A few thoughts on irony

These are some brief thoughts I had a few months ago about irony and it's impact on pop-culture. The meta-narrative of this post is that I'm actually a little hesitant to post these psuedo-philosophy arm-chair intellectual musings, for the simple reason that it's what I actually believe, and I'll seem like a kid trying to "act-smart-but-has-no-first-hand-experience-with-what-the-shit-he's-talking-about". After realizing it's these kinds of fears that hold us back, I submit this for your consideration, Internet, with sincerity and a gentle "fuck off" to the part of me that actually worries about this stuff.


Sincerely yours
DISCLAIMER: I KNOW I'M NOT USING IRONY IN IT'S STRICTEST SENSE, BUT I HOPE THE READER CAN STILL UNDERSTAND IT DEMONSTRABLY

It has been said that we live in an age of irony, and I think I’ve come to understand. America has stayed the same size geographically since Hawaii’s addition in 1959 (and Arizona was the last contiguous state added in 1912), but has increased vastly in population and complexity—think of the transition from farmland, to Jack Kerouac’s sprawling Beat America, to a service economy in the 70s and 80s, to the technological infrastructure of today. I’ve come to think that America today (right at this instant, even) is the singly most complex concept that has ever existed in the world. It’s the largest country with the most mobile population, and thus the number of possible “connections” (people to meet, places to go, things to do) that could be formed is the highest in the world. In science, entropy describes the number of internal micro-states that would still yield the same macro-state-- similarly, I think America has the greatest number of micro-states, the greatest number of possibilities, the greatest entropy, of any nation that has ever existed. There’s a sense that without enough money and time, you could do whatever you want.


Yet as the number of possible connections we could make with others increases, the amount of connections that we actually do make drops off rapidly. In a country where anything is possible, what’s the worth of a stranger that you will never see or notice again in your life? The same mobility that lets us talk to anyone in the country or move anywhere, also prevents us from staying anywhere for too long, makes us wary of investing our hearts in other people who could just as easily move in a month, or other things that could be just as transient. I think it’s a longing for connection that makes irony so appealing.

Living as we do in a “post-x” age, where what we experience is only measured by what came before (x = modernism, industrial, WW2, 9/11, etc.), we can no longer claim innocence or inexperience. It’s implicit that we know what has come before us—we remember the Beatles, the Reagan administration, the first Iraq war, Woodstock, NY, the camps at Auschwitz and Daschau— and have the burden to refer to it. We cannot talk about certain things without immediately calling to mind the past, and therefore cannot claim originality; instead, we refer (sometimes silently, implicitly) to the past. This is no longer the 80s, so you can’t say tubular, radical, or cowabunga without tacitly referring to that time in our past, although some try. More often you hear the speaker exaggerate their voice, to mimic a long-haired stoner California skate-boarder’s, “Radical, man…”— we use irony to separate ourselves from the past, show that we remember and we refer to the innocent past, the dumb past. It is this language of referral that marks the voracious cultural-consumption syndrome of our people I've met, needing to know every reference in order to communicate themselves, and then as their references are co-opted by the mainstream, seek more pure, more obscure, more "indie" objects to refer to for a more pure language. It is this act of distancing through irony that makes the kids so lonely today, as much as I can claim any knowledge about "kids these days".


In a world of brief connections, we eschew innocence in favor of a façade, a “Won’t-get-fooled-again” attitude— we show what is distant from us, what is not us, and never risk rejection or losing the connections we never make. Simultaneously as we parade around, holding the past up for ridicule (Did they really wear wolf t-shirts and zebra stripped pants? They grew their facial hair like this?) we reveal a longing for it’s dumbness, it’s innocence, it’s lack of knowledge. We think we could be as happy as they were if only we could forget, pretend that we don’t remember what comes next; and yet, we do and we can’t forget. Obama is a fundamentally unironic president, and so he is slaughtered at the bully pulpit; Lady Gaga is a fundamentally ironic pop-star, tragic in that she cannot pretend to be unaware of what the public does to it’s pop-stars. It’s the flip-side of the adage that the past was a simpler time, so the present must be more and more complex. We envy the innocent connections that our past selves could have made that we cannot.


Theater is the ultimate medium for connection, because it’s real people right in front of you, which makes it perfect for exploring our addiction to irony. Improv or monologues are even better than Shakespeare for this, because it is real people exposing their thoughts and hearts, working right in front of you and talking about right now. We can’t connect with Shakespeare (and that's okay!) in the way we can connect with a person we can touch, talk to after the show, visit every week, think of while driving, ask how they feel, become friends with, picture falling in love with, remember years later, simply be with in a singular moment together, performer and audience in a theater. As performers, it is our job to connect, so we should encourage the audience to connect by talking about our real lives, explaining our real selves, perhaps even telling our real secrets. This honesty is fundamental to any type of work I want to do, or at least partial honesty, or portions where honesty is apparent. In the simplest sense: I value letting shit get real.