A Commonplace Book

"Irony fatigue," a phrase Kaufman coined looking for what American humorist/pessimist Fran Lebowitz described as "undue fanfare," is a concept whose time has come. Even as knowing a filmmaker as John Waters, never exactly Frank Capra, ends his latest film Pecker with a toast to the end of irony. We've come a long way from what Spy magazine in the '80s labeled "the irony epidemic." The Irony Backlash has set in. Everyone is tired of the trickled-down and facile irony that pretty much defines the media sensibility of recent years; now, a professor gives the people who never liked any kind of irony, facile or otherwise, the chance to declare it self-destructive and unproductive. Unfunniness and optimism, freed from their shackles, can reign in the land once more, and shine on us even at midnight. I feel warmer already.

What Kaufman does show is that when men like Twain and Bruce became increasingly conscious socially, they were punished for it. He seems to blame them for the woes they found as a result. Why couldn't Prozac have been invented earlier, he seems to ask. Then Twain never would've written his Letters from the Earth, and Lenny Bruce would still be alive. In fact, he'd probably be playing the grumpy coffee-shop owner on Friends.