Eye Row Knee
On a lighter note. (Lighter than what? What could be lighter than Andrew Ross? Okay not lighter then, just different.) I have a staggering piece of news for everyone. Are you sitting down? Because this is a real shocker, and so new and fresh and unfamiliar – you just can’t think how new. Ready? Okay here it is.
Americans don’t get irony.
You didn’t know that, did you. You’ve never ever heard that before, have you. That’s not a stupid boring worn-out stale dull flat endlessly-recycled tedious cliché, is it! No indeed. No, you only hear that some three times in every BBC arts programme, that’s all.
I do beg your pardon. How unbecoming. And unironic. But there it is, you see – I don’t get irony. Never have. It’s a closed book to me. Comes of being born in New York, you see, that well-known haven of flat-footed wide-eyed literalness and naiveté.
No it’s just that I heard that particular gem of folk wisdom three times in one day last week. It’s just that it’s gotten so I can hear it coming, and prepare to roll my eyes. The minute one of the boffins on ‘Front Row’ or ‘Saturday Review’ comments on a certain sentimentality or fatuity in a new American movie, I know the next sentence is going to be the one about how Americans don’t do irony. Followed by a Tweedle-dum-Tweedledee-esque group hug. ‘Aren’t we cool, aren’t we great, aren’t we swell, we get irony and those poor pathetic dweebs across the pond don’t, not one of them, they’re all Biblical literalists and every other kind of literalists to boot.’
Gross exaggeration, I know. Well that’s what I do instead of irony, you see – hyperbole. I always do that. (And, I have to admit, a lifelong habit of doing that has revealed to me that some Americans do indeed not get irony, in the sense that I have had people of that nationality owlishly correct or question obvious hyperbole. ‘Was he really ten feet tall?’ Uh – no.) But if other people are allowed to do irony, then I’m allowed to do hyperbole. There’s a law on the books about it. I’d show you but I’m too busy.
One of the funny (possibly even ironic) things about the three in one day is that one of them was so very old. Two were from ‘Saturday Review’ but the other was from an ancient Morse I happened to watch on tv – one from 1991. Some guy tells Morse he’s going back to Princeton and it will be so nice and restful because Americans don’t do irony. Oh really! Princeton’s an irony-free zone, is it! Well I grew up there, and that’s news to me. In fact it’s bollocks.
To be fair, one of the two mentions on ‘Saturday Review’ was saying the same thing. Good old Tom Sutcliffe pointed out that it’s not that there’s no irony in the US, it’s just that it’s not evenly distributed. It may be a bit scarce in Nebraska, he said mildly, but there’s a lot of it on the coasts. Well exactly.
I’ve been slightly touchy about this for years – decades in fact. Ever since reading a long windy pompous self-congratulatory novel by John Fowles, Daniel Martin, which went on and on and on about how Americansdon’tdoirony. Even the clever ones, even the clever and funny ones, even the very clever and funny ones – even they don’t do irony. Whereas, apparently, all Ukanians, however dim and unfunny, do irony like polecats. I hadn’t a clue what he meant by it, which I thought might possibly indicate that it was true and that I too did not do irony. That it was like those notes that only dogs can hear, or sonic thingies that only dolphins can detect – that I simply couldn’t even recognize it, let alone appreciate it or smile at it or deploy it myself.
Well. That was a long time ago, and I’ve long since realized that Fowles was talking self-flattering crap. (And after that review of his diaries in the LRB the other month, I have serious doubts about his talent in the irony department, frankly.) Yes, granted, of course, a lot of our movies are full of sentimental bilge, but I’m such an ironist that I don’t go see them, so they don’t implicate the whole population, now do they. And granted our presidential campaigns are full of even more sentimental and utterly irrelevant bilge (Vote for me, I have a dog!), but – um – well never mind what. But we can too so do irony. We just don’t always happen to feel like it.
“Well exactly”? Probably I missed the irony here, but I’m sure that many in the empty middle of the USA would take this as just another reinforcement of bicoastal arrogance on the part of good old Tom Sutcliffe. Motes and beams? Not that I’m qualified by residence to speak for Nebraskans, but we in the empty middle of the snow-covered wasteland to the north get plenty of this kind of thing from Toronto (the axis around which the universe revolves).
