Irony Poisoning
Lame jokes won’t save us from the existential void
A few years ago, I went to a solo piano gig at one of London’s trendiest jazz clubs. At the tail end of the evening, the pianist announced that his last number was “about regret.” The audience laughed. “It’s about losing the love of your life and it never coming back,” he continued. The audience laughed again. “It’s the only serious regret I have, but it’s a big one,” he concluded. The audience laughed once more.
Hilarious, right? Well, as the pianist proceeded to bleed his heart all over the keys, I sat there trying to work out what on earth could have prompted such a bizarre response. And I realized it was something I’d started seeing elsewhere — a kind of frantic attempt to defuse anything remotely resembling genuine feeling.
Just look around. We seem to have made, as a society, an unspoken pact to avoid the sincere and replace it with the ironic. Musicians write love songs to their cats or motorbikes or — better yet! — rewrite the lyrics of once earnest songs and make them about cupcakes. Our everyday language is armed with amazeballs, adulting, simples, whatevs, chillaxing, and endless other antibodies against serious conversation. Savvy businesses plonk a moustache or top hat or monocle on their logos — anything to reassure us, with a cheeky wink, of a sincerity-free zone.
