postmodernists from David Letterman to David Byrne, putting ironic quotation marks around stupid so that ‘stupid’ becomes smart. Kitsch is king – yesterday’s obvious is today’s pop sublime.” Once the domain of the cognoscenti, irony, like sushi, was everywhere. To hell with postmodernism, all we wanted was a snark and a smirk.Then in the Nineties, it was Las Vegas’ turn to be ironic. The rejuvenated city began with the opening of the 29-storey, 3,000-room Mirage, a hotel that housed a tropical rainforest stocked with 60-foot-high palms, two dozen white tigers and a 50-foot-high volcano that erupted every 15 minutes, as well as a state-of-the-art casino (obvs). Las Vegas had had quotation marks around it for the best part of two decades before this came to pass, although the Nineties was when it decided to exploit its kitsch heritage. Realising that what was once corn was now seen as cool, the city tailored its entertainment to suit both generation X and baby boomers alike. In a Westworld-style display of pragmatic reinvention, Vegas became a theme park of the absurd, squared.
In 1993 you could even celebrate Charles Manson with impunity. In California that Christmas, the hot holiday gift was a Manson T-shirt. Hardly surprising, you might think, though you could also buy a Manson jacket, hat, party dress, hair clip and – in a feat of unparalleled (then, at least) tastelessness – even children’s clothes bearing his name.
And then it all came in a tsunami (a word that was still ironic back then). The ready-mades of Jeff Koons, the pomo novels of Douglas Coupland, the ironic maudlin pop of Pet Shop Boys and the knowingly detached comedy of Reeves and Mortimer. At the time it took a particularly strong critic to admit that, no, the Carry On films weren’t an emblematic example of innate iconoclastic British camp, but, er, rather crap.
Now we breathe irony like oxygen. Instagram is a platform that doesn’t so much encourage irony as demand it. In a world where pretty much anything can be reduced to an emoji, it’s no surprise that genuine emotions have been replaced by ironic displacement. Reproductions of magazine covers are customised before they have the chance to go viral, paparazzi photographs of tarnished celebrities are “amusingly” captioned within an inch of their lives (short) and accidental pomposity is treated as a genuine sin. On Instagram, genuine emotions are looked upon with genuine curiosity and then destroyed by sarcasm.
Which is kind of ironic, right?
Television is no better. In the pantheon of irony TV, David Letterman used to be God. By becoming the US’s first self-deprecating chat-show host he inadvertently encouraged a posse of nascent British ironists – Jonathan Ross, Clive Anderson, Tony Slattery, Roland Rivron – all of them equipped with gaudy neckties and smirks. All of them realised that the chat show was the perfect medium of the Eighties, the decade of the raised eyebrow. These days every chat-show host has a permanently raised eyebrow, from Jimmy Fallon to James Corden to Graham Norton.
Or take the hipster. While this specimen is increasingly only visible during Fashion Weeks, when he skulks around outside the show venues waiting to be photographed and labelled an influencer (and considering the number of photographers waiting to commemorate him, who can blame him?), for a while there he was part of the most ironic subcult of them all: a chap with a beautifully tailored beard in a made-to-measure three-piece tweed suit, his face, neck and hands all covered in VistaVision tattoos. Of course, the Brits have always excelled at both tradition and rebellion, but while the hipster was a perfect fusion of the two, his appearance when the fashion shows rolled into town made you think street fashion had mutated to such an extent that from now on every new scene would simply be that: “ironic”.
Alex Durham wrote about the death of the hipster a few months ago on Bizarre Culture, wondering whether their dedication to irony means that we have moved to a post-ironic state. His piece also questioned the Tumblr aesthetic of building online versions of ourselves using collections of found images, videos and music, essentially to create a more attractive avatar. “Crucially, collation of this internet persona raises a fundamental question: when does the appropriation and imitation of past eras become the defining characteristic of the current era? Does this not just make our contemporary semblance of sincerity a stale and lifeless reconfiguration of vintage pin-ups and haunting piano melodies? A sad ode to former glory days?”
Occasionally, irony has been pushed to the margins by events so horrific, so tragic, that mordancy and ridicule were temporarily parked. In 2001, in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center, Roger Rosenblatt wrote a piece called “The Age Of Irony Comes To An End” for Time. In it he said, “One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony. For some 30 years – roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright – the good folks in charge of America’s intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously. Nothing was real. With a giggle and a smirk, our chattering classes – our columnists and pop-culture makers – declared that detachment and personal whimsy were the necessary tools for an oh-so-cool life. Who but a slobbering bumpkin would think, ‘I feel your pain’?”
It didn’t last, of course, this new reality, as reproachful banter insidiously crept back in again.
Six years ago, the New York Times’ Christy Wampole tried to kill it off once more – albeit unsuccessfully. “Take, for example, an ad that calls itself an ad, makes fun of its own format, and attempts to lure its target market to laugh at and with it,” she wrote. “It preemptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself. The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism. The same goes for ironic living. Irony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to ‘secretly flee’ (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.”
Yet still it wouldn’t die.
But it might be dying now. Irony in all its forms is suddenly no laughing matter. Sure, Instagram might be laden with sarcasm, but it’s increasingly surrendering to the “blessed” among us, those for whom our world is divided into the damned and the redeemed. Those of us with folded palms are part of a woke generation that shuns heteronormative faces and ideals, that celebrates neutered fashion pictures in magazines and demands diversity without compromise while applauding any kind of activism. “Big issues” are ring-fenced from critique or context and whenever #MeToo, #EnoughIsEnough, gun control, gender fluidity or any kind of social injustice are raised as topics of concern, the “blessed” public respond with the sort of blind adoration that makes objectivity difficult to entertain. Not just that, but being woke means always looking forward, because there is always too much wrong with the past. Without wishing to be reductive about any of these things, we now find ourselves living in a time and a place where nuance is deemed unnecessary and the aggrieved are beyond reproach.
source:-gq-magazine