Fair point! Very fair point. As of course you realised (she coughed), that was indeed subtle irony.
Still I did say ‘a bit scarce’ as opposed to non-existent. Which may seem like a quibble (she said desperately) but it isn’t really. It’s the flat negation I find so irritating. If people were always saying irony is less popular in the US than in the UK, that would be different – but they say we don’t do it at all. I know there are ironists in Nebraska, because there are ironists in Iowa where I went to university and if they’re in Iowa then they’re damn well in Nebraska. And if they’re there then they’re also in Saskatoon and points west east and north. It’s just that it may not be as thick on the ground there.
But what I actually meant to agree with (she said in a panicked manner) was the point about distribution rather than the specifics of that distribution. There may be some places where there’s less of it. But I have noooooooooo idea where they are. Not Maine, not the South, not the Midwest, not any part of Canada, not Greenland – noooooooo idea.
Most graceful! And I agree with the initial point, that many Brits of impeccable intellectual pedigree, while appallingly ignorant about the USA (among other places) feel highly qualified to pontificate about the characteristics of its inhabitants. I’m allowed to say that (I am so!) as a transplanted Brit.
And Morse, of course, is from, though not at, Oxford, a major hub of self-congratulatory isolationism (and major-league scholarship, he added hastily).
[pirouettes gracefully, falls over]
Well, I’ll show ’em. I’m going over there in a month, and I’ll show ’em who can do irony and who can’t. I’ll flatten ’em.
We UKanians tend to generalise too often, far more often than other nationalities I am sure, and when we do most of us use shabby heuristics. Most of us only see Murcans, for example, on TV, and what do we see? Buffy, Oprah and George W Blush. Can you find it in your heart to forgive us?
“We UKanians tend to generalise too often, far more often than other nationalities I am sure, and when we do most of us use shabby heuristics.”
Please tell me this is irony!
Well spotted.
Currently in America, there is a vietnam dodging president who is painted as an all action hero, and a challenger vietnam veteran who is portrayed as a big girl’s blouse. I am sure the devil is in the details but nonetheless if you miss out the details, I think this is resounding proof that irony is alive and well in the US. Of course Alanis Morrissette did help to reinforce the incorrect stereotype. (A thousand forks when all you need is a knife is not very ironic).
But don’t be churlish, we lost our empire, let us enjoy our smug delusion that only we truly “get-irony”, and certainly not those ambitous upstarts from accross the pond ;-).
[gasps in shock]
Gosh, really?
I have to agree, that in some places it can be extremely thin on the ground; not non-existent, but hard to find, at times.
I remember the time I was in the Navy and passed by my Chief, carrying a guitar, which I did not know how to play. I made a comment like: “I just got this, don’t know how to play, but I think I’ll busk anyway…”
It fed into a decision he made regarding his input into where I went for my next assignment: according to him, I was so broke that I couldn’t afford to live in Portugal, where I was stationed and I needed to return to the States to get my affairs in order. He thought I was so desparate that I had to busk without knowing how to play guitar.
We Merkins tend not to get sarcasm, either, as well as the cynical Brits do.
But yeah, the comments around Americans not getting irony really irk at times.
Oh, man, that’s funny…
I was thinking about my ‘irony in Iowa’ statement – which caused me to think of a story my mother told about my grandfather. He was carrying the household grandfather clock to be repaired in their small Iowa town; he met a friend; she said ‘O are you taking the clock to be repaired?’; he answered ‘No, my watch is broken.’
Quite similar to ‘I think I’ll busk anyway.’
Don’t worry about it, chaps. Most British people haven’t heard of irony or have and don’t give a rats. Absurd cliches fly around like spam and we all just have to ignore them. Every Yank I meet asks me how I can stand the continuous rain here in the (actually) rather dry SE of England and somehow I never seem to hear. If I can generalise about my own folk, we British compare ourselves too often with Americans and always come off worse in our own minds, which causes a certain amount of brittleness. Kinell… let’s forget about it.